The Curious Autobiography Of Elaine Jakes 4w6c2v

Copyright © 2015 H.R. Jakes.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-1473-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1474-5 (hc) ISBN: 978-1-4808-1475-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015904365

Archway Publishing rev. date: 3/30/2015

Contents

1. Bear Mountain

2. Joie de Vivre

3. A Picnic in the Garden

4. The Good Dr. Davies

5. Marco Polo

6. Monkey

7. Leni

8. Tea with the Professor

9. The Gracious Dr. Davies

10. The Way of Reconciliation

11. The Scent of Redemption

12. Jemima

13. Thanksgiving

Editor’s Afterword

To my parents

1 Bear Mountain

I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. —Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

T hough it was an overcast day, my father, Harry, packed a picnic lunch basket and put it in the back of his depressingly imbued (i.e., brown) 1937 Ford truck. He then helped me climb in the enger side, firmly closing the door. Taking his seat behind the wheel, he adjusted the oval rearview mirror, cranked up the engine, and took me for a drive on Bear Creek Boulevard (Route 115) up what the locals called Bear Mountain. He thought that the best time for me to learn how to drive would be after we had enjoyed a nice picnic lunch together. He would then, so he reasoned with logic typical of the male species, put me in the driver’s seat and guide me as I drove along the boulevard down Bear Mountain, the only road that ran from Blakeslee to Wilkes-Barre. Bear Mountain is best described merely by the components of its name, for there is often truth in names. (For example, Harry means “the prince of the house,” and I have never known a man so princely as my father. I say this as a kind of disclaimer so that you will forgive him for what he did to me in this tale I am about to tell.) The “Bear” part of Bear Mountain was so called because the mountain was overrun by black bears. Now the bears of Pennsylvania rarely killed or maimed. They could be, however, terrible nuisances. They had been known not infrequently to plunder campsites, having no interest in harming anyone but rather having great interest in acquiring a juicy snack or two by the clumsy thievery for which bears are known. If you encounter one of these bears, you should definitely not try to prevent it from eating its purloined snack. Bears interrupted during snacking are wont to be grumpy, and a grumpy bear is not an animal that one should wish to encounter, for the outcome may be quite

disconcerting. The “Mountain” part of Bear Mountain, however, would seem, at first blush, to be more germane to my driving lesson, for Daddy took me straight to the top of the mountain in his truck. There we shared a delightful but too ample picnic lunch, which included Daddy’s favorite cheese, an aromatic (some would say malodorous) Welsh variety known as Hên Sîr, which he himself had packed. Having stashed away the leftovers, of which there were quite a few, as I had not been able to finish even half of the rather robust sandwich, Daddy offered me the place of honor, the driver’s seat. He encouraged me to drive down the mountain while he would instruct me on the finer points of operating the vehicle. I can say from firsthand experience that this is most definitely not the best way to teach anyone to drive. Within moments, the truck seemed to take on a life of its own, as the extreme slope of the mountain caused it to accelerate. I screamed, “Jesus!” calling, I suppose, for divine aid as I began swerving down the winding mountain road. Ignoring my outburst, Harry bellowed urgently, “Use the brake, brake, brake! Lainie! Lainie! Downshift, Lainie! Push the clutch down! Shift down, now, now!” Now it is true that my father had explained to me thoroughly before this misadventure began how the different pedals of the car operated, and he had onished me not to panic. But all of his fatherly advice was lost as the normally gorgeous scenery of Bear Mountain went flashing by. Often, in fact, quite often, if one were to look carefully through the trees, one might have seen a bear or two, sometimes a mother with a cub, just here or there in the verdant woods that were off the right side of the car as one descended the large hill that Route 115 bestrode. On a normal day, there was, too, a delightful view of the valley out of the driver’s side of the car. On that day, however, all the beauty was lost, and I was simply steering for my life as I had no longer any reasonable hope of ing how to use the pedals, though they were easily within reach of my feet. It did not take my father long to move his left foot toward the truck’s pedals and try to depress the brake, but his foot slipped off each time he did this, like the slipping knife of Agamemnon, the king of Argos, who sought to offer his daughter, raising the blade but, ultimately, finding himself unable (in some s of the story) to take her life until, just in time, the goddess Artemis

presented a stag as a substitute to rescue her; or like Abraham, who brought Isaac to the point of death but was saved by a ram that was readily available in a thicket. Now I was going to my death, and my father, my own beloved father, was the one who had brought me there, and neither ram nor stag would rescue me from Bear Mountain. Yet another animal would fill that role. Normally, Harry Jakes would not be inclined to quit just when a situation turned dire. But this situation was especially dire, and it was becoming increasingly so as the speedometer rose to its maximum position, the fevered pitch of seventy miles per hour. In vain, Harry hoofed at the brake to halt the hauler, which was hurriedly hastening headlong, leaving him with but one choice: the “truck runaway” ramp, an embarrassing alternative for a mere pickup truck. There were several truck runaways on Bear Mountain; these were simply short roads that ran up the side of the hill, characterized by a series of gravel speed bumps interspersed at intervals of about twenty feet, sometimes called “silent policemen,” meant to reduce rapidly the rush of a runaway truck. I had never actually seen one of them used, though I had seen many a big rig on Bear Mountain simply going too fast. These runaway ramps were intended, of course, for tractor-trailers—not just any car—which was why their silent policemen had unusually fat bellies. Though I was driving a much smaller vehicle than was intended for these ramps, Daddy grabbed the wheel firmly with his left hand and managed to steer the truck onto the third of seven truck runaways. I can still hitting my head on the ceiling of the truck as it bounced violently on the first of seven bulging silent policemen, pounding its way up the truck runaway. Owing to his half-a-foot taller frame, my father was driven into the truck cab’s ceiling seven times, in each case more violently than I was. My head banged against the ceiling only thrice. When the truck came to a stop at the top of the runaway, I was stunned. After what seemed like just a moment or two, I shook off my grogginess and was just beginning to sob when I looked at my father. He was slumped over toward the window, with blood running down the side of his face from a small head wound, which at the time I assumed to be larger. The power with which we had struck the speed bumps had knocked my father unconscious and put a tiny gash at the hairline on the left side of his forehead. I pushed him back into the seat and tried to revive him, but he was out cold. I had no time to panic. I realized that now I had to figure out how to drive, and quickly. Within a few minutes of getting my

bearings and restudying the truck’s mechanisms, I slowly turned the truck around, for at the top of this particular runaway was a gravel circle—meant for tow trucks to hitch up their prey—on the edge of a thick wood where one could easily turn a small truck. Skillfully, I guided the truck down the runaway, bump by bump, seven silent policemen later getting back on Route 115 to head the rest of the way down the mountain. Daddy kept sleeping, and I was scared, thinking now that I should take him to the hospital. Yet this was my first time driving. I was thus still figuring out how to work the clutch and brake as my father remained slumped over, sleeping away, wedged uncomfortably in the corner of the enger door and the edge of the single front seat. His feet—which were generally angled toward the central gearbox and tall, spindly stick shift—were each in an unusual pose, with toes pointing outward, the right under the glove box and the left nearly protruding into the virgin territory of the operating pedals, especially the gas pedal. Fortunately, there was just enough distance between his foot and my own that he did not accidentally obstruct my use of the accelerator and thus put me off my newfound and ever-waxing confidence in operating the motor vehicle. As I started down the hill, I noticed that the old oval rearview mirror, which hung from the front of the truck ceiling near the windshield, was made crooked from the pounding caused by the bumps of the truck runaway. When I adjusted the center mirror, I could see nothing in it, even when I set the mirror straight. It was an odd experience because I was appropriately devoting the vast majority of my attention to the road that lay ahead of me. Still, it was hard not to notice that there appeared in the freshly adjusted mirror a dense, stubbly forest of small, dark-cortexed trees, one and all defoliated and swaying briskly in the wind. On closer inspection I realized that these were not small trees but bristles budding from the bulging belly of a big black bear, who, standing up in the back of the truck, pressed its ample pectoral parts upon the pickup’s rear window, all the while snacking on the remains of the sandwich that I had not been able to finish. Looking straight into the belly of the beast, I felt the part of a cowering, timorous mouse. Unsure about what I should do next, I was precociously brave—non sine dis animosus infans, as they say—and the bear provided all the context I could ever need for that dictum’s validity. My first instinct was to take Father to the hospital, but I suppressed that idea because I questioned the appropriateness of bringing a bear in the flatbed of a truck to the newly remodeled Wilkes-Barre

General. To give myself time to think, I suppose, as if running away from my unexpected but not entirely unruly cargo, I just kept driving. When I came to a red light, the jolt from the brake caused the bear, which had been standing up with its elbows poised on top of the cab so it could eat its sandwich, to take a seat, the tips of its sharp claws making a strange sound like nails on a chalkboard as they scratched against the glass of the window on the bear’s way to a seated position. That animal, which had now finished off the rest of the lunch, just sat there looking quite contented, its tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth, as might a very large dog. Its bear paws were folded in its lap, almost like a monk who, fresh from his noonday meal in the monastery, has now entered the chapel to offer a prayer. The bear looked straight into the mirror at me, not with the threatening eyes of a wild animal, but with the appearance of a domesticated canine that is delighted to be in the backseat of a car and, instead of expressing its appreciation and excitement with a wagging tail, simply enjoys the wind in its face. I had not yet resolved what I should do with the monk-like, doglike bear in my mirror. Fortunately, the bleeding from Daddy’s wound had begun to clot, and, though he was not yet conscious, he did not seem to be in imminent danger; at any rate, the bear was a greater concern now than the likelihood of my father’s concussion. Various traffic lights prevented me from staying focused on the dilemma long enough to come to a decision about what plan of action I should take, for the looks and concomitant murmurings of the drivers or engers within those cars kept distracting me. “Look, Clarence,” I could hear one woman say. “She has a bear in the bed of her truck.” “No, Betty,” her husband responded curtly, “that’s just a big dog. It’s one of those Danish dogs, Great Danes, a fat one.” In defense of Clarence’s mammalian misidentification, the bear was acting much more like a dog than a bear, as I have already stated. You might not know it, and I certainly did not know it before that day, but bears really are precisely like dogs in two ways. They like to be walked in the morning—or, rather, they like to take a walk in the morning, since few bears actually are domesticated and are taken on walks in the morning, though I have heard of some bears being university mascots that live on campus and are walked by students called bear trainers; but perhaps that’s just a story. In any case, bears are like dogs, I found out that day

firsthand, insofar as they clearly love to ride in cars. As long as I kept moving, the bear was happy, swiveling its head, now here, now there, its tongue waving in the breeze. Sometimes, it would stand up with its paws on the cab’s roof; other times, it would take a seat in the monkish position described above. Oddly enough, the further I drove and the more I engaged the not-too-thick traffic of Wilkes-Barre with this bear in tow, the better and more confident a driver I became. From the base of Bear Mountain, I drove through the city, incurring further glances and disapproving mutterings from further Clarences and Bettys. One person tried to warn me, “You have a bear in your truck, you know,” to which I had no ready response except, “Yes, I know; thank you.” Having driven all the way through Wilkes-Barre and Kingston, I had in mind to head for a less inhabited zone to allow the bear to jump out, so I drove to Forty Fort, where, I thought, the bear might find an interest in the levee with its park along the Susquehanna River. As I was approaching the park, however, I thought to myself, “What if there is a child in the park? What if the child were to be eaten by the bear?” No, I could not go to the park. I needed woods, and I needed woods before the bear decided, as dogs sometimes do, that it was bored with the ride and thus might jump out of the truck at a red light. But where could I find woods on short notice? Since I was now running low on gasoline, going back to Bear Mountain, which presented itself as the obvious solution, was not a viable choice. I could not pull into a service station with a bear in the back of the truck and expect the service station attendant to fuel up the truck. Not only would that be embarrassing, but it could also be harmful to the service attendant, as it could have been to the children in the park. I did know one attendant, however, Bernie Schupp, who, since he worked weekends as a grease monkey, would probably help me if I could make my way to the Sinclair Station on Middle Road in Nanticoke; but that would be a long drive, too, and I wasn’t sure that Bernie was working that day. I didn’t know what to do with Daddy—who remained unconscious and was by now snoring, a further distraction—or for that matter what to do with the bear, but I knew who would know: my sister. I drove straight to the home of Lee Ann and her husband, Ed. Their house was located in Dallas, only a few miles down Pioneer Avenue. Of course, I got quite a few odd looks on Pioneer, a parkway with ing engers in motoring motorcars who were still debating whether

the animal in the back was a large dog or the bear that it was. Lee Ann’s house was the last one on the left of Midland Drive, right next to Fern Knoll Cemetery, itself next to a thick wood that ran behind Ed and Lee Ann’s house into a small vale contiguous with the lower bit of the Misericordia University (then Misericordia College) campus. I hurriedly pulled into Lee Ann’s driveway and tried to honk the horn of the old truck. But, as not a few other things on this truck, it did not work. So I did what I felt was the only thing to do. I jumped out of the truck cab and ran for the front door of Lee Ann’s house. The door was unlocked, as I knew it would be, and I darted inside, fell prostrate on the floor, and began to howl inconsolably, babbling like an apostle speaking in tongues. With sisterly affection, Lee Ann swooped down on me as she enfolded me in her healing wings and spoke a blessing, if a secular one, over me, “Ymdawelu, anwyl” (“Calm, dear, sister’s here”). “Bear Mountain … truck … Daddy … bear … runaway … hit head … blood … hospital … like … big dog,” was all I could say; I simply could not form a coherent thought. Then Ed looked out of the front window from their living room, between Lee Ann’s lovely rocker—which to its right had a small but strong coffee table—and the brand new TV, more of a status symbol at that time than an actual entertainment box. “My God, Lee Ann!” Ed exclaimed. “Harry’s truck is on the lawn. He is getting out of the truck, and he has blood on his head. He’s staggering toward the house.” “Don’t just stand there looking out the window!” Lee Ann barked, magically metamorphosed from staff medic to sergeant major in the instantly incarnate war zone that lay between living room and front yard. “Go help him!” “No,” I shrieked, donning my role of shell-shocked soldier. “You can’t go out there!” “Now, now, dear, it will be fine,” said Lee Ann, transformed back to a medic. I tried to wiggle out of her grip to stop Ed from going outside, but it was too late. He ran toward Harry and, putting his arm around him, propped him up as he staggered toward the house, as if Ed were a valiant hero rescuing a wounded soldier.

I never knew exactly what happened to the bear, and, despite what I insisted were clear traces of scratch marks on the top of the cab, only Daddy ever really believed that there had been a bear riding in the truck bed. Still, Daddy did not like it said that the bear had taught me to drive; after all, he had packed the picnic and picked the place, for better or worse, to teach me how to drive that old truck. The credence of my story seemed to grow a year or so later when, at the UGI power plant, my father met and befriended a newly hired worker by the name of Clarence, who was married to a certain Betty. During one of the night shifts that Daddy worked at the plant, Clarence told the story of having once seen a very large dog in a truck riding across Wilkes-Barre that his wife swore was a bear. Further, it was a well-known fact that the Misericordia campus was often visited by black bears (or at least one black bear), and for years after this event Lee Ann found bear tracks in the winter snow of her backyard. It seems fitting that I should here tardily request for myself the indulgent mercy of the Mother Superior of Misericordia, as I was the likely cause of the ruin of many student picnics that over the years were overrun by the bear that taught me how to drive.

This belated appeal to the Mother Superior notwithstanding, it should be clear by now that I have chosen to begin this work as I began life, not like Augustine with some lofty panegyric full of quotes from the Psalms, “Great art Thou, Lord, and greatly to be praised,” but with an affirmation of the roots of autobiography, not simply to please my pedantic son, Homer, whose penchant for tracing a word’s roots always irritated me not a little, but rather to assert my own view of autonomy, another word whose etymology is telling. Yet this is not simply my autobiography. Rather, this is the story of a teapot, tea leaves that float around the top of a teacup like chips of a rugged old tree, and a cheese plate, the lustrous face of which looks something like a rabbi, and a frightful one at that. These objects were transported from Wales to Pennsylvania in 1869 in a trunk that served as the family’s covenantal ark from the old country. These are the objects of this story but not the object of this story, which is the journey itself, a journey that began nearly 150 years ago, when life was vastly different, simpler, and purer than today. Purer, except for a war, the second such war in a span of a mere quarter century. After that war, life began to return to what everyone else seemed to think of as normal. Even the Welsh, naturally circumspect and pessimistic, felt joy, if not precisely irrepressible, as close to that state as the gloomy and nostalgic Welsh allow themselves to get. By the century’s midpoint, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, had become a thriving town, with Wilkes College as its intellectual and even economic hub, though Boston Store, quite near the Wilkes campus, might have made that claim, too. Regionally, it was still the coal industry that drove the economy, though each year that became less and less true. My father had already left Shaft 17, the only mineshaft recut to accommodate somewhat larger miners, for work in the local power plant known as UGI. Though better than the toil of the mines, his role as a supervisor in the power plant was not an easy one for him, because he had to work evenings, staying up all night and arriving home at 4:30 in the morning, just after his 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. shift had ended. I do not think he slept very much in the late 1950s or at all during the 1960s; still, my father never complained. He retired in the spring of 1972 and lived a full seven years as a pensioner, thoroughly enjoying the time of his retirement as he had thoroughly enjoyed his working life.

For my older sister (Lee Ann) and me, our parents’ goal was that we should have the opportunity to go to Wilkes to study to become teachers. This transpired for Lee Ann in the years just after the war. She finished college three years before I began, having made preparations to teach Latin and English in a local school district, which she did for many years. When, in the fall of 1954, I embarked on what would be a somewhat lengthy college career, I was less sure that I wanted to be the teacher my parents had envisioned, a vision for them born essentially out of the conveniences that a teaching career potentially might provide. But I get ahead of myself. I was born on August 19, 1936, to two loving, sometimes even doting, parents. Harry, you have already met, and you know my opinion of him. My mother’s name was Blanche, an appellation (like Harry) quite archaic, I imagine, even in her day. Mother was, I always maintained, a little gwallgof (Welsh for “batty”). I say batty not because we spoke a good bit of Welsh at home—many people spoke Welsh at home without being gwallgof— but because she sometimes did odd things that suggested that she was gwallgof. For example, she frequently would gaze out of the living room window of our home in Kingston, Pennsylvania, and comment quixotically to an imaginary interlocutor about this person’s hat, that one’s gate, another’s attire, yet another’s corpulence. Some days, especially in the spring when the weather might embolden her, she would sit on the front porch and perform this ritual within earshot of the ing pedestrians, though she rarely drew a comment, let alone ire, from any of them. Still, in this way, Mother was gwallgof. She also occasionally read tea leaves, quite against the stipulation of the good Reverend Griffith, who first introduced English into the services of the Gaylord Avenue Welsh Calvinistic Presbyterian (and therefore tautological) Church of nearby Plymouth, Pennsylvania, the church that we attended as early as I can . I was one of four children. Of the lucky two who survived childhood, I was at least as precocious as my sister, Lee Ann. But what miseries did I, ever unruly, undergo in school when I was told that I had to obey my teachers if I should wish to flourish! I was sent to school to get learning, yet I had no idea why I went to school or what value the education itself bore. Thus, I soon found myself placed in a special kindergarten class for the mentally retarded (for what reason, I cannot recall, but Mother always said it had something to do with an “IQ test”). Eventually promoted to the normal school, I was nearly held back from the first grade because of my inability to focus on the task before me. Even when I was a toddler, my father, Harry, had had to constrain me, like a dog, with a leash. He maintained throughout his life that he did so for my own protection (i.e., from

myself), and I understand now why this would have seemed to him a wise course of action. Still, throughout much of my adult life, I was certain that my father actually must have had another motive, though I could never establish one. My childhood—at least the aspect of it involving the Second World War, the struggle of which touched virtually all of my early days—was chiefly happy. Indeed, it may be that it was happy because of the war. My life, or at least the part of my life of which I have memory, commenced about when the war began, or near that point in time when America’s involvement in the war did. Accordingly, I the war well, and, despite my young age, I innately recognized, with judgment more mature than my years, that this was a critical moment for our country and for the world. Nevertheless, I was not particularly afraid. Rather, I grew up boldly hating Hitler and all he stood for. So savage and inhumane was Hitler’s particularly evil brand of inhumanity that the rest of our fallen race had to rethink questions of what constitutes human dignity and what the human race must learn in order to begin the slow movement beyond bigotry and racism. Our noble war against the Nazi regime taught me also to respect and value other cultures. This I learned to do so precisely because the Germans did not value human life. Their horrifying counterexample was all too easily established by their heartless invasion and attempted annihilation of the Poles, the French, the Balkan states, the British, and anyone else who resisted them, even the Russians. In one sentence, I have brush-stroked the deaths of millions of people whose lives we shall never know, whose families were wiped out or died or were maimed in some way. I have not even mentioned the Jews of and other oppressed states who were herded like cattle into inhumane railroad cars and trucks and were carried away to die in concentration camps. Yes, it was clearly the Jews who suffered proportionally the most. Accordingly, when at age six I was given a dartboard for Christmas—for in those days there were no age recommendations affixed to children’s games—I promptly clipped a picture of Hitler out of LIFE magazine and slipped it behind the wire mesh of the dartboard, so that I could hurl my miniature javelins at his repulsive mustache and merciless eyes. This allowed me to feel that I was contributing, somehow, not simply to the war effort but also to the invasion of Europe or the bombing of Berlin. When one picture of Hitler was thoroughly penetrated with dart tips, another would be inserted, and the process would begin afresh, the victimized visages having been stored in a special notebook. To my

delight, by the war’s end I had a file full of perforated portraits of the Führer. Yet World War II was always for me much more than simply a matter of historical consequence or a source of historical interest. It was the defining event of my childhood, creating in me a strong desire for social justice that would last throughout my life. The war also forged in me what I now confess to be a highly competitive outlook on life. Thus did I live much of my life comparing myself and my own situation to others, in part because we all felt, during the war years, a constant struggle to prevail, a need to win. This national competitiveness waxed greater during the war and touched not only the souls of my peers but my own psyche as well. Just a few months before that war with , I watched my father, freshly tired from a hard day in the coal mines, go out nearly every evening to serve as an air-raid warden, ensuring that the skies over Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, were clear of enemy aircraft. Never did he talk about his fears for the future, though he must have wondered, as he went on patrol, what might happen to his family—indeed, what would happen to America if we lost the war. Still, he never showed any disdain for the Germans; rather, he singled out the Nazis alone for contempt. What is more, he refrained from deriding or belittling the Japanese for their ethnic features or cultural mores. I learned during those years not only the lesson of graceful and indulgent mercy toward one’s enemies but also a way of looking past race to the shared aspects of the human experience. Moreover, I learned to be aware of and have a care for the environment, saving every piece of scrap metal, rubber, and paper for the common cause. I discovered how to value one’s country, how to temper national pride with prayer and sacrifice. Among women, Mother led the way, volunteering at the hospital as a record keeper, while Daddy worked ceaselessly; he always smelled like bits of burnt metal or coal dust or both at once. He seemed to me a war hero, even though owing to his age he merely patrolled the night skies that were, thankfully, devoid of enemy aircraft. Sometimes, Daddy would introduce me to friends of his who were enlisted men. I recall looking up at them, when the war began, from about their belt level. By the time the war ended, I had grown and was able to look straight at their chests and see their medals. I had great respect for these men. All these things I well. For as long as I could recall, Daddy had been working in the coal mines located between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton in upstate Pennsylvania. It seemed that

virtually all the Welsh immigrants, most of them coal miners, had settled in that region, alongside a good number of Irish workers, who also labored in the mines, though more often than not in separate shafts, as they mostly did not like each other, the Irish being dirty Catholics, the Welsh filthy Protestants. Yet the Welsh and Irish, like other blue-collar ethnic-minority groups, brought with them both the prejudices and the value systems of their homelands. And all the miners, Irish and Welsh alike, were more than dirty, filthy blue-collar workers; they were black lunged. So read, years later, my father’s death certificate. In those years, my father himself very much looked the part, besmirched and sullied with a strange concoction of coal dust, grime, and sweat that contaminated every strand of his hair and covered all the visible parts of his flesh. When Daddy came home, he would, in the summers of wartime, sit on the porch steps. Before climbing into his lap, I would stand behind him—playing with his dirty mop of hair, pulling on his ears—and ask him in Welsh what he had done that day. I would listen to his stories with glee, for he always had a story. Not a day went by that he would not speak of some new turn of events, some quarrel among the miners, some cave-in or near catastrophe, or some runaway coal cart. My father was a storyteller, and I loved to listen. Though he bore sadness in his heart, Daddy always presented hope on his face and would thus come home with cheer from every hard day’s work in the mines. It was not because my great-aunt Jemima was the property’s owner that she would say virtually every day, “Ydych fichi mochyn mawr” (“You are a dirty pig,” though really the expression means, “You are a sizable pig”), but it was simply because Harry was smelly and dirty and needed a bath. He never took it the wrong way. I would then, at age five or six, sit on my father’s lap for a few minutes, enfolded within his loving arms. With one of my hands, I would stroke the stubble of his face, as rough as his soul was gentle, and, with the other, make the sign of a cross in the coal grime on his forehead, while saying the old Welsh blessing, “Caru Duw chi, Tad” (“God love you, father”). Responding in English, he would assure me each time that God did love him and that God loved me, too. I will never know how my mother got the soot from his clothes, but thorough cleansing was a small miracle that she always managed to perform while God himself removed the grime of the world’s corruption from him each and every night.

But I should correct what I started to say when I said, “When Daddy came home…” More properly, I should say, “When Daddy came to my great-aunt Jemima’s home,” or at least that house that was originally hers for, many years before, she had taken in Harry and Blanche, then still a young and struggling couple. Jemima’s house was a relatively spacious duplex at 414 Rutter Avenue, Kingston, where she and her sister, my grandmother Lizzie Ann, had lived together for the last twenty-five years of Jemima’s life (i.e., until 1958), which encomed all of my childhood. The presence of my grandmother Lizzie Ann and my great-aunt Jemima ensured that the household in which I would grow up would be Welsh, for they spoke the language at home, allowing me and my sister to pick up bits of it here and there, enough to speak it, even if our lexicon was not fully developed. Though they themselves were not born in Wales, Lizzie Ann and Jemima were the last of the true Welsh, for my mother, Blanche, though her Welsh was quite good, married outside the clan. Some maintained that she did so “only slightly,” for my father’s father was a cook for Welsh miners, which allowed him to have a kind of honorary Welsh status; further, he lived in Larksville, a town contiguous with Plymouth and no less Welshly populated. Its famous Welsh Hill, now the dirt under Welsh Hill School, was a name that reflected the preponderant Welsh population. Add to this that my father’s mother (i.e., my other grandmother, Ann Louise Reed) behaved as Welsh as the Welsh, her favorite hymn being “Old Rugged Cross,” ittedly not a Welsh hymn, but quite Welsh in sentiment; indeed, I thought it was a Welsh hymn much of my life, just as I was certain I was completely Welsh. In any case, Ruth’s second-favorite hymn was “Be Still My Soul,” which most assuredly has a place, number 97, in the old Welsh Hymnal. Jemima’s generosity toward Harry and Blanche, newlyweds in the early 1920s, was welcome in the difficult economic times that many from that area of Pennsylvania—Larksville, in the case of my father, or Plymouth, in that of my mother—faced. Not surprisingly, neither Harry nor Blanche had money to buy a home. Thus, they were grateful for Jemima’s generosity and moved right in. The agreement—unstated in the Welsh fashion, of course (in this way the Welsh are like Italians)—was that Harry would take good care of the property, while Jemima and Lizzie Ann would garner a house full of life, for, to the new invitees, four children would be born, though, as I mentioned above, only I and my sister, seven years my elder, would survive the age of three. We all came to know too well the tears of things, and how mortality touches human hearts. Thus

was the life of my parents steeped in the dark dye of grief. My sister, Lee Ann, set the bar of life rather high for me. She was the good child, the good student, the better cook, and, generally speaking, more popular. Her grades were better, as was her Welsh. She was taller than I was, even taller than Mother; she was, in fact, nearly as tall as Daddy, or to me at least she seemed so. I lagged behind her in most ways, save one: the crazy Welsh creative spirit. Odd creativity is so valued among the Welsh that they have always honored their poets, even mentioning them in Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, the Welsh national anthem. Yet I do not mean to suggest that Lee Ann lacked Welsh spirit, for she had plenty of that. Nevertheless, she did depart significantly from Welsh tradition: that departure had to do with the church. Lee Ann’s lifetime love, Edwin Johnson, was, I suppose, the person who first urged that departure. A brilliant and handsome young man, Ed would, in the years of their courtship, study at Wilkes College, garnering both his undergraduate and his master’s degrees; he would eventually become a professor at that same college. Lee Ann found Ed to be the perfect boyfriend who would later become her loving husband, which provided me with yet another challenge —namely, to imitate my sister by finding a boyfriend for myself. This was especially difficult for me since, other than Daddy, I never really liked boys very much until I met Bernie Schupp. I envied boys somehow; I envied their position in the world, their freedom to live, and their unique relationships with their daughters that mothers seemed, at least in those days, rarely to have. Yes, even as a child, I could see that men had the best jobs and thus ran the world, always seeming to tell women what to think and do. And I did not hate such power; rather, in theory, I wanted that kind of authority for myself. As I grew up, I increasingly found myself wanting to help in the war effort in any way I could. The opportunity was presented to me in part in the various war drives that the government had arranged, such as those to which I alluded earlier. Yet I also sought to assist in little things, like helping around the house and keeping the lights out as much as possible. I wanted to thank every soldier I saw, kiss every sailor, embrace every marine; yet as I stated earlier, through most of the war I was too short to perform any of these joyous tasks. Most of all I wanted very badly the right side to win. V-E Day was a great celebration not simply for America but, I felt, for me

personally. I recall it perfectly. I sported a bowl-cut coiffure, if I may dignify a mere haircut with such a francophonic appellation, trimmed in such a way that I almost looked like a young Chinese girl. The bowl-shaped hair bounced as I walked with Daddy to the parade line to celebrate the victory in Europe (V-J Day was much the same). “Chinese girls, too,” I thought to myself, “are happy this day. The whole world is happy.” America and the free world had defeated the enslaving Axis powers and all that Hitler stood for. I felt, perhaps inspired by my game of darts, that I had been a part of that victory. Add to this the optimistic mood of the entire country, which spread like a wonderful contagion from handshake to handshake, with a twinkle in every eye and a grin on every face. We were all alive; our feet could hardly be restrained from dancing mightily. Hitler—now out of the picture, though I retained and rejoiced in my private pool of perforated portraits—was most likely dead, though no one knew for sure, and the wretched Reich of the terrible Teutonic race was thankfully in ruins.

2 Joie de Vivre

“It is a true tale of grief and trial, and sorrow, young man,” returned Mr. Brownlow, “and such tales usually are; if it were one of unmixed joy and happiness, it would be very brief.” —Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

A side from Harveyetta, that finest of dogs, Bernie Schupp was the first and, in some ways, principal love of my life. At sixteen years of age, I was certain that my life would turn out to be filled with love, success, art, and culture. While some of that did come about, it did not come about in the way I thought, especially as it might have if I had stayed with that tall, handsome young man, whose deeply carved face and inset eyes made words mere accessories. Bernie was not only spiritually perfect; he was physically perfect, as well (with one exception: he had an oddly hooked nose, the imperfection of which only enhanced his otherwise beautiful visage). His attractive face was that of a demure ancient Roman statue, perhaps of Caesar or Augustus, albeit with a rather large beak. His body was lanky and a bit uncoordinated, but that, too, seemed perfect to me. Bernie’s best feature, however, was an intangible quality: he embodied the notion of joie de vivre, a wonderfully descriptive French turn of phrase that I always liked very much, though I used it very little and, as I grew up, experienced it less than I used it. Bernie’s smile was more than the content grin of a naïve boy of the Wyoming Valley, though it had that quality, as well. But it was not his smile or even his capacity for speaking gently that first caught my attention. It was his visage, specifically his vision. His eyes had a Neapolitan quality to them, ever ready to emit an emotional effluence to touch my soul. For this reason I did not think that Bernie loved me; I knew he did. I loved him, too, though I lacked the capacity to express it, as the Welsh simply do not have the eyes of a Roman statue. (The Welshman’s eyes are, rather, similar to those of a dog, expressive and sad.)

I met Bernie “down at the shore,” as we used to say, in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, which was by far the most romantic nonromantic town on the East Coast. Though it was a distinctly conservative Christian little seaside resort, for us it might as well have been Paris or Rome. We would walk, and talk, and walk some more, and over a few weeks’ time—or was it just a few days?—we fell in love. It did not take us long to discover that, though we went to different high schools, Bernie and I both came from the same hometown of Kingston, Pennsylvania. It is a funny world that way, with virtually prearranged meetings of people in the oddest places. The place of our first meeting was Nagles’ Apothecary and Soda Fountain next to the little five and dime on what was known as Main Street. “The Grove”—as we used to call the town, attempting to jazz up its name merely by contraction— was where kids who came from religious or otherwise scrupulous families went to the beach. It was easy to love the Grove, even if you were not, as I was not, as religious as your parents. The reasons for anyone’s appreciation of that particular town were obvious to anyone even vaguely familiar with Jersey Shore culture. Asbury Park was where all the cool kids and, truth be told, often cool-vergingon-bad kids liked to hang out. To be cool there you had to be very cool, indeed. But in the Grove, it was easy: you just had to be yourself. At most, you might behave a little “edgily”; but you never had to go over the edge and be someone who you were not. Thus, to be accepted, you didn’t have to deny your parents’ authority or their religious values. Going with the flow in the Grove was not hard, as there was little motion and less flow. These moments, flecked with youthful delight, were the days I felt that I was truly alive. My thoughts about the future ran wild, and I was certain that my destiny lay in my own hands to be shaped as I wished. I could become who I wanted to become if I could just dream a fine enough dream. It was not until the very end of my life that I would know that feeling again, though by then it had been tempered by the variability of life and reinvigorated by a grace that I never quite fully understood. Then, in my dying days, by nature or kindlier divine intervention, I lost my ability to control my body and my destiny, as well, and could finally dream that fine dream and welcome its fulfillment. It had been a long time since the Grove, but then, on my sickbed, I ed those days, and I could at last envision a future once again. Bernie asked me out for the first time when he was eighteen and I sixteen years old. His invitation was precisely what I had hoped, the opportunity to go out

with such a handsome man. We went to Ma’s (known less colorfully in English as “Mom’s Kitchen”), a restaurant that served delicious Italian food, located as it was in nearby Neptune, New Jersey. The name of the town always troubled me because Neptune was not a coastal town but lied just slightly inland from Ocean Grove. How then, I wondered, did it get a name like Neptune (not Thetis or Doris or the name of some wayward sea nymph)? Neptune sounds to me like it should be a majestic beach town, ready to drive away unwelcome ships with its poised trident; yet there it was, a full town away from the coast proper. At least Ma’s restaurant was very close to the less-than-welcoming great gate of Ocean Grove, through which, incidentally, you could not in those days drive a car on Sunday. Bernie and I walked to Ma’s not because it was a Sunday (on which day Ma, too, shuttered her alimentary doors) but because Bernie’s even then quite old Ford Model T was simply not running well that day. He was having some trouble with the crank by which he started the car, as it fell out of the crankshaft from time to time, effecting, when it did so, a resounding clamor and causing not a few sparks to fly from beneath the car as it dragged the crank along. Each time, he would have to stop, reinsert the old crank into the shaft, and resume the journey. Thus, though he could have driven it, we decided to enjoy a late-afternoon walk together. The lady of the restaurant, Ma, was a real lady. Ma oversaw the preparation of all the dinners and always made the Italian red sauce herself. Her ing from this life, which thankfully did not happen until many years after this event, was not unlike the ing of George Allen, the owner of William Allen Bookseller in Philadelphia, whom I got to know later when I lived in that city. Both Ma and George Allen were not merely proprietors but institutions in and of themselves. When one bought a book from Mr. Allen, he would, with a gentle smile, express his thanks in Latin, “Gratias magnas tibi ago.” Ma behaved similarly. After a good meal, she would come out to ask you with a thick Italian accent how you liked it, and then she would thank you in Italian, “Vi ringrazio molto.” When Ma died, the reception was, appropriately enough, held in the restaurant. All the residents of Ocean Grove and Neptune went to her funeral, the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her kitchen, which no one save the kitchen staff had seen for many years. Ma was the kind of person who dignified the entire community. I’m not sure, but I think Ma’s was my favorite place to eat not simply because it

offered the best Italian food around but because somehow Ma’s ristorante Italiano resonated with my own psychological dilemma. That eatery lay outside the gate of the Grove, the seaside bastion of unswerving Christian faith. Located in a town of a starkly pagan name, the Italian restaurant offered a tiny piece of Europe amidst American culture. Though born American, I, too, in some ways felt like a first-generation immigrant, as I would oddly spend most of my life located outside the gate of my Welsh Christian heritage; like Ma’s, I was always close to that heritage, even if some on the inside might regard me as completely lost. I felt like the city of Neptune, too—closely proximate to the Christian world, but interrupted by Christendom itself from being where I belonged. I was seeking a deeper spirituality from which religion itself seemed to hold me back. Something was in my way, and that something had to do with being raised in the Church. Like Ma, for whom it surely would have been better business to move her restaurant into the Grove, I resisted entering through the Grove’s narrow gate, prevented not by the chain and Sunday guard but by my own heart, my own desire for something better, something more profound than mere religion. That particular evening Bernie and I took our time as we strolled toward Ma’s. It seemed a lifetime had ed in just a matter of moments. We held hands and talked and talked as the sounds of the tide retreated from our ears the closer to the ancient god we came. Bernie conjured with words; he could paint a picture with a few strokes of his tongue that itself would be worth a thousand pictures, carrying with them the emotion of a thousand more. I loved Bernie as I loved no other man, no other human being. He hoped and dreamt with me, involving me in his own dream of adventure, travel, and romance, not by plodding sonorously toward some plan, but rather by gently brushstroking the edges with implication and innuendo. If I could have given God a name, in those days I would have named him Bernie, and if at the last judgment the great lawgiver, Moses, had pressed me for more information, I would have added his family name, Schupp. Perhaps it was really only after I died that I discovered how very close Neptune was to the sea, how close Bernie’s family name was to the vessel of transport that can take one across the depths of the sea, when one needs to find the true port. But I had not distinguished between the ark of Noah and the barque of Charon, or the golden bough and the tree of glory. Bernie was all I had, and I felt I really had it all.

We arrived at Ma’s at seven thirty. It was a warm evening, and though it was not a long way from the Grove, it did take a while for us to get there. Yet a walk with Bernie never seemed too far, as it was the perfect use of time to glance again and again at his face and, looking or not, to hang on every word he said. At Ma’s we shared a salad, a bowl of real Italian bread, and a big plate of spaghetti with meatballs, Ma’s specialty. You could almost taste it before it arrived at the table, for the flavor of a scrumptious feast wafted through the whole restaurant. Dinner was delightful, and I knew then that I was thoroughly alive. I have never forgotten Bernie’s simple and warm conversation that took me over a sea of wild adventure, as billowing waves of enchantment drifted aloft from his words, themselves enmeshed with the steam that came from the tasty Italian dishes that sat on our plates. Were Bernie’s eyes blue or green or a mixture like the sea itself? I don’t recall now. The spaghetti was delicious. After dinner, Bernie fastened the loose crank under his old 1922 Model T— which had once been the Schupp family car but was now his—with a small piece of wire, to allow us to drive along the coast and feel the moist sea wind, of which you could almost taste the salt, caressing our hair as we headed north through Asbury Park toward Sandy Hook. This would have been perfectly romantic had not the little piece of copper wire fallen out, causing sparks to fly from time to time, whenever the car took a bump or turn oddly. Once in the beautiful park of Sandy Hook, we got out of the car and strolled onto the open night beach to share our dreams. “I’ll give you the moon, put a lasso around it, and you’ll swallow it and moonbeams will shoot out the ends of your fingers and your hair,” Bernie said. “That’s from a movie,” I said, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” “I know. I think it fits you,” Bernie replied, “even better than Donna Reed, and she’s the most wonderful actress in Hollywood. And it could be a wonderful life for the two of us, Lainie,” which was the same term of endearment my father had used for me (Bernie’s adoption of which only made me love him more). We talked for an hour about movies, especially movies with Jimmy Stewart, the war hero, and then we made our way back to the Model T, only to find two ruffians fooling with the old car. One of these ne’er-do-wells brazenly asked for a ride. The other, the uglier one,

came briskly toward me in a threatening manner, “You would like to go along for a ride, wouldn’t ya, little lady?” as the other began pushing Bernie back toward the beach. Bernie looked concerned and tried to squeeze past the sizable ruffian toward me, only to be rebuffed and pushed further down the beach. Bernie yelled heroically, “Lainie, I’ll come for you!” But the thug struck him square in the mouth, driving him back further yet. Strangely enough, at this point I was not afraid but simply recalled who I was. The Welsh are fighters by nature, but, inasmuch as Wales is a small country, they are so habituated to coming up short in their fighting that they often go into a fight expecting to lose. And you can imagine that as I went into a fight with a hooligan twice my size, my Welsh self could have, and perhaps should have, prepared me for the worst. But, though neither I nor my mother would ever it it, and certainly not my sister—or anyone else in my family for that matter—I am not 100 percent Welsh, though I have always felt that I am. I am the daughter of a certain Harry Reed Jakes, of which name no component is Welsh. But Harry was a fighter. The son of James Jakes and Ann Louise Reed, Harry evidenced his fighting spirit early on in his life, when his beloved great-uncle John died at the hands of the remnants of the very secret society known as the Molly Maguires. I say remnants because everyone knew that the Molly Maguires, the nineteenthcentury “Irish mafia” of the coal regions of Pennsylvania, came to an end with the famous trials of the 1870s, when John “Black Jack” Kehoe was hung in December of 1878. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was said to have manufactured evidence to demonstrate the violent tactics of the Mollies, and some to this day hold that the Molly Maguires did nothing wrong and were framed. It may have been so with the Mollies of the nineteenth century, but it was not so with their heirs, who were involved with the labor movement in Pennsylvania, some of whom even became Communists. One of these, a leader in the American Communist Party of the 1920s, lived in Wilkes-Barre about that time and had a political scrap with my father’s uncle John Reed, who opposed the Communists. But these Communists, whom some rightly or wrongly but certainly privately called the Sons of Molly, did not shrink from violent behavior and were believed, though never proven, to have been responsible for my uncle’s untimely death: he was found at the bottom of a ravine with his skull crushed. Some believed his skull had been fractured first and then his body thrown into the ravine.

I should mention that my father had friends in interesting places. Most of these were Italian friends, for he was one of the few young men in those days who did not evaluate a person based on their race, creed, or color, and thus had many friends of various backgrounds. One of these was a certain Giovanni Sciandra, who, though five years older than Harry, permitted my father to change his name to Johnny and teach him English when they worked together in the mines of upstate Pennsylvania from 1917 until 1920. There they were, an Italian and a Frenchman amidst all the Protestant Welsh and Irish Catholics—objective outsiders, almost peacekeepers, between those two warring factions. With the onset of prohibition, Johnny saw a way out of the mines by distributing alcohol to speakeasies. Harry—perhaps because he was engaged to an almostproper-Welsh woman, Blanche June Evans (I say almost proper because she was, as I mentioned earlier, known to read tea leaves clandestinely over the good Reverend Griffith’s objections)—turned down the chance to Johnny, staying on instead in the miserable conditions of the mines. Harry eventually married Blanche and, before trying to start a family, kept turning down many a lucrative offer from Johnny, who kept rising in the ranks of the then fairly innocuous local mafia operation. After 1922 or so, my father rarely saw Johnny but knew in his heart that Johnny Sciandra, though he was mixed up in a different world, had a soul. If Johnny Sciandra did bad things, my father always maintained, he did them as ethically as he could (that may be why, many years later, a more deliberately unscrupulous element within the mob itself allegedly gunned Johnny Sciandra down in 1940, when he was only forty-two years old). Insofar as young Harry believed his beloved uncle had been brutally killed at the hands of the quasi-communist clique called the Sons of Molly, he allowed his emotions to get the best of him. One evening, he made his way stealthily to the home of one of the leaders of the movement, whose name I cannot recall; it was some normal name like Bill or Steve, Nelson or Wilson. Harry doused Nelson’s brand-new car with gasoline and set it afire, nearly killing himself in the process, escaping the explosion with his eyebrows and hair singed. Given the timing of the fire, the Sons of Molly correctly believed one of John Reed’s relatives perpetrated the crime. They soon convened to issue, it has been said but never proven, a hit on the most prominent men of the family of John Reed. Meanwhile, Johnny Sciandra, who had friends in low places, got wind of this and correctly surmised that my father was in grave danger of coming to an early grave. In any case, it did not take Johnny long to ascertain that it was Harry

who did it. For when Harry reported to work the next day at the mines, his singed eyebrows and cracked eyeglasses drew the attention of his boss and not a few miners who got a good look at his face before he donned his mining gear. Harry’s boss operated one of those speakeasies to which Johnny’s boys made daily deliveries, and he told Johnny personally about Harry’s singed eyebrows. Johnny knew precisely what to do, as he had been looking for an excuse to get rid of the Sons of Molly anyway. In his view, they were Communists and therefore anti-American, a threat to our way of life. So Johnny got the word out on the street that the Italian Mafia destroyed the car. Need I mention that the Italian Mafia had no fear of the Sons of Molly? That was the true end of the Molly Maguires, and though the Mafia did not deal a crippling blow to the Communist movement in Pennsylvania, the intervention of Johnny Sciandra and his “boys” hindered it. This Harry Jakes was the man whose offspring I was, and I was not going to stand there and simply watch these ruffians beat up my boyfriend. I had Harry Jakes’s fighting instincts, and I had my mother’s pure and my father’s artificial (but not spurious) Welsh ion. These were the ingredients, I suppose, that prompted me to turn and draw the loose rod out of the Model T’s crankshaft. The visage of my assailant, whose swagger had gotten cockier when he saw me retreat toward the car, appeared utterly astounded as I whirled around, swinging that crank right at his head. I missed, but the weight of the crank kept me spinning like a top, increasing velocity as I went. On the second , after he had taken another step toward me, the rod dropped in its elliptical orbit, coming full speed into both of his ankles, as they were in striding position, at the same time. As he toppled, he yelped like a dog being hit by a car. With him down, I came up behind the hoodlum who—ignoring the squeals of his accomplice (perhaps he imagined I was the one squealing)—was fixated upon his soon-tobe-thorough roughing up of Bernie. Now I swung at this unsuspecting and therefore easier target, connecting directly with his flank. I could hear his ribs crack, and he dropped immediately with a terrible groan, like an enemy soldier fallen in battle. If Bernie was not quite a hero, he was nevertheless most assuredly a gentleman. Moving quickly, he put his arms around me, scooped me up, and carried me back to the old Model T, inserting the shaft that I had in my hand at that point, cranking it up, and getting the engine running fast. With love and iration in our eyes for each other and not a thought for the condition of the hooligans, we

kissed a lovers’ kiss before we drove away, leaving them writhing on the sandy ground of Sandy Hook.

The Grove’s uniqueness was not merely the uniqueness that makes every beach town unique. By typical beach town uniqueness, of course, I mean the waves breaking on the beach, the smell of the sea, saltwater taffy shops, and daily opportunities to stroll aimlessly in bare feet on a sidewalk made of wood. The Grove’s distinctiveness was owed surprisingly to its vast tabernacle where faithful visitors and residents came and still come, I believe, week in and week out to hear preaching, the preaching of grace, rendered by itinerant and often most-excellent preachers of grace, many of them Welsh Presbyterians. Bernie and I would go every Sunday to hear the preaching, to sing hymns (mostly those of Fanny Crosby), to recite what bits of liturgy could be found in typical Protestant services. This tabernacle, the Grove’s gate, the prohibition of driving a car on Sunday, the Lord’s Day—all these things were meant to be harbingers of the city on a hill, the city of peace. These images came back to me in my final days as I lay on my deathbed in my incapacitated and most unfortunate condition, brought on at the end of my life by Lewy body disease, a debilitating ailment with some of the same traits as Lou Gehrig’s disease. I ed how remarkably special those days at Ocean Grove were, and I reflected on what in particular made them special. It was as if I had all along been in the house of God without knowing it, taking its wondrous furnishings for granted. These things, the ordinary things about Ocean Grove, and its extraordinary tabernacle, as well, made the tiny town thoroughly palatial. What other mighty fortress could claim the sound of the ocean dashing upon its jetty’s rocks, or the spray of foam mist rising to the faces of those in its palace’s court, or a prince as fine and handsome as my Bernie, clad regally in his redand-white swimming trunks? Even when I had to bus dishes at the Hotel La Pierre at the age of sixteen, I lived under the Grove’s common grace that exuded from the twinkling lights of the night sky’s stars under which Bernie and I exchanged our tender teenage words of love. The light from those heavenly bodies, each individually barely visible but collectively spectacular, cascaded down upon us and upon a thousand other couples that night, revealing suggestively a glimpse of the individuality and complexity of heavenly love. We experienced a fraction of that love that summer, a fraction that would stay with me for the rest of my life. Each night that I had to work, Bernie would walk me home from the Hotel La

Pierre, bidding me adieu at the base of the steps running up to the little apartment over Nagles’ Apothecary and Soda Fountain, where I roomed with my sister, Lee Ann. As it sometimes happens with strong-willed sisters, Lee Ann and I were not so close as children as we would become as adults. She did not approve of Bernie, probably because she may have deemed him too good for me (she may well have been right about that); or was she a bit jealous? I doubt that, for, truth be told, her own boyfriend, Ed, who would soon be her husband, was incredibly handsome, at least as handsome as Lee Ann was beautiful. As regards looks, Bernie’s or Ed’s, mine or hers, she would have had little to be jealous of. Lee Ann herself looked like our mother. Her comportment was shaped by the fact that she had come of age during the war and the fact that she had had young parents. These were the same parents as I had, but they had changed and had become more reserved and distracted by the time they raised me seven years behind Lee Ann. Such a discrepancy in our ages occurred because two of our siblings, in the time between our dates of birth, had ed away. Though I never knew them, I can see them now—David, sweet child for the sweeter smile, and Dorothy Mae, my dear sister, who, had she lived, surely would have been the best of us. Ah, dear Dorothy, I now so wish you could have had days like mine, days I was so graciously given but treasured all too little. Yet even though Lee Ann was the better of the two of us, that summer in particular she wielded her superior status over me like an ax in the hand of a lumberjack who cuts down trees indiscriminately to make his monthly quota. In her defense, her raison de vivre changed during her college years. In the hands of I don’t know what professor of philosophy or sociology or (I think it was) psychology, she had lost, or attempted to shake off, the remnants of her Welsh Presbyterian heritage. I was, in my own way, trying to do the same, so I do not condemn her for her efforts to lose that simple, but not so simple, and what at the time must have seemed to her antiquated, Gaylord Avenue Welsh Calvinistic Presbyterian religiosity. We barely discussed, and certainly did not argue about, religion per se, as I myself saw its trappings everywhere but dared not inquire into what the source of such trappings might have been. Instead, I simply took religion, as I did all things, entirely for granted, though I found many of Lee Ann’s objections to the religion of our parents quite reasonable. Still, something did not sit right with me, as my older sister spoke about her newfound freedom with the air of superiority that one does when one is overly committed to something, such as a new automobile. It is the finest car

of its kind until it breaks down at an inconvenient moment, which is precisely what happened to dear Lee Ann within just a few years of that blessed summer. At length that summer, that perfect summer, drew to a close. Bernie had returned to Kingston to start football practice at Kingston High, and when I wasn’t working at Hotel La Pierre, I kept busy by filling in for a girlfriend of mine at Nagles’ Apothecary and Soda Fountain. One Saturday afternoon in late August, just before the summer’s end, just before it was time for me to return to my high school (a private school known as Wyoming Seminary), the same two hooligans who had accosted Bernie and me came in to Nagles’ and took a seat at the bar, though they did so with some difficulty. One had a pronounced limp. The other was gaunt and walked slowly, as if in pain. Was it wrong for me to take no small satisfaction in serving these two Goliaths, who failed to recognize the David who now presented them with their lunch? The first winter came and ed just slowly enough for Bernie and me to keep our gentle romance aflame. How many times did he bring to the house flowers that he had gathered from the Dierks’s garden that ran along the driveway beside their house, only a few blocks away from our own? Mrs. Dierks was a gentle lady, and I have often wondered if she had not been a coconspirator against Mr. Dierks, the keeper of the rose garden, in Bernie’s wonderfully unholy harvest. Daddy liked Bernie very much, but Mother and Lee Ann were convinced that he was of less than noble blood. I always found such a posture remarkably paradoxical for a Welsh coal-mining family of modest, but not as modest as in years gone by, means. So does wealth corrupt a people and in our case ridiculously so, since we did not even have wealth. Now with heightened eagerness, Lee Ann put her newfound view of life into practice by entering into what most of us thought was an overdue marriage to Ed. The date was 1954, and, with my relationship with Bernie now beginning to away, I confess that I became swept into thinking myself too good for Bernie. How quickly I had forgotten the common, but not so common, miracle that consisted of walks on the beach, dinners at Ma’s, dreams about the future given to us by the stars in the sky, and the strangely beautiful moment of the shared violence of Bernie’s crankshaft. True love should never be taken for granted. Bernie would remain forever in my mind, revisited only on wistful days during

which that distant and wonderful memory crept up into my thoughts as a morning mist after a warm summer rain. My memory of him was kept apart from other memories, stored in a special part of my soul as one might keep in a special desk drawer a unique piece of driftwood, saved from the sea, an enduring memento of a trip to the shore taken in one’s youth. Paradoxically, Mother’s comparison of Bernie to a commoner could not have been better chosen. As I look back nostalgically on my love for Bernie—something that I did quite often throughout my life—it is precisely the fact that we had in common merely a common love, two young adults, both from families of commoner status, with common backgrounds and merely common tastes. How I craved throughout my life’s journey merely the common things of life, but could never find them, pursuing instead uncommon pleasures that gave me no pleasure.

3 A Picnic in the Garden

There was a pear tree nearby … heavy with fruit attractive neither for beauty nor tastiness. —Augustine, Confessions 2.4.9

I t took Lee Ann almost five years to get pregnant, and people were beginning to talk. She came to me a few days after she found out. I had in the meantime gotten married myself, though I will spend no time on that mistake here. I leave that aside and turn to another mistake that was perhaps the most despicable event in my life. It was at least the most outrageous thing that I had done up to that time. Lee Ann’s excitement about her pregnancy was palpable. She had been very, certainly unduly, worried about her apparent inability to conceive. Some privately joked about Ed’s libido, but these were not the Welsh, who do not make jokes or puns about fertility and who at any rate conceive of such problems as part of God’s providential plan for a couple. Still, Welsh and non-Welsh alike were hopeful for a fruitful union. Besides, Lee Ann had confided to me that there was no lack of what the Welsh call rhyw, which bears little resemblance to the English word describing the normal activity of young couples. They had, in fact, at first been careful not to conceive. But, after a bit of waiting, they had begun to try, gingerly at first, but soon with fervor; yet in due time it was the third year or so of their trying without success. Accordingly, Lee Ann was worried. Then one day she came to the little house where my husband and I were living to tell me the big news: she was pregnant. Things were going well. Ed had a master’s degree and was teaching at Wilkes College, while my own spouse had not even finished college, though he had found a job deg small machines at a draftsman’s table. I am sure that my

face and even my demeanor betrayed my jealousy of her husband’s success as well as my not-quite-feigned but certainly forced congratulations about her pregnancy. Perhaps spurred on by this jealousy, I took to unprotected rhyw and swiftly became pregnant myself. I did not, however, tell Lee Ann. Partly out of a sense of shame that I bore because my marriage was less than happy and partly because I was so recently married that it could appear to be a scandal for my parents, I told no one, not even my husband. It was not long before a signal event should define my entrance into full adulthood. I confess, too, that it turned me further from sober judgment and reasonable thinking. To accomplish this dastardly feat, I had to part with the gentle Welsh ways in which I had been raised. My comportment at Lee Ann’s announcement picnic ensured that we would forever be rivals, renewing a contention that ittedly had its inception earlier in childhood. The idea for the picnic was hatched the very day that she visited my husband and me to tell us the news. While our men busied themselves outside inspecting the recent acquisition of a motorboat, in which my husband had foolishly invested what little savings we had, Lee Ann and I sat at the coffee table and planned a grand picnic for the family in order for her to make the announcement. Everyone —especially our grandmother Elizabeth Ann Evans and her sister, Jemima Jones —had been worried, thoughtful, and even prayerful about her pregnancy problem. Though Lee Ann was skeptical about the prayerful part, she nevertheless appreciated all the warm wishes. That group of those concerned, I confess here, included everyone except me—for I was neither concerned nor prayerful, as religion was for me, at that time, blurry at best. As the picnic drew near, Lee Ann and I planned every detail twice. I would make a plate of cubed and crustless watercress sandwiches, garnished with a circle of sliced apples and pears, as well as another plate of my favorite deviled eggs, fluffy and besprinkled with paprika. For her part, Lee Ann would prepare a tray of cold cuts, neatly arranging, as was her wont, the meats and cheeses in geometric patterns that would have made Archimedes proud. My grandmother Lizzie Ann made Welsh cookies while her sister, my great-aunt Jemima, made finger cookies and palmettes, which, taken together, were meant to represent the hand of blessing that the Welsh presbyters, when calling on a sick house, would lay upon the forehead of the ailing. Blanche would bring the cheese on the

cheese plate, which had been in the family since the days of my great-greatgrandfather David Hughes, who purchased the plate chiefly for its very interesting cover, which bore a lustrous face upon it, a face that made guests inquire and, in spite of its luster, repelled little children, one and all. Yet this was the family heirloom, so of course Mother would, ever so carefully, bring the cheese in that particular vessel. There was a large tree near Harveys Lake, a tree that overhung about a third of the park, near the pebble-covered beach where children splashed in the gentle breaking waves as they waited patiently for a wave bigger than the others, the wake of a ing boat, to wash ashore. Some of the lower boughs of this venerable tree were so laden with pears that they actually touched the ground. The shade and the beauty of the tree made for a perfect place for us to hold Lee Ann’s special picnic. My sister and I had set out on a folding table the deviled eggs, the sliced fruit, the cold cuts, and some crackers, while my husband carried a cooler full of drinks. I had argued that my in-laws be invited to the gathering by appealing to the inconsequential fact that they lived in some proximity to Harveys Lake. Lee Ann, caught up in the joy over the preparations for the occasion itself and steeped in a deep sense of satisfaction bordering on pride, offered no resistance to my suggestion. Now that I had them on the invitation list, I took full advantage of my sister’s distracted state and her rather terrible morning sickness —I fortunately had none of that, nor did I have pain in childbirth, as I was sedated—convincing her to invite my husband’s brother and his wife, as well. I took up my position under the pear tree that dominated the garden, a tree that made the part by the lake such a special, almost primordial, place. Having hurriedly helped myself to the eggs, I greedily devoured the fruit (even picking a pear off the tree, a pear picked neither for its color nor for its flavor but simply because it was there). I then stood up and called for and soon commanded the attention of the crowd. Lee Ann looked confused; perhaps she was thinking that I intended to introduce her. “I have an announcement to make,” I said. “My husband and I are going to have a baby.” Lee Ann’s face took on an ashen pallor. The excitement of the moment, the delight of my listeners, and my unfortunate desire to be the center of attention were necessarily muted by Lee Ann’s having

fainted as she got up to carry the silver tray of cookies to my father. That silver platter—which, along with the cheese plate, had made the long journey from Wales in a coffin-like black trunk two generations before—bore the delicious round palmettes and finger cookies, dribbled with butter and then dusted amply with powdered sugar. Lee Ann had only just removed the wax-paper wrapping that protected the cookies, since most of us, save Daddy, were not yet sufficiently stuffed with the other delectables. But my sister—thoughtfully casting a glance to see who might or might not lack for the next course in this informal but highly symbolic feast and, as always, wishing to please our father— had put aside her small plate of tasty sandwiches and had risen to bring the fancy cookies to him. It was at just this moment that I stood up to make the announcement that caused the dessert disaster that would have become an amusing part of family lore. It would have, that is, if what I had done had not been correctly understood as a dastardly act, which, I confess, it was. At first blush, no one understood. Indeed, everyone assumed she had simply fainted or fallen, and most swarmed around her, some bringing napkins doused in water, others making fans out of paper plates in their attempts to resuscitate her, which did not take long. The reason it did not take long is because one of my cousins, Warren, who was studying chemistry at Princeton, intelligently grabbed off the cheese plate a hunk of Hên Sîr, an olfactory Welsh cheese that my grandmother Lizzie Ann had obtained the day before from Mary Griffith, the wife of the great Reverend Griffith, the pince-nez bespectacled family rector in the Gaylord Avenue Welsh Calvinistic Presbyterian Church of Plymouth, Pennsylvania. (It was Reverend Griffith who first introduced English into the Welsh Presbyterian service, an act for which he would be pilloried by other Welsh presbyters of the region.) This odiferous cheese, Warren reasoned, would function as smelling salts to revive Lee Ann. Only my cousin Blythe—Warren’s brother, who was never as close to Lee Ann as he was to me—sensed that I, too, was upset and sought to help me. Being quite unsure as to how or whither I might make my escape, I decided that instead of attending to my sister, I would assist my father by picking the cookies out of his hair. The cookies had landed on his head, finger cookies on one side and the other, with a palmette cookie smack in the middle, which Blythe later told me reminded him of the Presbyterian bleson the ill. The pulverized sugar rose from my father’s shoulders like a mist over a lake at dawn, or dust on a plain that wild horses, thrown into confusion by some distant sound, have tossed up in a stampede. My cousin brushed the powdered sugar and cookie crumbs off

Daddy’s shoulders while I, still not comprehending the full extent of my crime, lifted the cookie-shaped hand of blessing from his forehead and then tried to brush the crumbs from his hair even as he bent over his, by now recovering, older (and surely better) daughter. Awakened by the pungent smell of the cheese and slowly regaining her wits, Lee Ann did not take long to start crying, and she most certainly did bawl like a baby, a rarity for such a strong woman. This was for me the first clear and obvious sign of my transgression, and I immediately wished to hide myself beneath the lowest hanging boughs of the nearby pear tree, under which, only a few minutes before, I had taken my seat and eaten my deviled eggs. Now I knew that my crime was exposed for all to see, yet it did not occur to me that I should be most concerned with the opinion of the one who, I would have said at the time, saw it only from a great distance. I should have at least been concerned with my father’s judgment. When Lee Ann stopped sobbing and began to talk, my doom was sealed. Father was angry; Mother was mortified, especially in front of my husband’s family. I was now a pariah, an outcast, dismissed by my father, whom I loved, from the picnic in the garden. Though he used no profanity and showed little anger, my father’s words felt like a curse being pronounced upon both me and my husband, though my husband had never known about the announcement or, until just before the picnic, even about the pregnancy. It may come as no surprise that it took some months for my sister to speak to me again; even then it was a forced, clearly painful, discussion. I am now greatly thankful that she was willing to resume our relationship, though it took a few years for it to be fully restored. And, because I complicated my life with a series of difficult choices, our relationship was, if confessionally close, somewhat tumultuous and, at times, competitive. I trace, if not quite the inception, at least an impetus for this competitiveness between us to the incident at the picnic; my sister’s indulgence afterward was always to me an uncommon example of common, decent, human grace.

It was the 1960s. For my generation and more specifically to my taste, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Simon and Garfunkel were figures larger than life, and they began to replace my former musical preferences for the Kingston Trio, Eartha Kitt, Dean Martin, and Nat King Cole. The next generation offered a new breed of philosopher-poets, not seen (my son might tell you in his pedantic fashion) since antiquity. I say “might tell you” because I am not certain that he ever paid attention to contemporary culture or popular trends the way I did. After a series of arguments with my husband—the divorce was messy—I moved back in with my parents, my son in tow. I decided immediately and irrationally that it would be best for my son never to know his father; I discouraged my former husband from further , and, after an ugly incident, I discouraged my four-year-old son, too, from wishing to see his father; my husband eventually stopped coming to visit. Because I had gotten married, I failed to finish my college education. In 1962, however, I returned, on my parents’ urging and with their financial , to Wilkes College, from which I had earlier been exiled. Now I tried to participate more fully in campus life, for personal reasons staying quite far from the activities of the Beacon, Wilkes’s college paper, but participating actively in Sigma Tau Delta (the honorary English Society, for I was an English minor), while also doing the makeup for Wilkes’s theater group, the Cue ’n Curtain Society. Inasmuch as I had a small child, for me acting was out of the question, and makeup duty was all that I could handle. The cause for my previous dismissal some seven years prior is easily explained. The time came for the second set of mid—that is to say, the set of tests that occurred in midspring of 1955 (i.e., my freshman year, when I was eighteen years old). How I faced these mid was shaped by my idea of why one went to college, which was itself shaped mostly by my peers but also, to some degree, by the less-than-well-informed view of my parents that I mentioned earlier. As far as I could gather from all sources—except Blythe and Warren, my cousins who went to Princeton—college was like a summer camp where one went to have fun and make new friends, and eventually to graduate and garner a good job or be a good wife. Since my parents thought it would be more practical for me, as a woman, to be a teacher, they urged me to study education, a topic and activity in which I had no interest at the time I began college.

But I return to the cause for my first dismissal. Since the first set of mid had not gone well for me or for some of my newfound friends, who were in fact not friends at all, we decided to take action to ensure our success on the second round of tests and to do so in a way that would be fun. Indeed, we had fun, at least if you define fun as making lots of noise, getting drunk, and crossing ethical boundaries. Now my friends had devised a way to cheat on a test, an ethical boundary I was very hesitant to cross and in fact did not personally cross on that or any other occasion. But like one wanting to with a pack of lads up to no good, who might steal just for the thrill of stealing, so I went along with my peers, pressured perhaps, but willing to be a part of the group, though not a part of the plan. I figured that to their satisfaction I could feign having cheated— so readily had I learned to justify my actions and rationalize away obvious sin— and thus be a part of the group. The plan itself, which kindled my desire for participation in part because it was so diabolical, was to throw a coat hanger, about which a wet towel had been wrapped, into a fuse box. That fuse box was located in the basement of Chase Hall, which had been a gift of the coal baron Frederick Chase, who owned the coal company for which my father had worked; his father, my grandfather, James Jakes, had once served the company’s miners their lunches outside one of the mine shafts. Chase Hall, which had once been the coal baron’s home, was thus not a large building, as far as university buildings go, designed in the fashion of Tudor revival—that is to say, stucco and brick with a gable roof, arching windows, and beautiful wooden crossbeams to divide up the stuccoed sections of the building. The exam was to be held, assuming all business would be done as usual, in that building, a typical setting in those days for either an English or a history exam; ours was the latter. If the scheme worked properly, fuses would blow, causing the lights in the building to go out. Since the exam was to be given in the late afternoon, either the lack of light would cause the professor to go out of the room to see what had happened or the exam would be postponed. Since it was the last day of exams, my friends were sure that the professor would leave the room and one of us would sally toward the desk and pretend to sharpen a pencil. That same conspirator would then stealthily the desk and steal a glance of the answer key, which we knew would be on the desk; indeed, the instructor, Mrs. Keinhoffe, always graded the tests as they were turned in. While Mrs. Keinhoffe was out, the hurler of the hanger (whom we called the

“grenade tosser”) would slip into the back of the room. When the professor—we called Mrs. Keinhoffe “professor” even though she did not have her PhD— returned, we would all complain about the lack of light before the exam was distributed. The person who saw the multiple-choice letters (D, C, A, B, C, etc.) would memorize the pattern and share it with the other conspirators. Were the exam to be delayed, the pencil-sharpening conspirator might even have garnered the essay prompt, which then could be prepared in advance of the retest date. We even devised a secret code for tapping out the answers to each question, should the need arise. Somehow, as unlikely to succeed as this plan surely was, I and my fellow idiots were convinced that it would work. The worst that could happen, we reasoned, would be nothing whatsoever. In that case the grenade tosser would come in late and apologize for being tardy. Since, as I said, I did not want to indulge fully in the wickedness of actually discovering the exam contents, I volunteered to toss the “grenade.” If it turned out to be a dud, then no harm would be done. And I was pretty sure it would not work, and that the building’s electrical system would not be shut down, but that, in the end, we would have a great story to tell anyway. Nevertheless, I prepared my grenade, thoughtfully, even maniacally, wrapping the hanger with an absorbent towel and, ironically enough, with plenty of electrical tape. Yet how thoughtlessly I failed to prepare for the exam, the content of which covered the history of classical antiquity through the Middle Ages, a course taught by one of the kindest, gentlest educators any student could ever hope to have. Though she lacked the doctoral degree, Shirley Keinhoffe was said to have been related to royalty, and her carriage and demeanor gave substance to that rumor. Had I bothered to prepare for Professor Keinhoffe’s exam, I would surely have learned the lessons of history before I had to discover them for myself. Even without any omen of mercurial mutilation, the Sicilian Expedition would have been a bad idea; even a well-thought-out putsch, such as Catiline’s during Cicero’s consulship, often fails. I’m sure Professor Keinhoffe, had she known about our attempted conspiracy in advance, would have proclaimed, “O the times, O the character!” With so many answers blowing in the wind, I did not take the time, amidst the silence, to listen to the small still voice within, which by then I had all but blocked out anyway. Rather, for me it was one plan of action followed by the next, one chance for glory after another. And I grasped

my chance with vigor. The first problem I had was keeping the towel wet while I found my way to the building’s basement. The “grenade” was amply moist when I arrived at the back entrance, but by the time I figured my way through what seemed to me a subterranean labyrinth, much of the towel’s moisture was left on the floor. When I found the door that opened into the room where the fuse box was located, I carefully looked around to assure my privacy before entering that dark inner sanctum. I fumbled for a light switch but could not find one. What remained of the daylight shone through a few windows that were cut into the building’s foundation, permitting just enough light to discover a sink where I could amply restock the weapon with a fresh supply of water. Would that I had not done so. The fuse box was in plain sight, a mere twenty feet or so away from the sink. The box itself was gray, and there was a small black handle that I had to pry up with some vigor using my thumbnail. Once I got the fuse box’s door open, I took my weapon and I threw it in the box, just as we had planned, shutting the door quickly with my left hand. I am certain a lot of sparks must have made it quite a brilliant sight to see, but I did not see the results of my handiwork, as the next thing I recall is Mrs. Keinhoffe kneeling next to me stroking my hand and asking me if I was all right. To my surprise, I found myself on quite the other side of that room in Chase Hall’s basement, flat on my back with a good bit of blood near my head on the ground. My aching cranium seemed to bear a congealed mess of blood and dust from the basement floor. The smell of burning hair permeated my immediate surroundings and seemed to be coming from my nose itself. When I sat before the honors council a week later, all was made clear to me by the campus police chief. I had descended into the basement; I had attempted to disrupt an exam; said disruption was an attempt to effect a cheating plot. The associate dean (who served as the prosecuting attorney) described the plan as “so ridiculous, so very far fetched!” I was, it was alleged, the ringleader of the group of three (though really we were a group of five; two got off scot-free) students who confessed. When after a few minutes I had not come to the classroom at all, one of those two conspirators became not unjustifiably worried, thinking I had been nabbed or, worse yet, electrocuted, which is indeed the very thing that had happened.

Fortunately for me, the electrocution had not proved fatal. The closing of the ultimate portal, which was the small metal door of the power box, was my undoing. The electrical current was so powerful that I was actually thrown by the shock away from the source, striking the back of my head with sufficient force to break open the skin. I required only three stitches, but those three stitches failed to teach me a lesson about power that I needed to learn. Certainly, it was obvious to me that one should be wary of the great power of electricity, yet the real lesson about power I failed to grasp, for I could not yet see the metaphors of life that were too often right in front of me. Wilkes would not be, it seemed apparent, the school from which I would take a degree. Life is so very full of twists and turns. My departure from Wilkes consisted of the following series of events. My dear cousin Blythe, who would at a later date help clean up my father after the cookie incident, came to my aid as I confronted my expulsion trial at Wilkes. Blythe was then a first-year student at Dickinson School of Law and would later go on to become the district attorney of Wilkes-Barre. In his first act as a protolawyer, he drove up from Dickinson Law to help me with my defense. Dickinson’s mid had ended a few days before, and, just after that, spring break had come to the Dickinsonians a week or so earlier than to those of us who were studying at Wilkes. Accordingly, Blythe came home during his academic hiatus and could, thanks to me, now put into practice the very things over which he had just been tested. What was exciting for him, however, was terrifying for me, especially in my tattered and mottled state. My scalp hair, at least what had survived, was singed and, if not exactly wavy, was now partially curled. Some had been liberally removed by the doctor for the stitches, and my eyebrows were rather higgledy-piggledy looking, singed and partially gone. My nose, though recovering, still kept noticing the self-referential odor of burnt hair, an odor coming from the very place meant to detect odor. Before going to court, I had to prettify what was left of my rattled soul and body to face the college’s ombudsman, who served as the judge of the case. At the hearing, there would be no jury, a fact that brought me a certain amount of relief. Blythe advised me to cast myself upon the mercy of the ombudsman, which is precisely what I did even though that position was filled, that particular academic year, by Professor Keinhoffe. No, this was not the same gentle Professor Keinhoffe whose multiple-choice grid we conspirators had hoped to pirate or whose indulgent character we had hoped to exploit by begging for a

testing delay. (It still did not occur to me that merely studying instead of conspiring might, in the first place, have achieved more felicitously the results that we sought to effect through this bizarre plot.) Rather, it was her husband, who this term served as Wilkes College’s ombudsman, Professor Dr. Aberdir Keinhoffe. More often than not an ombudsman’s role is simply to resolve problems between faculty and other colleagues or between faculty and the istration. But by an odd quirk of Wilkes’s rules and fate itself, or kindlier destiny, suddenly I sat before Professor Dr. Keinhoffe, ombudsman and judge. Like his wife, Professor Dr. Keinhoffe taught history, but his focus was on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His wife had only a master’s degree, though it was a very high-level master’s: she had attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she had fallen utterly in love with her future husband, a brilliant, young, and quite muscular assistant professor under whom she was studying. Aberdir Keinhoffe had left illegally, just after the opening of World War II. His doctorate would have been from the finest German university, Heidelberg, but he took advantage of a chance meeting with an itinerant mule driver—or, more properly, a muleskinner, as they are called—to make his escape through Switzerland. The muleskinner—whom he befriended in his hometown with the impossible-to-pronounce name of Pleikartsförsterhof, just outside of Heidelberg—was, as it happened, ing through the town driving a pack of mules. Aberdir Keinhoffe (not yet “Professor” or even “Dr.” Keinhoffe) actually had remarkable expertise in the Battle of Gallipoli and was working on a dissertation on Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson. (Patterson, one may recall, served under General Sir Ian Hamilton, commander-in-chief in the Dardenelles.) But Keinhoffe’s chief interest was in the world’s first Jewish fighting force since antiquity, the Zion Mule Corps. Though not a Jew himself, Patterson generally favored the Zionist cause, as he had been educated in the classics and had, as a youth, read all of Josephus in Greek—an impressive feat. Mules, then, were responsible for Patterson’s relatively minor, one might even say Pyrrhic, victory at the otherwise disastrous operation at Gallipoli, which ended in retreat. If mules could have rendered aid, such as it was, in the mission at Gallipoli, then mules, Keinhoffe reasoned, just might save him, as well. Accordingly, he struck up a conversation with the muleskinner. When he learned that the man was en route to Switzerland and was looking for someone to come

along to help him with the mules—for he had charge of twenty-seven mules, which is twenty or so more than one muleskinner can drive comfortably—and because the muleskinner loved to yodel (a skill Aberdir, oddly enough, had learned from his aunt, who had taken up yodeling to console herself over the premature death of her Swiss-born husband), he allowed Aberdir Keinhoffe to him on his expedition, provided that he add some substantial amount of dried meat to the food basket, and not a few pieces of good dried German brown bread, as well. Aberdir was glad (and quick) to oblige, putting in even more than that, for his father had a small beer-brewing business. Thus, Aberdir Keinhoffe was able to take as much beer for the journey as he wished. Because as a young man he delivered beer by horse, Aberdir also had access to several horse packs that were used for transporting beer in fairly sizable quantities upon the animals’ backs. He and the muleskinner, whom he only ever knew as Hans, adjusted these devices ever so slightly to fit the mules, for they reasoned that, as they traveled, should they need more food and supplies, they could always sell or barter the beer. Mules were meant to be beasts of burden, and if they could prove effective by carrying vast amounts of supplies at Gallipoli, they could certainly carry a bit of “Dumhof” brew (a name formed out of word fragments of the family’s name and that of his father’s maternal great-grandparents). To all appearances, Aberdir Keinhoffe was throwing away an academic career that had already been brilliant, as he was the first person, and at that point the only person, to have looked into the specific question of how mules were used at Gallipoli. Hitherto, no one had cared one whit for the Zion Mule Corps, a topic that would obviously not be popular with the Nazi regime. By the time they were ready for departure, all twenty-seven mules were loaded with what would be the modern equivalent of approximately twelve cases of beer each—Aberdir’s father’s going away present to his son. His father understood fully why his son had to leave—the danger of writing a dissertation extolling Jewish mules just as Nazi power was waxing—and could not bear the thought of sending him away without as much beer as possible. And so it came to that Hans and Aberdir drank their way across southern to the Swiss border, Hans out of a predilection for drink, Aberdir as a way of fighting off his sadness at leaving his studies at Heidelberg unfinished. Nevertheless, their lack of sobriety or, rather, the case upon case that they had

not yet used on inebriation was the very thing that saved them. For the German border guards, though stiff and unfriendly as so often depicted in the movies, were all too ready to indulge in what remained of the delicious Dumhof brew, and, even though Aberdir and Hans had helped themselves to more than was healthy, a great deal still remained for the guards. Delighted with their entrance tariff, a surcharge that would last the normally austere border guards for at least the next month, they allowed the mules and their muleskinners to without further questions. Now free in the Alps, Aberdir Keinhoffe was filled with hope of finding transport to England and of making a life for himself there. By chance he met a noblewoman from America as he was seeking a room at a local tavern. The noblewoman, Adele von Wappengeld, just happened to be looking for a valet, and Aberdir Keinhoffe recognized that this was the right opportunity for him to part company with Hans, his muleskinning friend, and to take a minor position with a person of elevated social status. ittedly, Adele had an unusual interest in Aberdir, whose muscular build belied his attention to the details of history that he had begun amassing in his mind at the University of Heidelberg and that still engaged the majority of his attention. While a lesser scholar might have been less devoted to the mulish pursuit of midrashic scholarship and instead entertained the possibility of a relationship with a baroness, virtually all Aberdir thought about at the time was mules, the Zionist Mule Corps, and Gallipoli; all the baroness thought about was Aberdir’s pectoral muscles. With hopes of him doing more than simply carrying her bags, Adele used false papers to take her new handsome and thoroughly learned valet with her when she returned to Scotland, which she did because her noble Swiss husband had recently died. Once they arrived in Scotland, Aberdir, having fulfilled his obligation to the noblewoman and growing weary of her unwarranted advances, sought to resume his historical studies at the University of Leeds. Adele liked this because it was but a stone’s throw from a small country house that she and her late husband had some years before purchased in a small hamlet named Pool, in Wharfedale, just off Old Pool Bank. Thus, nearby in northern England, she could keep in touch with her strapping former valet and foment their friendship, which, she still hoped, might just lead to something more than friendship. Of all the schools he applied to and should have been itted to, such as Oxford and Cambridge, strangely enough Aberdir was itted only to the

University of Leeds. The reason for this was that His Majesty’s Secret Service had stationed there a group of top-secret operatives. This group during the war years used to spy on anyone who could possibly be a German sympathizer. Although his false documents purported him to be Swiss, Aberdir Keinhoffe had sufficiently German-looking features and, of course, a sufficiently strong German accent to draw the suspicion of the authorities and, as a consequence, to garner for himself ission only to Leeds, where snoopy secret agents kept watchful eyes on possible plants. Ignoring all those who looked over his shoulder, Mr. Aberdir Keinhoffe soon became Dr. Aberdir Keinhoffe, the world’s expert on mules at Gallipoli. The Swiss nouveau riche baroness from America was residing in that Pool country house, where she continued to fan her dream of receiving from her former valet much more than merely eternal gratitude. Indeed, he promised to and did in fact visit her there from time to time. It was perhaps only the fifteenyear gap in their ages that prevented a tryst, but it may also have been the fact that this strangely beautiful forty-two-year-old baroness never spoke to her valet or anyone else about the Swiss baron whom she had married and through marriage to whom she had become fabulously wealthy. When she realized there was no hope for her to enjoy the pleasures of what had to be the most muscular, intelligent man in the world at the time, she referred the freshly minted Herr Doktor, not yet Professor Keinhoffe, to her niece, lovely in form, with slender ankles and thick hair that this selfsame niece had the nervous habit of flicking back over her left shoulder—a habit formed, most likely, from the fact that it was parted on the right side. This pretty and wispy young woman would develop into the kindhearted educator who held my hand as she gently tried to resuscitate me after my electrocution, which the reader will recall was caused by my tossing a wet clothes hanger into an all-metal fuse box and closing it manually. And now I faced Herr Professor Dr. Aberdir Keinhoffe as the judge of my case, a man I had never met personally but I felt that I knew from Mrs. Keinhoffe’s of his story, and of their first meeting at the University of Pennsylvania, where he had, with the remarkably long-reaching influence of the baroness, obtained a position as an assistant professor of history; and, Mrs. Keinhoffe maintained, there was no truth whatsoever to the rumors that swirled about their relationship when she was his master’s degree student at Penn. Even in my almost still sizzling and certainly quite frazzled state, I was keen to accept Blythe’s advice to throw myself upon Keinhoffe’s mercy and to mention

discreetly, of course, the fact that rumors can sometimes ruin one’s reputation— something I knew he must have known, as Mrs. Professor Keinhoffe had told us that that was precisely why, not so many years before, they had left the University of Pennsylvania to accept the posts offered them at Wilkes College. At Wilkes, Professor Dr. Keinhoffe had risen in the ranks quickly, having just recently come to the level of full professor. The dean was, no doubt, eager to see what his bright, still fairly young, ombudsman with a thick German accent would do to the likes of me. Despite my most imioned appeal, Herr Professor Dr. Aberdir Keinhoffe was not willing to let me off with a mere swipe of his ombudsman’s staff (known as “mace”), on which a “Flying W,” the not-so-ancient sacred symbol of Wilkes College, was embossed at top center. But, perhaps wistfully recalling the muleskinner’s mercy, or the valet’s (and border guards’) indulgence, or the baroness’s favor and even her poorly masked sexual restraint, or the University of Pennsylvania’s willingness to be influenced by that same baroness’s titular position of power, or his own wispy wife’s readiness to tolerate what amounted to an arranged marriage and his own earnest-eared attention to Frau Keinhoffe’s intervention on my behalf, he did not say, “I’m sorry, but there is no hope for you.” Instead, he at least gave me the choice of withdrawing from the college without a blemish on my record or facing the jury of my peers, a jury that he and Blythe and I all thought it wiser to avoid. Before I could accept the deal, however, Herr Professor Dr. Aberdir Keinhoffe took it upon himself to offer an interesting excursus on the lack of moral values among young people of (what was then) today. His diatribe was not that of the curse of religion upon free thoughts of a young mind, channeling the potential energy into a useless and one-size-fits-all code of conduct that by virtue of its rigidity and fixed point of view undermines the very value system it seeks to create, but rather something surprisingly (and I would now say refreshingly) the opposite. The good professor forthwith launched into a dissertation on the positive value of religion and religious upbringing. Had I had such an upbringing? he wondered. Had I ever studied the catechism (he meant Luther’s catechism, of course)? Had I thought of applying the tenets of religious life to inform my code of conduct? Was there any hope for young people nowadays?

4 The Good Dr. Davies

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, Grew lean while he assailed the seasons; He wept that he was ever born, And he had reasons. —Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Miniver Cheevy”

S o I decided to become very religious, which I immediately did. With my newfound sense of religious identity in hand, but not in heart, I quickly resumed going to church, an institution I had not attended for some time, as is often the case for young people who leave home to live on the college campus. Now I went to services with a fervor intended to prove that I could make amends for the shocking sin that had nearly killed me. Little did I know then about the depths to which I would stoop in betraying my sister on the day of her special announcement, or the convenient lies I would later tell my son about his father. Since I had withdrawn from Wilkes voluntarily, I could now apply for transfer to some other local colleges. Among these, one school was sufficiently kind (or foolhardy) to accept me, though it, too, would soon expel me. That second expulsion, from Bloomsburg State Teachers College, was caused not by my desire to run with a bad pack but rather from my desire to be good, inordinately, zealously good. Yet I will not here seek to explain fully the inner workings of my religiosity (for there were none), but rather I will try to delineate the practical results of my new penchant for religion and the new heights of the moral mountain that I intended to ascend. Curiously concurrent with this indecent ascension was my own willingness to

indulge the Welsh capacity for mendacity. Such ascendency began quite accidentally, for I was far better at (and the better for) being mendaciously moral than I was for seeking morality for morality’s sake; I would accomplish the latter when I would take the position of investigative reporter with the school’s newspaper, the Maroon and Gold, about which I shall speak shortly. But the former came upon me immediately after my arrival on campus. Daddy drove along Route 11, which followed the winding current of the Susquehanna, a peaceful ride along Salem Boulevard. Yet the peace in my own life would be borne out of strife and suffering from which I had to learn what was necessary for me to learn. My new place of learning would in a short time teach me much in an idyllic setting. In many ways, the campus of Bloomsburg State Teachers College was more attractive than that of Wilkes; it had much more of a rural, almost Arcadian, feel to it and was thus insular in a way that Wilkes was not. Bloomsburg State Teachers College was, in of appearance and ambience, a truer junior version of Bucknell, though in fact that title officially belonged to Wilkes. Both Bucknell and Wilkes, however, were the principal schools of our family; I, my sister, her husband, and her sons attended Wilkes, while Bucknell was the fine school of David Evans’s grandson, Blythe Sr. (my uncle and the father of my wonderfully giving cousin Blythe, whose sole indulgence was very weak whiskey sours, very heavy on the sour with practically no whiskey at all); Blythe Sr.’s sons went to Princeton, as they were smarter than the rest of us. Thus, Bloomsburg State Teachers College, though not one of the schools others in the family had attended and despite its pedestrian name (later changed to the slightly more distinguished “Bloomsburg University”), enjoyed an attractive campus and was, if not a junior Bucknell, Bucknellesque, and at a discount, at that. The Waller Hall dormitory, where I was given a room, emphasized the “discounted” aspects of the school, as its furnishings were Spartan, though the Husky Lounge was a lovely place to chat with friends. Alas, my roommate, Barbara Parrot, seemed to me a bit of a Philistine. My initial relegation of Barbara to Philistine status came not from her given name, which smacked of a lack of sophistication (as Barbara, in its root sense, means the woman whose diction is so unrefined that it sounds like she is saying “Bar-Bar-Bar,” though in her case with a robust southern accent), but simply because she hailed from Baton Rouge, Louisiana—such was my northeastern prejudice. Nevertheless, she enjoyed a touch of redemption for her proper pronunciation of all things French or Cajun. Even a city name such as “Baton Rouge” preserves at least

some of its French intonation with or without the cooperation of the speaker; in Barbara’s mouth it sounded positively exotic. Thus, I found it at least as fortunate as it was appropriate that Barbara pronounced her last name, as she explained at our first meeting, in the proper French fashion (Parr-’oh’). “Thank God,” I thought. “I cannot imagine rooming with a Cajun bird.” Trouble started, however, soon after my initial, ittedly minor, jubilation regarding the pronunciation of the name. The nature of this trouble was, frankly, shocking, for within just a few weeks, Barbara began to refer to my favorite black slinky dress—which she often borrowed with or without my permission (for beyond her Cajun accent, Barbara had a wonderful figure that could easily turn heads)—as a “nigger” dress. “My God!” I responded the first time she did so. “What are you saying?” “You know full well”—“full well” was both a British and a southern (US) expression, rarely used in the original thirteen colonies except by foreigners —“what I mean.” “I do not,” I protested. “Yes, you do,” she said. I advanced the argument. “No, I don’t,” I stated more emphatically. “I haven’t the vaguest idea what you mean.” We left it at that for several weeks, with her calling black objects, such as my slinky dress, “nigger” objects, and me objecting each time. “I am offended,” I said (repeatedly) in response to her constant abrasiveness, “when you call black objects, ‘nigger’ objects.” “I don’t know what you mean,” Barbara said, acting innocent. “You do, too,” I would respond. “I insist,” she would say, “I do not.” “You do, too,” I would parrot back.

After an exchange of mild profanities, I would excuse myself to do my laundry, which I had to do often because of the slinky black dress, which she seemed to like better than anything in her own wardrobe. Finally, the entire business of the racial slurring came to a head. “I only borrow your ‘nigger’ dress because it fits me better than you. I look good in it.” Now I was willing to let the implied insult about my figure go—for ittedly Barbara Parrot of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had a better figure than I did, and in fact better than most Bloomsburg Huskies had, whose very mascot would imply big-boned girls—but I was getting sick of the racial slurs. I was just waiting for her to make an antiminer remark or an anti-Gaelic slur—for here the Welsh and Irish were as if blood brethren. Upon my latest objection to her use of the word “nigger,” she said, “What does it matter to you, anyway? You’re white like me.” I did not think. I did not reason. Nor even did I say, “Do you really think that all white people are racist?” Instead, I simply responded, “No, I’m not. I’m black. Of course it offends me! I am a Negro!” “You’re what?” she said hesitatingly, employing her best southern belle-ese, but clearly shocked nonetheless. “Black.” Then came a pause. “Well, my father is black, so that makes me halfblack.” Now I was thinking about the fact that I am really only half-Welsh. But I said, “black,” while thinking, “Welsh,” which made this half of a half (i.e., one quarter) of a lie. “I am black.” I reiterated. I had never seen anyone so astonished. Barbara Parrot’s face took on an ashen pallor. “You are not black,” she retorted, half-demanding, half-questioning, chuckling uncomfortably. “I am not one hundred percent black, of course. But my father is black—my real father. The person whom you met, well, he is my adopted father. My real father, just before he died (when I was four), placed me in the care of Philadelphia’s

Home for Destitute Colored Children. That man”—and here I just made up a name—“Mauro Nero, my real father, was black, fully black. Besides,” and then I stopped, offering a pretended dramatic pause, “look at my nose,” preying on her bad habit of looking for stereotypical identifying features. “Is that a white man’s nose?” “Oh my God, you are black.” And then, a ceasefire of several weeks came. Classes came and went, fraternity functions came and went, yet never again did my racially prejudiced roommate ever even think of borrowing my black dress without my permission. My black dress was safe, and so were, it seemed, any and all visitors to my room of the Negroid race, as all references to “nigger” this and “nigger” that were utterly dropped from the language of our living quarters. Instead, if ever she wanted to use the dress, she would ask me politely, “Elaine, may I borrow your elegant black gown?” or, “Are you going to wear black tonight? You look so lovely and slim in it,” or “If you are not going to wear it, do you suppose I might borrow it?” Such niceties were now the common course of cameral conversation. Other benefits to this new and improved level of domestic decency accrued. For example, on the racially driven assumption that I liked watermelon, she would, from time to time, bring me one that she had gone out of her way to buy at a local green grocer. “You …” (no doubt meaning, “you people”), she would stammer gingerly, “like watermelon, don’t you?” “Sure we do,” I would respond, leaving a bit of wiggle room, at least, for her to wonder whether I was using the “royal we” or speaking for my race as a whole, or, in my case, as a half. Such was the interpersonal dynamic of the rooming situation throughout the term, during the course of which I eventually almost forgot that I was black. Both Barbara and I learned to live with each other. I was discovering the beauty of the Deep South, while she was, oddly enough, learning that racial differences were less pronounced than she had imagined. “You know,” she said—just a few weeks before the end of the term, an end that would come for me a bit earlier than for the other students, but I shall explain that turn of events momentarily—“you people are okay.”

At this point in our relationship, it seemed to me that there was no malice intended in the addition of “people” to “you.” Rather, what Barb—for now I was calling her by the shortened and more endearing form of her name—meant by “you people,” I innately realized, was all black people at once, the entire race. We blacks were suddenly “okay” with Barb Parrot, who had been raised a ragin’ Cajun, whose grandparents had been racist to the core, whose great-grandparents could have owned, theoretically, my grandparents, but whose parents had sought to change this pattern of destructive thought, even if they could not break from it themselves. This they did by sending their beloved daughter, Barbara, to school in the North, the beautiful Bloomsburg State Teachers College, where she could get a new perspective on the world and even have a roommate like me, a roommate of color with a background vastly different from her own. Barb was designated by her parents to be the first teacher of the family in more ways than one, a beautiful turn of events, far more beautiful than the beautiful Barbara in my beautiful black dress. Here is real beauty, when two human beings learn to see each other for who they really are, with color, creed, accent, and incidentals all falling away, leaving only soul. “You mean to say,” I said, “I got soul. That’s what we ‘people’ ”—I parroted back her use of “people” in a playful, but not at all sarcastic, manner—“say. We say, ‘You got soul.’ And Barb, honey, you got soul.” She began to cry. “I can’t tell you how much rooming with you has meant to me.” “Me, too,” I said. “Barb, you’ve taught me more than I can say.” My learning from Barb would not end here. It would be fourteen years later, almost to the day, when I would see Barbara again. Much had happened in the meantime, the details of which will be fleshed out in the pages to follow. Yet for a moment I will leap forward to that particular, and particularly absurd but entirely authentic, point in time, when I saw Barb Parrot again. It was the fall of 1969, and I was visiting my parents in Kingston, which, as I mentioned above, was only about an hour drive along the Susquehanna River to Bloomsburg. Feeling a twinge of nostalgia—as nostalgia often creeps upon the Welsh—I decided to take a drive along the river with my sister, Lee Ann, in Daddy’s fine large car, a blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, which he had

bought, lightly used, from his wonderful Welsh next-door neighbor George Perkins. My automotive odyssey in the Cutlass Supreme took me that day back to Bloomsburg State Teachers College—for it was still called by that name in 1969. Having parked the car, Lee Ann and I ambled down Lighthouse Street, a street that always had a creepy, even haunting, air to it, past Mitrani Hall, where I recalled that Ned Pawolski, the finest ballet dancer in the history of Bloomsburg State Teachers College, once performed. During this stroll I told Lee Ann a bit about my time on the campus, a few stories I had never shared with her, even though she was my beloved big sister. Just when I began to mention Barbara Parrot, whom should I see? (I realize that this part of my must sound particularly unbelievable; but it did happen.) I saw, in fact, Barbara Parrot, the very Barbara Parrot with whom I had roomed all those years ago, walking around the campus, wearing a beautiful black dress and turning her head this way and that, as if looking for someone. “Elaine, Elaine!” she exclaimed when she saw me. “I knew it would be you!” “Barb?” I said, startled out of nostalgia into a state of stupefaction, as she ran toward me and flung her arms about me, bursting into tears. “I knew it would be you!” “Oh, Barb,” I said, “it is so good to see you. You are as beautiful as ever!”—for she was still very beautiful—“How have you been?” “Oh, Elaine,” then a pause and some tears before she continued, “I just got in this morning. I was in a Greyhound bus all night. The Lord told me,” she said, pausing again before continuing in an excited tone with her Cajun accent in full bloom, “the Lord told me to come back to Bloomsburg because I was to see someone very special, very special.” “I can’t believe it is you!” I said, ignoring her theological explanation and still quite startled by this seemingly chance encounter. She continued, “The Lord”—she used the term in an endearing and welcoming way, not the judgmental way of a televangelist, but the way a gentle Cajun grandmother might—“told me to come back to Bloomsburg, so I got on the first bus out of Baton Rouge, and, well, here I am after two days in the bus.” Now

that she mentioned it, her effervescent splendor was muted somewhat by the matted appearance of her hair. “En route,” which she pronounced properly, in the French Cajun manner, “I realized that it would be you. It just came to me when I was praying on the bus, ‘Who do you intend, Lord, for me to see in Pennsylvania?’ And then it hit me: ‘Who else but the woman who changed my life?’ ” “Changed her life?” I thought to myself. “How could I have had any influence upon her life, when I roomed with her for only three quarters of a semester?” “How did I change your life?” I queried, after I had introduced her to my sister and we had found three seats in a nearby coffee shop, where we ordered three large black coffees. “You know,” she said earnestly, “by being who you are.” “You’re sweet,” I said. “I told you she was sweet, Lee Ann,” I said to my sister in such a way as to imply that I had spoken to Lee Ann before about Barbara. Truth be told, however, I had not thought of Barbara Parrot or my little black dress for the dozen or so years that had ed since I had last seen her. “Too sweet,” Lee Ann played along sarcastically before adding, “Yes, of course. Barb, is it? Do tell how Elaine changed your life; I am so curious.” “Well, you know, it is because she’s”—and then she paused momentarily as she turned her head toward me—“you’re black.” I choked suddenly on a slurp of my coffee, burning my tongue but at least giving me enough time to gather my thoughts to formulate a proper reply. I quickly went to that part of my mind marked “Dubious (i.e., Welsh) Actions” and, entering the tiny room, found a filing cabinet marked “Lies.” Opening the file drawer marked “Sizable,” I then pulled out the folder marked “Whoppers,” in which I noticed a particular memorandum marked in all capitals: MULATTO MENDACITY. I had been black—or, more properly, half-black—for almost fourteen years, and I had curiously forgotten it. “Oh, that,” I responded, as if it were merely a typical topic of my conversation. “Yes, well …” I broke off, hoping to change the subject. “How have you been?”

Lee Ann, who was used to my antics, looked thoroughly amused, more amused at the prospect of my extricating myself from this dilemma than confused about how I could possibly have gotten myself into it in the first place. “Rooming with a black woman changed my life,” Barb reiterated. “Well,” I said, “that’s nice, special really.” “Black?” Lee Ann queried, enjoying how uncomfortable I undoubtedly appeared. “Yes, black, of course,” Barb continued. “She’s black on her father’s side, you know. Or was it your mother? And she’s not ashamed of it, are you Elaine?” “Blanche is black?” Lee Ann quipped, noting the irony. “No, of course not,” I retorted. “Harry?” Lee Ann could not resist exhausting all possibilities. “I learned from Elaine,” Barb forged ahead, “that we are all the same, red and yellow, black and white.” Lee Ann gave me a look that showed she was engrossed in the way this particular piece of mendacity was playing itself out. “Yes, her father—you know, her real father—was black,” Barb added. “She was adopted from an orphanage for colored children, was it in Philadelphia? Her new parents never thought of black people as bad or less than themselves.” Then, realizing that these same parents must also be Lee Ann’s parents, she added, “Your parents must have been very special for that day and time.” “Oh, they’re special all right,” Lee Ann said, lathering her tone with ample sarcastic spit. “Oh, yes,” I said, for I sensed this conversation was drifting deeper and deeper into the fictional world I had constructed some fourteen years previously. “Our parents are special.” And then for some reason I suddenly felt compelled to tell the truth. I think that was because she had insisted that “the Lord” had motivated her to return to campus. I felt now that I owed it to “the Lord” to come clean.

“Barb,” I said with a serious tone, seizing a lull in the conversation for the proper dénouement, “I am not black.” “I know,” she said warmly, even sweetly, in a grandmotherly singsong voice. “You’re only half-black; you favor your mamma.” “No, Barb,” I insisted. “I am not black at all.” “What?” She was startled. “Barb, look at me. I am white; my eyes are greenish-brown.” “But your father … the orphanage …” “All lies, Barb.” An uncomfortable pause followed. “But I told everyone that I had a black roommate in college. That is what led me to the Lord. I had to face the sin that had driven me to hate people just because of their color of skin or their religion or their … their background,” she stammered. “But God showed me that if he can love everyone, I needed to, too. And it all started with you, Elaine. It all started with you. It all started with … a lie?” Suddenly, the Lord, the same Lord who had motivated her to travel across the country on a bus to see someone of importance to her life, gave me—though at that time, of course, I knew it not—a measure of wisdom. In addition to that unmerited gift came, in a rush, a level of comion that I had heard Reverend Griffith speak about when I was a little girl in the Gaylord Avenue Welsh Calvinistic Presbyterian Church of Plymouth, Pennsylvania. “It was not a lie, Barb,” I said, “not exactly. It was a story, the way Adam and Eve is a story, but not a lie.” (Albeit, my “story” was a bit more like a lie than a story.) “The story was intended to teach you something that could not be taught without a story. You see,” I waxed eloquent, “stories tell us something mere memories, words, and even sentences can’t on their own.” “You just pretended to be black,” she said, “the way I pretended that your little black dress was mine when I wore it to the dances at Phi Sigma Sigma, you ?”

“Exactly,” I said. “But when the night came to an end, you took off the dress and put it away. And that’s what I’m doing now. It’s time for me to take off my ‘blackness,’ which isn’t real, and tell you the truth. I am not black. Look at me. I’m white like you.” And then we all stared into our coffee cups for a few seconds. “You know, it doesn’t matter,” Barb said (at least I think it was Barb, for it could have been any one of the three of us), “what color you are.” As Barb walked me and Lee Ann back to the car, we agreed to keep in touch, and we exchanged addresses. For the next few years we sent each other Christmas cards, but then Barb and I fell out of touch for about thirty years, when I came across her Baton Rouge address in my diary from 1969. I thought to myself, “I think I will send her a Christmas card again after all these years.” By now I lived with my son, who had a family of his own, a large family, with three adopted children who are African—not African American, but actually African. Our collective family Christmas card was, that year, one of those group photo cards with a simple “Seasons Greetings” and a wreath superimposed beneath a family photo. How I would have enjoyed seeing Barb get that card that Christmas, if she did get it, if somehow that old address did still work. She might just have turned to her husband and said, “You see, I told you she was black.” In any case, the card was never returned to sender.

This colorful fabrication, with its eventual happy result, was neither the defining event of my time at Bloomsburg State Teachers College nor the furthest depth to which my religious ascendancy led. I soon established a close connection with a new social group, each member of which was associated, in some way or other, with the college newspaper, the Maroon and Gold, not exactly a catchy title, which, as a result, has been changed at least twice in the ensuing years. Insofar as my concomitant moralistic impulse was in full bloom, I was truly happy to be associating with a pack of young intellectuals who viewed journalism not as a duty to inform one’s fellow human beings about important societal events but as a crusade to root out every trace of evil from humanity. We aimed to completely pulverize and to utterly annihilate said evil, even if that meant employing legalese at inopportune moments or splitting an infinitive or two for the cause. Of course we never stopped to ask fundamental questions such as how we knew what we knew or, even more fundamentally, how we knew what was right; nor did we ask, even, what was right or what right was. Those were simply givens, items neither thought about nor even discussed over coffee. Rather, we simply talked about how we could wield our pens like swords and write away (and, ultimately, write off) the problems of the world through daring investigative reporting. Our chance came when a rumor ran rampant about the selling of grades by a certain somewhat unpopular professor. This professor was so hard that one could believe that he could sell grades for a very high cost. That educator, Dr. Evan Davies, used to say, time and again, “ ‘A’ is for God, ‘B’ is for Davies and anybody who thinks he’s as good as Davies, while ‘C’ is all the hoi polloi can hope for.” To break this story, one of us had to sign up for his ridiculously hard English class. Of course, that someone was me, or, as Dr. Davies would have corrected me, “that someone was I.” If I had had even a slightly open mind, Dr. Davies’s English poetry class might have utterly changed my life for the better. Though not every word that every English bard ever wrote is morally or spiritually fortifying, the vast majority of English poetry, I now think, or at least a healthy swathe of it, can give the serious reader, if not a spiritual pulse, at least spiritual pause. But I was too religious for those inspired commanders of verse, those genuine couplers of couplets and sayers of sooth. I was not on a religious crusade of discovery but on a moral one,

seeking not so much the answer to whether or not the professor did the deed but merely how it might have been possible for Dr. Davies to have sold grades. To reveal this, I first tried to complain about the pedestrian grade of C that I had received on my midterm. I did so by going to Dr. Davies’s office alone late one afternoon. “Professor, we know that you are simply a divine teacher, for no one could do the things that you do unless he were truly inspired.” After a pause, he replied, “Unless a student is born with an entirely fresh attitude toward reading these texts, he, or in your case, she, will never grasp their deeper meaning. You should not be surprised that I say that as a reader you need to be born from above, as it were, to grasp the true meaning of these texts. If I am, as you say, a divine teacher, then you must be a divinely inspired reader.” Ignoring his penchant for platitudes, I got right to business. “What does one have to do,” I queried, “to,” I paused and cleared my throat, “merit a better grade? Can one do something to raise one’s grade?” Dr. Davies replied, with a good Welsh accent, “Annwyl ferch melys [“Dear sweet girl”—for I knew the expression], you just need to let the poet’s voice speak. Let the words reverberate in your head and enrich your soul. The spirit of poetry, like wind, blows where it pleases, and you must stand in its breeze.” “How much does a college professor make?” I asked, changing the subject with the rapidity of movement of a Homeric bard, not reflecting a desire to learn from Dr. Davies’s gentle soul but merely getting on with the business for which I had come. “Yn wir, yn wir, pshaw,” he said. “Yr wyf yn grwgnach pan fyddaf yn siarad a personau o America.” These were words I was not entirely familiar with, but I understood some grief in his voice for having to put up with American mores. I did not bother to try to put this Welsh phrase in the notebook in which I had been scribbling as Dr. Davies spoke. “You know, it isn’t a lot of money but it is a wonderful life, a wonderful thing to be able to share with one’s students the knowledge of the ages that is of greater worth than gold, and of greater worth than I, your teacher.” I bore with me the burden of disappointment as I went back out into the dark of

the night and descended the rolling hills of Bloomsburg State Teachers College to the press office located at the lowest part of the campus. Only one of my fellow reporters was there, Sarah Jacobson, whose strongest desire was to run an exciting storyline such as “English Professor Caught in Grades for Sale Plot.” I suppose we all wanted this, and it was not hard for me, with her urging, to carve up the very words Dr. Davies said to me, at least those spoken in English: “No, professors don’t make a great deal of money,” and “some things are of greater worth than gold”—and, simply by dropping the word “grade” between these ideas and not putting it in quotes, we could easily write what we thought would be the second-best thing to the story we wanted to write. Thus, instead of something like “Professor Caught in Grade Conspiracy,” we would at least be able to make an exposé: “Professor Suggests ‘Grades for Gold.’ ” Yes, we blindly reasoned, this would work, because we were not saying that he actually sold grades—just that what he said could be interpreted to mean he might be willing to make a deal. This all made so much sense at the time that Sarah Jacobson and I stayed up late concocting a deception that was of epic, even biblical, proportions. We were so proud of the subtlety of our language, and I was so morally titillated that I actually forgot to say an “Our Father” before bed that night. When this potential scandal came before the dean, Dr. Davies was offered the same deal that I had been offered at Wilkes: “You can leave quietly at the end of the term, or you can make an appeal, but then face possible formal dismissal.” I knew nothing of this at first, as it was now getting to be a bit late in the semester. And, before the final exam period should have all too suddenly came upon us, I was scurrying to finish one or two short papers that, thanks to Dr. Davies, I was now writing more thoughtfully than those I had composed at Wilkes. Sarah Jacobson, however, studied even less than I, instead devoting herself, now a few weeks before the end of the term, to her work for the Maroon and Gold. That work she carried out far above and beyond the line of duty. Thus, at what would perhaps be the climax of her investigative reporting, she uncovered the fate of the good Dr. Davies. Sarah happened to be enjoying the rare opportunity of dating Jaš (pronounced “Yash”) Laufermund, the smug, spoiled, and loquacious son of the thoroughly unlikable Dean Wallace Laufermund, who had given his son the pretentious name of Jaš in anticipation of some of the similarly pretentious names that one finds all too easily nowadays. Dean Laufermund had been the dean of Bloomsburg State Teachers

College for two years, and I am certain that no one liked him except, I suppose, the college’s president. As a sophomore, Jaš Laufermund was already a big man on campus. He dressed the part perfectly, for he would frequently wear a dark, almost-mauve tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. His pants were matching almost-mauve and were straight legged, meeting his black-and-white riding shoes somewhere near his midankles. (Actually, he would correct anyone who referred to them as riding shoes, consistently maintaining that they were more properly golfing shoes. He was probably right, but we had no way of being sure, as at Bloomsburg State Teachers College few of us had ever actually played golf.) Not infrequently, he could be seen smoking a pipe, and, when he decided to run for sophomore-class president, his victory seemed to all a virtual fait accompli. Other than laziness, alcohol, tobacco, ostentation, and light gambling, Jaš Laufermund had but one vice: women. I was not his type of girl, nor would I have so sullied my character—as debased as it was in other ways, I now confess —to indulge his ion. But Sarah Jacobson did not have such scruples. Rather, a student of political philosophy, she viewed her subordination of moral values to a greater good to be a worthwhile price for inside information. The author of The Prince, she told me, was her teacher; apparently, Naso was, as well. I had not read much Machiavelli, but Ovid’s steamy poetry was not unfamiliar to me, as my Latin-teaching sister had spoken of it a time or two over tea. Sarah skipped teatime with Jaš and went straight for dinner, so to speak, between courses of intercourse engaging in pillow talk, which activity showed precisely to what extent his mouth could run. It seems that other than his father’s own generally shameful incompetence, the scandal attached to poor Dr. Davies’s name had been the height of disgrace for Dean Laufermund’s istration. And Dean Laufermund let his mouth run, too, at Sunday dinner that week. Sarah managed to procure the saucy details from her pro tempore boyfriend, Jaš. Information flowed back to the dean, too, through the same conduit of the couples’ unsavory affection. Though she clearly had the idea that both the information and the details of her sleazy escapades with Jaš would delight me, she was rather surprised to see a look of horror on my face generated both by her obedience to Machiavelli and by her relationship with the unlovable son of an unlovable father. That father was unlikeable, as well, which became starkly apparent when, before

in his capacity as dean he could raise the phone to call me in for a meeting, I came of my own accord to confess what I had done. On that uncomfortable occasion, it was painfully obvious to me that he was far more concerned with how I had gathered the information about Dr. Davies’s resignation than the importance of my testimony, which was, unfortunately, now somewhat belated. The dean found my withholding of how I got my information especially objectionable, though what was more objectionable was the pillow talk of his all-too-loquacious son or the lovemaking itself, none of which I would divulge. My recalcitrant posture outraged him. How dare I withhold information from Dean Laufermund! He was the dean, and he demanded to know all. I refused to turn Sarah in, even though it would have delighted me to see the dean’s visage when I told him it was his son—the pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing, golf-playing (or perhaps pony-riding) sophomore-class president—who had let his mouth run. But I held my tongue, simply confessing to concocting, on my own, the whole story about Dr. Davies. Dean Laufermund showed, however, no comion for me or for Dr. Davies. He alleged that I had invented the whole story and said that it was too late to help Dr. Davies, for Dr. Davies had already accepted a position elsewhere. In any case, he had been exonerated from guilt because he agreed to resign his position; the scandal was a dead issue. My resurrecting it would only cause Dr. Davies further discomfiture. Further, he was outraged that I would come to him now so late in the term, just two weeks before final exams, and, finally, why had I refused to divulge any of the names of those who had told me of the event? In response to my abiding impertinence in the face of his implied threats, coming to an ime he banged his hand on the desk and demanded that I either withdraw from Bloomsburg State Teachers College or deal with the proceedings that he would launch against me. Those proceedings, he assured me, would not be pretty, and would certainly involve my parents. The charges would, no doubt, impugn the family reputation (such as it was, I thought smugly, as I come from only a coal-mining family). “Furthermore, young lady,” he railed, “there will be a permanent mark on your record!” Perhaps these were the very words he had used to persuade Dr. Davies to “accept a position elsewhere.” This time I did not need to seek the advice of my cousin Blythe. I simply quit on the spot. My religious zeal and the misplaced morality that had been driving all my choices had abated sufficiently to allow me to see clearly my precarious position. The dean said I could withdraw ing, which would allow me to

apply to college again, should I foolishly “deign” (his word) to do so, as in his opinion I did not belong in college. I took the deal, but there remained a thorny problem of what to tell my parents. This was, after all, the second time something of the sort had happened to me, and actually the second time in only a very few months. The first shocking event had been motivated by my desire to win the acceptance of my peers. The second had been born out of my newfound religious zeal, a desire for religion without God. The verses of Paul come to mind: “I was a Hebrew of Hebrews, as far as legalistic righteousness, flawless, as for keeping the law, unrivaled.” Little did I know then that within a few years I would in fact become a Hebrew, or, more properly, a Jew. But first I had to travel mentally and philosophically further east.

5 Marco Polo

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat. —Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West”

M y marriage, as I already mentioned, ended in disaster; I now confess that much of the blame for that disaster lay with me. I married mostly out of jealousy of my sister and to have something to do, whereby I could engender in my parents a fresh sense of pride in their younger daughter, pride that had been sorely eroded by my collegiate escapades and academic inactivity. The marriage, therefore, killed two birds with one stone, but it had been, indeed, a perilous stone to cast. After I got married, I was working as a waitress in Wilkes-Barre in a small lunch restaurant—really more like a tearoom—called the Marco Polo. It was a delightful place, serving mostly savory sandwiches, tea, and strong coffee. It opened every day at 10:00 a.m., closing by 3:00 p.m., though three evenings a week the manager, Billy Dierks, the oldest son of my parents’ rose-tending neighbors, would reopen the shop at 7:00 p.m. for poetry readings that ran until midnight. My parents were none too keen on the evening hours; they tolerated them because Billy gave me an otherwise excellent schedule and Sundays free. I would arrive at work at 9:00 a.m. to begin the preparation of the always freshly made sandwiches, a task that I enjoyed. Indeed, all my life I particularly enjoyed making sandwiches. I was an ordinary cook but an exceptional sandwich and soup maker, twin skills, or rather arts, that I first perfected at the Marco Polo. My favorite sandwich, both to make and to eat, was most definitely watercress, an uncommon herb, and one that is nowadays all too rarely found in savory sandwich shops. The Marco Polo’s watercress sandwich consisted first of an ice-

cold—this is important—thickly sliced piece of fresh, even doughy, extremely dark rye. If the bread is warm or too recently baked, a watercress sandwich will be a failure. Then comes, of course, well-washed watercress with all the plucked ends neatly trimmed; then a smattering of salt (one should be careful not to add too much salt); and, of course, last but not least, the quintessential Philadelphiabrand cream cheese. This is the very best watercress sandwich one can ever hope to enjoy. Some add onions, but they do so to the sandwich’s detriment and their own romantic peril, for the combination of watercress and onions can make for the worst sort of halitosis imaginable. The occasion of my meeting Sheila was my very first poetry reading, which meant all the fresh morning sandwiches were gone; I had to come late in the afternoon, before the evening poetry gig (that is to say, at 5:00 p.m.), to refresh the supply of sandwiches for the evening gathering. Sheila, who had recently taken on the as-yet-unpaid position of the Marco Polo’s events coordinator, showed up about the same time I did. As I made the sandwiches, she told me her plan for the evening. The performance would consist of a responsive reading, first in Chinese and then in English, of the poetry of Tu Fu (also known as Du Fu) and Li Bai (also known as Li Po). Tu Fu and Li Bai were contemporary poets who lived in the sixth century AD, an epoch that in many ways represents the pinnacle of Chinese poetic accomplishment. Tu Fu’s poetry offers vignettes of the everyday life of his age, while Li Bai’s is sometimes characterized by martial or amatory themes. Both poets, particularly Tu Fu, were saturated with Chinese sympotic tradition. One small sample, drawn from the reading in question, was a poem entitled “Winding River” by Tu Fu, which was beautifully performed in Chinese that evening by Irene Liverani, a student of Chinese literature at Wilkes College. I cite Irene Liverani’s translation of that poem:

Day by day, I come home from court and sell some of my springtime clothing. And, day by day, I go back to the park by the river where I drink myself into oblivion.

I have to go there to pay the common debt of wine, common to all men, a debt rare for a man of seventy years. And now I see that the butterflies plunge deep amidst the flowers, deep, deep, As dragonflies flit leisurely through drops of water and, as each generation has noted, their motion never ceases. Yet you and I have so little time that we should never separate. Instead let us know each other for many a year, One the other and the other the one.

Tu Fu’s beautiful poems and those of Li Bai, as well, first cultivated in me a deep and abiding appreciation of and affection for Chinese culture. When Sheila, who was a freshman at Wilkes at the time, told me of her and Irene’s decision to take a year off from school and go to China, were it not for my Welsh phobia about travel and my desire to win back my parents’ respect (which, as I said earlier, I attempted to do by marrying), I might actually have considered tagging along with them. It was, however, a trip that neither Sheila nor Irene would ever make; chiefly for financial reasons, they both dropped out of Wilkes after a year, and Sheila took over my duties, in addition to her own, at the Marco Polo, for she’d become well acquainted with Billy Dierks, who, as I mentioned above, was the restaurant’s manager. The interruption of my marriage and my all-too-sudden pregnancy suspended my friendship with Sheila and Irene, who had both remained a part of the poetic intelligentsia, though neither would ultimately graduate from Wilkes. Both Sheila and Irene took short academic hiatuses before transferring to King’s College, the newly founded crosstown rival to Wilkes. A Catholic school, King’s started out as an academic alternative but over time has in many ways become the better of the two schools in the Wyoming Valley. I say as much unbiasedly, as I am in fact a Wilkes alumna (in the pages to come I will explain how that

unlikely turn of events came to ). The next time I saw Sheila, about two years and a span later, I was pregnant. I had already separated from my husband, though we would get back together briefly just before the birth of my son, my only child. Sheila looked generally concerned, as she seemed to notice my bump immediately. “Are you, you know, pregnant?” “Yes,” I replied, “but let’s not talk about that now. Let’s talk about poetry, and Chinese literature, and art, and your trip to China.” “How many months along are you?” she asked, ignoring my plea to go back in time. “Six or seven,” I said discontentedly. “I don’t know. When are you planning to go to China?” “What do you mean you don’t know?” “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t want to think about it. We split up, you know. Will you see the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an? Let’s read something, shall we?” “What will you do with it?” “With what?” I retorted. There followed a slight pause. “Do you mean the baby?” “Of course I mean the baby,” Sheila replied. “What will you do with it?” “I haven’t thought much about it,” I said. “We just split up a month ago, and I’ve been busy moving back in with my parents. You know how that goes.” Sheila did know how that went, for she had lived with her doting, kosher-notjust-for-over, ergo almost Orthodox, Jewish parents during her first two years at Wilkes. After two years she tried to get an apartment with Irene, but her nagging—only gently nagging, in Sheila’s case, as her parents were kind folk— parents would not let her stay with Irene, even though she had managed to move in for a month. (Nagging, I learned, was an effective tool, and even an art form. My sister, Lee Ann, wielded it to raise her family, and I would employ it, too, in

the raising of my own son.) Sheila convinced Billy Dierks to hire me back at the Marco Polo. After all, my watercress sandwiches were arguably the best in the city, and without doubt my cucumber sandwich was a true rival to the watercress. (The procedure for making a good cucumber sandwich is not difficult: peel purposely imperfectly the requisite number of cucumbers, slicing them thicker than everyone else does, but not so thick as to be difficult to eat. Add an appropriate amount of thinly sliced onions [but be cautious here], a tasteful portion of finely sliced fresh parsley, a pinch of dill, and a touch of sugar in mayonnaise with—and this is the secret—a half teaspoon of white wine [vinegar may be substituted]. Serve on freshly baked, oversized, Italian-style bread, in which bread recipe there should be plenty of eggs.) I also had a knack for knowing precisely what kind of cheese should serve as a side for these particular sandwiches (of course, for the watercress it would be the strong Hên Sîr; for the cucumber, Havarti with dill, to complement the pinch of dill in the sandwich), a skill I had learned as my mother served many a cheese on the family cheese plate when she had company. This skill—or was it a gift?— provided Billy Dierks with yet another incentive to hire me back.

Throughout my life, memories of cheese would turn up in the oddest places, and sometimes befuddle me. One example had to do with some confusion I had about a myna bird and the only woman I ever knew who consistently smelled of cheese. I now jump forward in time, some seventeen years from my pregnancy, to be precise. It was always quite embarrassing for my, by then, sixteen-year-old son when I came to his basketball games, not because he was ashamed of me, but because I would root for him, a mere scrub, very aggressively, which only called attention to the fact that, for all his love of the game, my son was not a very skilled player. Oh, he was good enough to make the basketball team, to participate in practices, and, in a scrimmage, to challenge, with his long monkeylike arms, the starting guards, Paul Russ or John Beidler. But when it came to game time, it was pretty much all Paul Russ and John Beidler, with only backup minutes, and a slender number of them at that, going to my son. Yet, in my boundless maternal pride, I would go to the games to root, and to do so vociferously. The problem with my rooting lay in the fact that I rooted far too much for my bench-warming son, not with the decorum expected of the mother or father of a substitute player, but with the exuberance of a teenage girl at her sweet-sixteen party. “Yay!” “Yippee!” “Hooray!” and occasionally even “Hip! Hip! Hooray!” (with not one single person responding to or even acknowledging my hips or hoorays) were a few of my choice rooting words. What was a mother to do? Did my son expect me to buy into the other parents’ conspiracy of silence? Did he expect a sophisticated “Bravissimo,” as if I were at La Fenice in Venice applauding a tenor’s best aria? I was at a loss (in more ways than one, as many of these games did turn out to be losses). After each game it occurred to me that perhaps it was not so much a matter of rooting for my son that vexed him as it was the timing of the rooting. I would root immediately when he strode onto the court, before he had a chance to the ball to the tall and prolific John Dyer, or actually before he could do anything at all. One of my friends told me to take a clue from Vonnie Ort, the sole cheerleader willing to root for the nonathletic-looking sharpshooter who was my son. Vonnie led a cheer for him, doing so in fact by name, “Yay Homer, Yay Jakes, Yay, Yay, Homer Jakes!” Still, Vonnie cheered only when he did something significant, which in high school basketball usually means he scored. Since John Dyer scored most of the points, Vonnie normally rooted for that fine player; but sometimes my son scored, and, on those rare occasions, she would root for him

at just the proper time, which kept the incongruity to a minimum. This concept (viz., timing my bouts of rooting) was one that I never successfully grasped. The most egregious example of my failure to grasp this skill came when my son completed his master’s degree in literature at the University of Vermont. There remains some question in my mind as to whether I was more proud or jealous of him achieving that master’s. My jealousy sprang from the fact that I had been forced, as I reconstructed my own history, to study education. What a world men had, I thought, what a better world. Women were consigned, even relegated, to the drudgery of education courses at state teachers’ colleges (though ittedly I had graduated from Wilkes), while men could study art, literature, history, and philosophy. These were the things on my mind, though I never stopped to think about how faulty my self-pitying logic was, since I had had the opportunity to study all of these—indeed, I had studied them all—in college, but I had held back, somehow, when I had a great teacher like Dr. Davies, from fully engaging the material before me. It would only be years later—at my future abode, a country house named “The Lizzie Ann”—that I would reread those books and take them to heart for the first time; it was then, after I retired from teaching, too, that, for the first time, I really read sacred writ, the good book of which Reverend Griffith had so often spoken so lovingly. But I return to my ill-timed rooting at my son’s graduation in 1983. It was a long drive to Vermont from Pennsylvania, but I nevertheless managed to arrive on time. The graduation proper was less than spectacular. The university had decided to have a separate graduation for the master’s degree students, which had the advantage of being very short. There was no hokey speech from some television personality like Phil Donahue about these master’s graduates shaping the future. Thank God, for it was not very likely that someone with a master’s degree from the University of Vermont was going to go out and change the world overnight, and pretending that this would be likely would have been, to one and all in the audience, pure horse manure (or at least I thought so). The gymnasium in which the brief ceremony took place was shadowy, dingy, dusty, and echoey. The uncomfortable bleachers on which we sat were at some remove from the stage. The public address system only made the echo worse. My normal practice in those days—during which period I rarely set foot in a church or synagogue, for I had stopped practicing religion in about 1972 and would not begin again until the late 1980s—was, when attending a wedding or funeral or the like, to fidget; I would dig through my purse, excavating the layers

of the past several weeks at the bottom of the handbag, seeking, I suppose, an escape from the premises through some magical hole that I might find. It did not matter to me that it severely annoyed those sitting within a five- or ten-foot radius. As if to assuage their obvious irritation, I would, once I came upon a stray roll of Life Savers, offer them one. “Mint?” or “Candy?” I would whisper, depending on the type of Life Savers roll I had discovered. Invariably, because by then they had been thoroughly provoked, they would decline. This graduation was no different, even though I was not in a house of God; I was in a house of graduating or, really, a house of sport, for it was an old gymnasium. The more I dug in my purse, the closer the reader of the list of graduates came to my son’s name; yet I was preoccupied with my unceasing quest for mints. Increasingly, the people around me kept sliding away as if I smelled like old Welsh cheese. Coincidentally, I did find a piece of cheese in a napkin in the bottom of my purse, but I don’t think that was why they were displacing themselves from my vicinity. I hardly paid attention to the graduates, who one by one were paraded across the stage. And then I heard it—or I thought I heard it—“Jakes.” My son, I thought, my son had gotten his master’s! So I took the air horn out of my purse—that is, the air horn I had smuggled in, the only air horn that any of the dignified parents of the master’s graduates had smuggled into the old dusky and cavernous gymnasium —and released its screeching whistle. But it was, I realized after my daughter-inlaw smote me with a doubly disapproving look, not my son for whom I had loosed the whistle’s sound, but Jake Rosenthal, whose parents were very surprised that someone two rows above them had released an air horn at the proclamation of their son’s name. They quickly turned their heads in my direction. Seeing me with the air horn still in my hand, they smiled charmingly. Of course, they assumed that I knew Jake, perhaps through a friendship with my son. I grinned, a bit uncomfortably. It was not much longer until my son’s name was called, for they had the master’s candidates divided up by discipline (e.g., all the art students, all the journalism students, all the literature students, etc.) rather than simply alphabetically. When my son’s name was announced, all I could do was applaud, with my daughter-in-law’s help, as vigorously as I could, since my air horn had been deployed in honor of Jake Rosenthal, journalism graduate, instead of my own son in literature. The Rosenthals also applauded vigorously, as if to repay the favor.

After the ceremony, the Rosenthals approached me and my daughter-in-law. Mrs. Rosenthal spoke first: “Hello, dear”—for she recognized my daughter-inlaw—“how kind it was of you two to root for our son like that.” She then directed her remarks specifically to me. “I suppose you know what a struggle it was for him to complete this master’s degree. It took him a full four years to write his MA thesis. Your son was a great help to him!” “He was? Oh, yes, yes, I knew that. He was,” I responded, trying not to sound as if I were bluffing. “Yes,” Mr. Rosenthal piped up. “The advice your son gave my son, well it worked out just fine. We appreciate you and your sister (was it Cookie?) for the advice and his repeated onitions.” Whatever was he talking about? I just smiled and nodded and added awkwardly, “Glad to have been of service, I mean, I’m glad I, or my sister, that is, could help in some way.” “Oh, it was a big way, a really big way.” The sole Cookie I could think of at the time was a woman from New Hope who owned a huge black poodle named Thom and who used to come over to the apartment, when I lived downtown at 14 West Bridge Street, and sit on the porch. That Cookie, Cookie McMurphy, was the only person I ever knew previously who was both dignified and undignified at once. She was the epitome of grace when she walked her nimble and very lovely black poodle (known as a “standard”), Thom (pronounced simply “Tom”), from her apartment near Ye Olde Cheese Shoppe, where one could buy spuriously “homemade” peanut butter, which the proprietor insisted had been made by a little old lady in Solebury. But—my son told me (for he worked in Ye Olde Cheese Shoppe part time when he was fifteen)—that of the peanut butter was entirely spurious, for the “shoppe” keeper actually took the gooey condiment from large, industrial-sized cans of organic peanut butter and slopped it into plastic containers to which he affixed, quite disingenuously, a label alleging its “homemade” status. Such was the depth to which that quite affable but mendacious proprietor was willing to go to sell peanut butter in New Hope, Pennsylvania’s one and only Ye Olde Cheese Shoppe. That dairy-dealing peddler of pretentious peanut butter was located near the

Ferry Street Bridge in one of the loveliest areas of New Hope, with a view that cascaded upon Pam Mimford’s Hacienda, as it was called in those days. (There was, I suppose, the presumption that everyone would recognize the name of “Pam Mimford” and understand immediately that this inn was of the highest quality. Though nobody did, the name “Pam Mimford’s Hacienda” nevertheless offered, in one nominal fell swoop, a stately tone that gave the hotel/restaurant an aura of authenticity befitting one of New Hope’s finest dining spots.) Cookie McMurphy’s apartment was on Ferry Street, directly over Ye Olde Cheese Shoppe, and for this reason both she and Thom McMurphy (for she often used his full name) always smelled of cheese. Much depended on the type of cheese that had been most in demand that day—Camembert, Havarti, Swiss, Gouda, or, of course, the noticeably noxious Limburger were most popular. Cookie and Thom were particularly pungent on the days during which there had been a run on Limburger. When such a run took place, for all Cookie’s elegance and Thom’s dignity, they could not be elegant or dignified in the fullest sense of those words. But they were always noticed. This was not, however, the Cookie of whom Mr. Rosenthal was speaking; rather, he meant my myna bird of several years earlier, the bird who had provided an unlikely dissertative paradigm for my son when, as a three-year-old, he was learning to form sentences. Now in graduate school, my son adapted Cookie’s “You bet your ass, arr, your ass, arr!” to mesh with the advice of his thesis adviser, Professor Z. Padrino Augustini, whose work in literary studies was legendary at Vermont. Dr. Augustini, a true Renaissance man who had written an endless thesis at Princeton on the Greek word telos, was much beloved by his students, particularly graduate students. They, jumbling his initials, called him “Dr. A to Z,” in part because he had such broad interests, ranging from medieval manuscripts of Ovidian love poetry and ancient Greek tragedy to his ion for (and capacity to play) baroque harpsichord. Strikingly, too, his bathroom was equipped with a bidet. Yet for all his culture, Dr. Augustini—of Italian descent, but raised in Texas, though sporting an essentially New England accent, which he must have picked up as an assistant professor at Vermont—was nevertheless certainly Texan when it came to practical advice and reasoning. This advice he shared on more than one occasion with my son, proffering it in the form of a homemade gnomic dictum: “One writes one’s thesis with one’s posterior”—most Texans would have used another word—“not with one’s head.” Coincidentally, that is also the way one uses a bidet.

Cookie was the means by which my son was able to help his struggling fellow student, Jake, whom he had met in the University of Vermont’s Bailey/Howe Library while tracking down an all-too-often-checked-out copy of Columella’s treatise on farming (De re rustica, on which another professor at Vermont, a certain Dr. Rodgers, had done serious research), a poem my son read whenever he felt nostalgic about his farming days in Virginia (I shall speak of that experience in a later chapter). Accordingly, when the less-than-motivated thesis writer Jake Rosenthal happened to bump into my son in Bailey/Howe’s reference area, they immediately struck up a conversation about Columella, graduate school, and, ultimately, the woes of writing a thesis. Indeed, Jake might never have finished if my son had not taken Dr. A’s advice and filtered it through Cookie—the myna bird, who was my son’s first teacher of rhetoric—to produce the following bon mot, pronounced, of course, with a myna accent and repeated twice, as I have it here:

Arr, thesis, arr, you write it with your ass, write it with your ass, arr!

This catchy jingle my son would bark out at Jake Rosenthal on every occasion he saw him, mostly at the tables in the reference area of the Bailey/Howe Library. Now it is impossible to imitate a myna bird quietly, or, at least, very quietly, so each time my son would say this, which occurred virtually every evening when the two master’s candidates were sitting down at the reference tables, the night librarian would invariably “Shush!” my son and his comrade vigorously. Nevertheless, being a bit rebellious like his mother, he did this each night with such regularity (circa seven o’clock) that by April, near the thesis deadline, the reference librarian actually anticipated his unlibrary-like comportment and issued a loud librarian-like “Shush!” in advance of his avian onition. Thus, my son wrote the onition on a slip of paper and ed it to Jake with a grin, and then went back to his work on epic poetry, a pursuit no one really knows why he undertook, but there you have it. Jake treasured that half sheet of paper, repeatedly reciting its recommended course of inaction, even taping the paper to the front of his thesis notebook. And,

eventually, when in triumph he had completed his thesis at long last, he sent the bescribbled paper to his parents in Albany, New York, announcing to them his victory and crediting my son and his aunt Cookie. My son did not tell Jake that Cookie was a bird, but feigned a relation to the bird as if she were a full warmblooded woman. He never explained to Jake why his aunt Cookie talked like a bird, and, curiously (or perhaps discreetly), Jake never asked. And, now, en route to lunch with Jake and his Rosenthal parents, I had to keep up this pretense, the details of which fabrication kept coming to me only in fits and starts. If I was going to have to play this game all through lunch, I was going to get the food I craved and sought to eat whenever I had the chance to travel out of New Hope to a more culinarily complete cultural center. Specifically, I wanted Indian food, for neither New Hope nor contiguous Solebury had an Indian restaurant. Surely, Burlington, Vermont, would have a lovely Indian place. If so, it would likely be on Church Street, that small cultural mecca’s main esplanade, a street cordoned off from vehicular traffic to provide a protected pedestrian promenade. “Is there an Indian restaurant nearby?” I asked someone who appeared to me likely to be a Vermont native because, though it was a warm day in May, he was sporting an untied Russian-style ushanka cap, its furry flaps flopping freely from the sides over each ear. He seemed a bit disorganized but by no means untrustworthy. “Oh ya,” he said with an almost Canadian drawl, “over yonder.” “Yonder,” I thought to myself as I led our hungry postgraduation party in the direction that the man had pointed, toward a restaurant called Chief Yum Yum. “One does not hear the word ‘yonder’ used every day,” I muttered, trying to make myself look both exotic and worldly before my captive audience of Rosenthals and hoping also to divert the conversation in my direction, lest I accidentally reveal the depths to which my well-intentioned but far too brash son had descended in cooking up an Aunt Cookie. How could he have turned my bird into my sister? And then it dawned on me—his thesis with Dr. Augustini was on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, wasn’t it? He had transposed the world of Ovid into the real world. “My God, does he need to see a psychiatrist?” I wondered. I just smiled and led the group briskly into the Indian restaurant. “Drinks?” said the smiling and handsome Indian-enough looking waiter, who had a lovely brown, almost reddish, hue to his beautiful skin. Yet his skin tone

was not what I or, much more especially, Mrs. Rosenthal seemed interested in; nay, rather, it was how markedly buff his physical appearance was. That physique, I supposed, deflected our attention from the fact that he clearly lacked the requisite Indian accent that one might expect a proper Indian waiter to have. I was expecting an Indian-accented “Would you like to ’ave a scrumptious dreenk of India?” Instead, he offered a handsome smile, followed by an economical, “Drinks?” “Perhaps he’s a second-generation Indian,” I thought to myself, “the son of the proprietor. I love a family-run business. But he sounds so …” I could not put the right unspoken word on it, “native.” He was certainly not the kind of Indian waiter to which I had become delightfully accustomed when visiting Indian restaurants. “I’ll have a mango lassi,” I proclaimed without looking at the menu, so as to show off to the Rosenthals the breadth of my cultural savvy. “I’m sorry ma’am, we don’t have that. But perhaps you’d like to try ishkode waaboo with honey? “Well, there’s one I’ve never heard of. Is it good?” I said, feeling adventurous. “It is one of our traditional drinks, quite nice with honey.” “Yes,” I said, “that sounds marvelous,” turning my head toward the Rosenthals with a prescient grin. “I’m sure it will be wonderful.” “Large or small, ma’am?” the waiter asked. “Well, how large is small? Ha! A delightful oxymoron!” I said, calling attention to the learned repartee I was having with myself. The waiter grinned a second time and suggested the size with his hands, adding a funny little wink in my direction as he used sign language to demonstrate the large one. “That’s not what I call a ‘large,’ ” I said, tossing my head with pride coming from I knew not what source. “Make it a ‘double,’ ” I said, more as a joke than seriously. But the waiter did not take it as a joke and did in fact make it a double. So now I had an extra-large double ishkode waaboo, whatever that might be—ishkode waaboo with plenty of honey.

My son ordered the drink of the northern barbarians, beer, as did Jake, while Mr. Rosenthal—who was, I by then began to conclude, a somewhat boring human being—ordered the traditionally safe iced tea (though it was actually sassafras tea, which did redeem him somewhat in my estimation). Then Mrs. Rosenthal surprised me by ordering a manzanita berry juice, especially rare, I thought, in an Indian restaurant and likely to be too sweet for my palate, although I had no idea as yet just how sweet the ishkode waaboo with honey that I had ordered might turn out to be. I suspected she just did it to get the waiter to wink at her. “Would you like a large one, ma’am?” he said. Batting her eyes, she responded almost with my own words, though quite differently intoned, “Well, how large is large?” He made a similar gesture and offered another wink, to which Mrs. Rosenthal added, “Yes, sir, I’d like a large one, too.” “How gauche,” I thought to myself, and the nerve of her using almost my own words to get him to wink at her. Ishkode waaboo with honey turned out to be nothing short of delightful, and surprisingly refreshing, I thought to myself. Everyone but me studied the menus diligently. I was too busy enjoying the ishkode waaboo—much stronger than the normal Indian drinks, I thought as I sat there munching between sips on pieces of bread that our buff-husky waiter had brought. This bread, known as frybread (a sumptuously crispy bread made of wheat flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, and water, fried in lard, for which cooking oil may be substituted), was really quite delightful but very much unlike any bread I had ever eaten in an Indian restaurant or anywhere else for that matter. But down it went, washed down by the ishkode waaboo, of which I ordered yet another lip-smacking round. “The same, ma’am?” the waiter politely asked. “Oh, yes,” I muttered, “yes, it’s very, very nice.” And forthwith he brought me the same, not a large, but another double large. In the meantime, the waiter, whom I now started to think of as “Mr. Buff Husky,” returned to the table to take our orders. “Are you ready to order?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” I replied first, possibly because I was simply the hungriest, but more likely because I was becoming very drunk, very fast. “I’ll have the lamb vindaloo. Should be delightful with this ichabod winnebego.” “Ish-kod-ewa-aboo,” Mr. Buff Husky replied phonetically. “Can you show me what you are speaking about on the menu, ma’am?” “I didn’t look at the menu,” I said. “I always get lamb vindaloo in an Indian restaurant.” “You’re not in an Indian restaurant, ma’am,” he responded in a calm and collected manner, for no doubt this confusion had arisen before. “Chief Yum Yum is a Native American restaurant, ma’am.” Only in the Burlington, Vermont, of the early 1980s, would one have been likely to find—squarely on Church Street, the main (walking) street of the town—a Native American restaurant. “What would you, um, recommend?” I asked, with my accent starting to betray my drunken state. “Well, today’s special is roasted buffalo and succotash.” “I’ll have it,” I said with a drunken chuckle, “by all means. Sounds yum.” Then, after an awkward pause, I realized what I had said, swiftly adding a selfcongratulatory “Ha!” Indeed, our entire party ordered the buffalo special, and it was quite delicious. Mrs. Rosenthal was horrified, however, that I, in a belated attempt to mimic lamb vindaloo, used far too much hot sauce on my buffalo, seemed drunk, and confirmed her suspicions to that effect by repeatedly referring to my sister Cookie as a bird. Yet she was a fine one to talk, flirting with Mr. Buff Husky right in front of her husband! But there you have it, as I finally realized through this event that I was not good at rooting at games or graduations, and, if I could not recreate on short notice a good vindaloo, I nevertheless was gifted when it came to making savory sandwiches. And that is how the episode drew to a close, for, even a bit tipsy, I was capable of touting my sandwich-making prowess to the Rosenthals, who seemed to enjoy watching me eat the Native American dessert wojapi, a sweet pudding consisting of cooked pulverized berries, quite different from my favorite gulab jamun, which I normally ordered in Indian restaurants. “I was,” I said, tearing up with

nostalgia, “once the best sandwich maker in Wilkes-Barre, the best, you know. It was my moment.” At this unwarranted display of emotion, the Rosenthals thought it best to extricate themselves as they “had better get on the road” back to Albany, whence they hailed. After they left, I sat there with my son and his wife and ordered one more unpronounceable ishkode waaboo from Mr. Buff Husky. “What is this stuff?” I asked him. “We Native Americans call it, in English, ‘firewater’; with honey, we call it ‘sweet firewater.’ ” “It’s yummy! Ha! Yummy! I’m drinking something yummy at Chief Yum Yum!” “Time to go, Mom,” my son said, as I slurped the last of the sweet firewater down with my straw. It was a good thing that I had decided to spend the night in Vermont that evening, as ichabod winnebego would indubitably have hindered my capacity to operate a motor vehicle. My son and his young bride walked me carefully to my hotel room and tucked me in. I went to bed dreaming of the sandwich-making days of my youth. But I have gone rather far along the Silk Route from the Marco Polo restaurant to India, only, like Columbus, to find Indians in the new world of Burlington, Vermont, which is where I encountered ishkode waaboo for the first and last time.

The capacity I had developed for making savory sandwiches, which had manifested itself all too amply in the pregnancy picnic disaster, came remarkably in handy after my divorce, when I sought, with Sheila’s help, to repossess my former position at the Marco Polo. There the hours turned out to be quite well suited to the schedule of a working single mother with a very small child, as yet years and years away from his master’s degree. Even the short-lived attempt to get back together with my husband did not interrupt my work at the savory sandwich shop or my deep friendship with Sheila and Irene. I lived at my parents’ home and worked five shifts a week and the occasional evening, providing sandwiches for most of the poetry readings that continued to be held at the Marco Polo. There I advanced in my cultivation of my love for literature, art, and culture—all kinds of culture, chief among which was that of China. I began reading more Chinese poetry, even memorizing some of it in translation, particularly the lovely translations of Irene Liverani. Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism all delighted my religious interests, interests that were growing ever deeper in my soul. I was a richly spiritual person, disastrously so. I say richly because the vein of my religiosity was, it seemed to me, strikingly deep. I say disastrously because the religiosity was just that, religiosity. I still could not yet understand that God has little interest in religious people. I concede that the phrasing “little interest” is hyperbolic, for I know that God is in fact interested in all people. But to put it another way, it was then my belief, as perhaps it is the belief of many people, that God especially delighted in religious people, the more religious the better. Thus, I freely told my friends that I was “very religious.” Furthermore, I was certain that to please God, to the extent that I really believed in him, one ought to find and sustain religious fervor and do good things to evidence that fervor. It was all so logical, like math or science. The poetry I was reading, however, from Tu Fu to Virgil to Keats to Frost, kept hinting that for the sincerely inquiring spiritual person something quite different than merely the mathematics of self-redemption should be at play. While some of those poets sought or sensed that “something” more poignantly than others, each of them seemed to see that it existed somewhere, and that somewhere there was something different from the cold science of self-righteousness, religiosity, and multiple vantage points, all of which Weltanschauungen, I, in a roundabout way, ultimately considered inferior to my own. I could not yet understand grace,

and I still sought the obvious and more traveled path of self-justification. Nor had I ever stopped to contemplate a Grecian urn or what story that cold pastoral might tell, let alone thought of the happy morn, wherein the son of virgin mother born, our great redemption did bring. No, I was too busy finding my own story everywhere, I confess, save right in front of me. I could not understand how a child of Jove could help me among my farraginous swirl of art, literature, and psychobabble, amidst which I did the babbling, while paying little attention to the stories contained in the literature or art. I felt alone, and perhaps I was, for, of all women on the planet, I may well have been the only WASP-Chinese-Jew with a monkey. But I get ahead of myself.

6 Monkey

I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the peoples of the jungle—except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. They have no law. —Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

I t had been two years since Sheila and I lived together with my young son in a one-room apartment on Pine Street in the historic district of Philadelphia, which is where I moved after leaving my parents, Wilkes-Barre, and even my beloved Marco Polo behind. Much had happened in the intervening years. I became increasingly semitophilic and, simultaneously, sinophilic. Indeed, in my unquenchable desire to ascend to increased heights of religiosity, I now began the somewhat long process of conversion to Judaism. My parents, though they were Welsh Presbyterians through and through, were not anti-Semitic—indeed, by the standards of their day they were somewhat progressive—but they were nevertheless alarmed by my conversion to Judaism, my divorce, and my status as a single mother, especially since in the early 1960s such a sequence of circumstances was neither universally accepted nor, in fact, ideal for raising a child. Add to this that I had moved to Philadelphia and was living with a woman. All of this seemed somehow to push them a bit over the edge. There were—from my father, Harry, just before my departure—even one or two instances of raised voices, a rarity for him, for he always loved me so. I think Harry was most concerned with—actually, now that I look back on it, I am not sure what he was most concerned with. Was it my moving in with a woman or that my being a single mother could be interpreted as my having had a child out of wedlock? Or was it the fact that I had now fully denied the old Welsh Presbyterian faith with which I had been raised, a faith my parents

believed could move mountains or at least the hills of Wales? Beyond these possible objections lay the fact that I had moved to Philadelphia, which city was, for an old coal-mining family like ours, a Babylonesque symbol of evil. Our family regarded How Green Was My Valley as a divinely inspired film and entirely shared its gloomy but venerable way of looking at life. My lifestyle, by comparison, was aberrant, to say the least. Simply put, I had done the unthinkable: I had become un-Welsh, though, being Welsh, I sought with all my strength to cling to whatever remnant of Welshness I could. I shall never know which of these treses caused my parents to question their own faith, yet that they did so was obvious, as, with Reverend Griffith now long dead, they left the old Welsh Presbyterian Church, which by then was called Gaylord Avenue Presbyterian, to find a church that could be at least slightly more accepting of my life choices without completely abandoning my family’s Welsh Presbyterian value system. That value system, strongly rooted in Calvinism, was stubborn and not easily eradicated by a new church, however progressive it might be. My parents’ personal beliefs could be traced back, as far as I could tell, to a family named Hughes, whose burial plot was with that of Eynon, another relative, in Llanelli, Wales, or, more properly, in Llwynhendy, a hamlet contiguous with Llanelli. These place names, I should warn you, are not as innocent as they look, for it requires a good bit of guttural slime to say either of them rightly, particularly the bigger town. Pronounce them correctly, and you will say something more like, “Chlan-[spit now]-echl-[spit again]-lee” and, for the smaller town, “Chlwyn-[spit now]-hen-dee.” This I learned many years later when I and my son went to the family grave and wept tears of nostalgic joy, for there we were at last in the real green valley where in fact it all did begin. The Eynon family intermarried with the Hughes, the latter of whom had temporarily become the bearers of the family name. Family legend holds that the trait that attracted William Eynon to the Hughes clan was a ion for cheese, particularly Hên Sîr cheese with jelly and Welsh biscuits, revolting as that may sound. The Hughes’s love for cheese, which may well have been for them a delicacy as it was not inexpensive, provoked the wife of David Hughes Sr., my great-great-grandfather, to purchase a very interestinglooking cheese plate complete with a cover chiefly to keep their cheese, I suppose, free of pests such as flies. More likely, with its unavoidable clanking sound made by replacing the lid, it was meant to call attention to the cheese-

thieving hands of the greatest cheese lover of them all, David Hughes’s firstborn son, John, the only cheese thief ever to become a right reverend rector of St. Michael’s Church in Betws-y-Coed (in Snowdonia, North Wales).

THE FAMILY CHEESE PLATE

The cheese plate’s cover bore a lustrous, if startling, facial expression meant, I suppose, to prey on the superstitious nature of small children and deter them from unsupervised cheese snacking. Indeed, its frightful radiance seemed to say, “Let the little children not come unto me.” Though John, the firstborn and eventual preacher, was frightened the least of all the children by the plate’s menacing grin, John’s sister, Lucy (born in 1840), was generally the most adventurous of this clan. Although Lucy did not bring the Hughes name to America, as she had already married Daniel S. Jones in 1867 in the Llwynhendy Nazareth Calvinistic Presbyterian (and therefore tautological) Chapel, she did manage to bring the Hughes’s cheese plate across the Atlantic, prompted to do so because her husband decided to leave the coal mine in Wales in which he had worked since he was a child because it had recently collapsed. America offered a new hope, and it was toward this hope that he set out, without his wife at first, for Lucy Hughes Jones would arrive about two years after her husband, Daniel. It was Lucy Hughes Jones, then, who boldly followed her bold husband across the Atlantic, bringing with her the unattractive black trunk, the ark of the family’s covenant that bore their few invaluable valuables. Lucy had been encouraging her husband to go to Pennsylvania, about the plenitude of coal in which land she had heard reports, particularly in the mines of the Wyoming Valley, a place offering, if not prosperity, at least livelihood. Thus, they migrated, on the urging of my great-great-grandfather David Hughes and great-uncle William Eynon, as well as my great-uncle David Hughes Jr., who, after the family’s departure, corresponded a number of times with my great-aunt Jemima. Though he never quite put his seal of approval on the “Clever Yankee,” as he called America, he knew that there could be a future for the family there, where the energy of men could bring energy from the earth to a new nation. Perhaps, in America, they could eventually strike a vein of a different kind of life. My grandmother—Elizabeth Ann Jones, the daughter of Lucy Hughes Jones— married David Evans, a member of another Welsh clan who emigrated from

Wales for similar reasons. Though he died young, he left a remarkable stamp on the family, which shaped its future for generations to come, for he was a composer of Welsh hymns. David was a gifted violinist, whose practicing in his parents’ tiny home in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, drew the attention of not a few of the neighborhood girls. Like all Welsh boys in Plymouth, David was to begin working in the mines when he was thirteen. His dear mother and father had, of course, hoped for something better for him. Thus, when he indicated of his own accord that he wanted to learn the instrument of his namesake, Uncle Davy, his parents bought him a violin. To do so, they had to borrow money, thereby establishing one of the first lines of credit known in the Welsh community in America. Initially, David taught himself to play the violin, but when it became obvious that he had a suring wonderful talent for music, his parents found a probably not Welsh potbellied peripatetic pedagogue named Mickey Musgrove to teach him once a month, whenever Mickey Musgrove might make his way to Plymouth, where it was rumored that he kept a flat. The long-bearded Mr. Musgrove most often had a piece of yesterday’s lunch near the nearly covered opening in the furry gray beard that hid his mouth. Had Mr. Musgrove had a white beard, he would have looked like Siôn Corn, as the Welsh refer to Santa Claus, but the old food morsels would have certainly shown up more clearly in a white beard, so perhaps the gray was an advantage, after all. Mr. Mickey Musgrove not only gave lessons but also repaired and tuned instruments, a skill that proved to be important for David Evans, who a year before he died bought a pump organ that was in dire need of repair. Mr. Musgrove was the only one truly qualified or talented enough to repair it, which he did as a favor to Elizabeth Ann, after David’s death. But I shall return to that sad event anon. David’s beloved instrument was always the violin. When he turned fourteen, he took a job in a local market to save money to help his parents pay for his music lessons—all this that he might make a career as a musician. So it was that he eventually learned how to compose, and thus he would make a real contribution with his Welsh hymns. He met Elizabeth Ann, daughter of the adventurous Lucy Hughes Jones, and at the age of twenty-two married her on October 26, 1898. To his strange career choice, his dear sweet wife—my beloved grandmother, Elizabeth Ann, who viewed herself very much as his er and helpmate—made a surprising (and, to her mother’s mind, delightful) announcement. She intended to open a small shoe store / candy shop in which

she would sell homemade candy, while David tended to the shoes—nice shoes— some of which were even imported. This shop would be located at Plymouth’s 46 West Main Street on the ground floor, and they lived above the store in a small apartment; that way she could tend to the children and still work full time to her composer husband. Needless to say, this was a remarkably progressive plan for having a career and raising a family simultaneously in that day and time. Their plans worked out beautifully. Elizabeth Ann’s candy store did at least as well as the shoe store with which it was coned. David, meanwhile, between shoe sales, composed or transcribed many a beautiful Welsh hymn—one of which was Fanny Crosby’s “Just as I Am.” His new, very Welsh-sounding (i.e., rather melancholy) tune actually won the “best new composition” prize in a local competition held on February 27, 1903. That hymn was played at the funerals of both David and Reverend Hugh W. Griffith, with whom my grandfather had collaborated for the writing of that particular piece. More importantly, David and Elizabeth Ann Evans were profoundly in love. They had, I later learned from my beloved grandmother, the thing that everyone wants but very few people ever have, that thing I had experienced intensely only once in my life, for a very brief moment, with Bernie Schupp. That thing is love, rapturous, complete, real, lasting, committed, patient, kind, unfailing, and enduring; indeed, my love for Bernie endured throughout my life. Their moment was to be brief as well, for on February 15, 1907, my grandmother came back from a trip to the market where she had to buy the flour and sugar used to make her homemade string licorice. Hers was wonderful candy, thin and lacy, as if put through a machine, yet every yard of it, both red and black, was made by hand on a massively thick cutting board, through her hard labor alone, with a rolling pin. When she walked in, she saw David’s violin on the floor, not far from that cutting board, with its bridge down, a site she had never seen. How could this have happened? David was always so careful with his instrument. Then as she rounded the corner toward the kitchen, she saw him by the cutting board, sprawled face down on the ground. My grandfather, David Evans, was but thirty-one years old when he died. He had had a heart arrhythmia that abides in our family to this day but has taken the life of no other. Reverend Griffith preached a wonderful sermon for David, all in Welsh, at Plymouth’s Welsh Presbyterian Church on Gaylord Avenue. All wept

as they sang the Welsh Presbyterian hymns that David himself had written, the only hymns played at the funeral with one notable exception, “Amazing Grace.” It was clear to all who spoke Welsh—and everyone there spoke Welsh—that for David Evans, religion was something different than piety, morality, ritual, or even identity. Lizzie, who never remarried, held her tears throughout the event. As one poet has said, on such a grand scale do lovers say good-bye.

David and Elizabeth had two children, neither of whom could recall their father. One, who would be my uncle, was Blythe (the father of my cousin, the lawyer, who would one day advise me about how to plea when I had unwisely tossed that nearly lethal wet coat hanger into the fuse box at Wilkes College). The other was Blanche, my long-suffering, mostly affirming, and always-loving mother. Blanche was especially upset when I, at age twenty-eight, bought my son, who had been complaining bitterly about being a lonely only child, a sister. Now Betsy was not quite a real sister but rather a close relative of what could possibly be a sister, for she was a monkey. My impulsive decision to buy a monkey may have subconsciously been borne out of, I suppose, my reading of Wu Cheng’en’s classic Chinese novel Monkey, the wonderful story of a band of friends on a religious quest in whose experience of the world a mischievous monkey figures prominently in a series of memorable misadventures. How could I have known how remarkably close this would be to my own story? But if you want to know more about that, you will have to read further in this book, and then that book, as well. The need for Betsy arose, I suppose, because I could see that the move from Philadelphia to rural Shermans Dale, Pennsylvania (though it was not very far from the state capital, Harrisburg), had been quite tough on my son. Sheila and I made this transition in part because we needed more money, for in Philadelphia our coffers had run dry. I particularly wanted to move away from Philadelphia because I was hoping thereby to gain the approval of my parents. I had graduated from Wilkes College in the meantime with a teaching degree, which delighted my parents. Yet when I had moved to Philadelphia without a job or a plan, living with a woman and taking a small child of five years of age with me, they were, as I said at this chapter’s outset, both worried and outraged. On the advice of some of their friends, they let communication lapse. On the advice of some of my friends, I did the same. Still, I missed them dearly, as Eve expelled from the garden must have longed for humankind’s first parent. Beyond the harshness of the move, the scantly populated town of Shermans Dale proved to be for my son a painful place. He found no friends there, which did not seem to me substantially different from his situation in Philadelphia, for he had few friends there, as well. Yet in the big city there were, at least, other children in the neighborhood, and there he had been resourceful enough to invent himself

a girlfriend, a certain “Niney.” I shall never know, and perhaps he shall never know either, why he fabricated that unlikely name for her. Parting with Niney, when he had to leave her behind in Philadelphia with her imaginary family, was particularly hard, though it was not as hard, I suppose, as the day I caused the unreality of Niney to come rushing out of the artificial world he had created for her. The date of this recognition was, I recall quite clearly, April 14, 1965. My son was to turn six the next day, and we were to celebrate his birthday on Friday, right after school, on the sixteenth. Putting his birthday party together at nearly the last minute, I sought to call his friends’ parents one at a time, to issue each child an invitation to the Fridayafternoon party. On the afternoon of the fourteenth, I procured the phone numbers of the parents from Mrs. Leutweiler, his kindergarten teacher. All lived nearby, and most could simply walk their children from their houses or apartments to my small, nearby Philadelphia apartment, which was, by now, completely bedecked with Chinese-style furnishings and various Hebrew religious articles. I and my son were probably the only white Anglo Chinese Jews in the United States, or possibly even in the world. We were spurious Jews, and even more spurious Asians. (Sheila, my apartment mate and beloved friend, was authentically Jewish.) Niney did not show up on the list of invitees. Mrs. Leutweiler knew nothing of any Niney, and she assumed that it must be one of the children’s nicknames. Yet when I pressed my son on the authenticity of Niney, about whom I had been hearing for some months now, he finally cracked. There was no such girl; he did not have a girlfriend. He had in fact very few friends. The few friends he did have, however, had a great time at the party, though he seemed forlorn the entire time, for he had learned the day before that Niney did not exist. This turn of events was at least somewhere in the back of my mind when I made the very impulsive decision to buy Betsy that day at the pet shop in Harrisburg, about two months or so after we moved from Philadelphia to the center portion of the state. We had made an expedition from Shermans Dale to Harrisburg that day, simply a family outing, as it were, as Sheila and I had intended to visit the zoo and cheer up my melancholy first-grade offspring. In Shermans Dale, we not infrequently hosted parties and poetry readings, similar to those of the old days back at the Marco Polo or at the Egg Bar on Twelfth and Spruce Streets in Philadelphia. At the Egg Bar, my son would sit in the back of the pub sipping on

a drink known as an egg cream (consisting of neither eggs nor cream). While he did that, Sheila and I sat in front, smoking cigarettes through long plastic filters, wearing berets woven of loosely knitted and porous needlecraft, airy, light, offering plenty of ventilation, appropriate to the hot summer nights in Philadelphia, but still allowing us to look the part of urbane sophisticates. Prose was read, too, mostly Hemingway and Stein, powerful stuff, especially good old Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea spoke to me, and with it Ernest came so fitfully close to understanding the point of the pain of sacrifice, and the point of the pain of suffering, so close to understanding that suffering can have a point. But then he blew his brains out, leaving a different legacy than the old man created. Yet, if Sheila and I had found a way to preserve in Shermans Dale a touch of the urbane culture we had previously enjoyed, my son was not so lucky, for he was lonelier here than he had been in Philly. Imagine the wild-eyed surprise my son had that late afternoon in Harrisburg when I told him I would go into the pet store, which he had discovered and in front of which he now stood. Sheila and I caught up to him gazing at the animals, one after another. “Mommy, Mommy,” he said, “can we get a puppy?” “No, dogs are simply too much work. They need to be walked and looked after constantly, and who will clean up the backyard?” Giving up on the dog, he asked about a cat. Now at this point I was very tempted, but because we already had two cats, Biggest (a curiously small cat that I had obviously named while it was a kitten) and Fang (who years later rode off in a lovely Thunderbird, never to be heard from again), I restrained myself. “How about the gerbil?” he persisted. “No!” I responded. “How about a hamster?” “No!” “What about that monkey?” That is when, impulsively, I entered the pet shop with Sheila, my fellow fool. I say fool because, as almost anyone who has ever bought a monkey on short notice will tell you, you are a fool to do so. In fact, it is foolish to buy a monkey at all. Consider this: we had not then, or before, given

the slightest thought to monkey proofing our house (which we were at the time renting in Shermans Dale) or to fastening down the Sino-Hebraic household furnishings. On the trip home, in the backseat of our Volkswagen Bug, my son talked up a storm with his new sister, Betsy. She was appropriately and rather dashingly clad, sporting a red dress with white lace trim and grasping a matching monkeysized parasol that she kept trying unsuccessfully to open inside of the monkey cage that the pet store manager had tossed in as part of the deal. Now, like the monkey of Wu Cheng’en’s novel Monkey, our monkey was extraordinarily mischievous, as I previously mentioned. Indeed, had any one of our vases actually come from the Ming period, a marked decline in Sino-simian relations would have been a natural consequence, for it was Betsy and Betsy alone who brought my own era of Chinese décor to a precipitous close, breaking every vase, every plate, and every bowl that I owned. She even destroyed my numerous rice-paper lamps, one at a time, by hurling chopsticks, like tiny javelins, into them. Her action reminded me of the dartboard I had had as a child during the war years. Such destruction was wrought because Betsy figured out, within just a few weeks of living with us, how to release herself from her cage whenever she wished. This meant, ultimately, that Betsy had no cage but rather a very small wire-mesh abode from which she came and went as she pleased. Again, I am sure that anyone who has ever given a monkey free reign of the house will agree not merely that it is a bad idea to do so but also that the monkey is apt to take larger and larger license, time after time. Finally, fully liberated, the monkey will decide to give itself a bath, for monkeys love baths the way that dogs love walks. One fundamental difference between a monkey and a dog, however, is that, whereas a dog is rarely in a position to walk itself, a monkey can quite easily give itself a bath, once it has learned to come and go from its cage as it pleases—assuming, that is, that it has paid sufficient attention when you have bathed it over the course of the past several months. The reason you have bathed it, of course, has to do with the other fundamental difference between dogs and monkeys—monkeys smell rather acutely. Dogs smell only sometimes, and, when they do, they normally require only a quick shampoo and an unpleasantly brisk dousing with the garden hose, and that’s that. Monkeys, conversely, by virtue of their constant struggle with colitis, nearly always smell of fecal matter. Anyone who has spent any amount of time at a simian exhibit at the zoo can tell you this; go sit for a few minutes in a dog

kennel, and, though your ears may not like the yelping, you won’t leave ashen white and about to vomit. Go sit in a monkey house, and you will. Accordingly, I should not have been so surprised when I came home that afternoon from school along with my son—about an hour before Sheila would be done with her various visits to financially challenged families in the greater Harrisburg area—and opened the door of the house, from which I had already noticed small dribbles of water leaking. As I pulled the door handle toward me, I discovered, to my horror, a cascading waterfall that poured down the concrete steps all over my son’s and my own feet. It did not take long to realize what had happened. The meddling monkey had extricated herself from her cage—not an unusual event—and had decided to give herself a bath in the kitchen sink. When the water overflowed, Betsy, as she so often did, probably shrieked, either in fear or in delight or in a curious combination of each. After her bath, she toweled off with a dish towel, turned on the television, and watched As the World Turns, more likely by chance than by choice. All this, of course, with the plug in the drain and the water still running. When we came home some hours later, we found the guilty party reclining on the couch, mesmerized by the soap though perhaps relieved to see us since she knew that, yet again, she had made a mess of some kind, as she could not jump down from the couch without getting her feet wet. (I say “yet again” because just two days before she had caught a dangerous ride on the centerpiece of the ceiling fan and had simultaneously been hit with a strong bout of colitis. It was a matter not of the excrement hitting the fan but rather of the fan spewing the excrement about the room.) Betsy was a monkey of extremes, extreme sportive defecation at one moment and at the next extreme soaping (followed by a soap). On the occasion of her self-induced bath, my son turned to me with a look of wisdom well beyond his six and one-half years and said, “Mom, the monkey must go, mustn’t she?” I said yes, that was indeed the case. The next day, when I called the Harrisburg Zoo, I was surprised that they had no colony of woollies; they had spider monkeys, the man said, and chimps and one baboon. “You don’t happen to have a male baboon?” he asked. “My God, man,” I retorted, “what kind of person has a baboon in his home?” “Sorry, ma’am, it is just that we are looking for a male as a stud for our female.”

The next day, when I called the Philadelphia Zoo, to my surprise the man with whom I spoke asked precisely the same question, “Gender, ma’am?” “What has that to do with it?” I snapped. “A female monkey can do the same job as a male monkey. Besides, people don’t notice the gender of the monkeys!” “Ma’am, I hate to tell you this, but we really have no interest in another female woolly. We already have six females.” “Please,” I begged him, “you just have to take her. I can’t deal with this monkey anymore.” The reason the zoo was not willing to take another female is that it needed, the man explained, a stud. “What is it with these zoos and their studs?” I thought to myself as I began to tear up. Nevertheless, moved by my unseen tears, this Philadelphia “monkey man,” as he called himself throughout the conversation, broke in, “Well, ma’am—and I might get in trouble with my supervisor for this, for I’m really just a monkey man, not the resident primatologist —we’ll take her.” I had never heard such words of deliverance in my entire life. “Thank you, thank you so much!” I said, choking back my tears, sad to be losing a daughter but overwhelmed with joy that she would be going to a better place. Even my son was relieved when, after going to the Philadelphia Zoo the following Saturday, we left Betsy. The monkey man stood there with her in the parking lot, holding her small left hand. As we drove away, she, looking as darling as ever in her red dress, shook her tiny parasol with her right hand as if to say good-bye. It must have been hard for my son to leave his sister at the Philadelphia Zoo. Still, he bore up nobly, saying good-bye to the only sister he would ever have. You can imagine my surprise when, in the next week, the monkey man called me. “Ma’am,” he said, “I want to thank you for the woolly monkey you donated last week. That’s a great animal, ma’am, really great, full of personality and joy, joy that all the other monkeys are experiencing, too. Now, as to why I am calling, ma’am. I need to ask if it would be all right for us to change the monkey’s name?” “Why ever would you do that?” I asked. “What name do you have in mind?”

“Ma’am,” the monkey man said, “we think Jo Jo is more appropriate. You see, ma’am . . .” I interrupted. “Jo Jo? Is that meant to capture the spirit of joy she’s been bringing to the zoo? I don’t see what’s wrong with keeping her name as it is. Won’t she be confused?” “Well, ma’am, when we put Betsy in with the females, it didn’t take long for her to rip her clothes off and start copulating. You see, ma’am, your Betsy, well, she isn’t a Betsy, ma’am. She’s the male stud monkey we were hoping for.” “You’ve got to be kidding,” I muttered with utter astonishment. Then, after a long and awkward pause, I added, “Well, yes, of course you can change the name. I mean, why not? If she really is a boy, well, she probably ought to have a boy’s name.” “Oh, she’s a boy all right,” the monkey man responded. “She’s been a very active little stud.” To this day I have never been able to figure out how I could have given Betsy so many baths—so many that she herself learned how to give herself one—but failed to notice her penis.

7 Leni

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!), Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace … —Leigh Hunt, “Abou Ben Adhem”

I t is a little-known fact that the largest collection of penises in the world is housed in carefully marked boxes in the basement of the Vatican Museum. This is because, I am told, Pope Paul IV was a prude. At his behest, his nephew Cardinal Carlo Carafa, you may know, took on Michelangelo, condemning the great artist’s Sistine Chapel frescoes because he had depicted Christ, along with all the apostles, naked at the Last Judgment. Within a few years, one of Pope Paul’s pietistic successors, with the appropriate appellation, Pius IV, prolonged this pervasive policy of prudishness, hiring Daniele “Il Braghettone” da Volterra to paint covers over the crotches of Michelangelo’s masterpiece and then commanded his army of emasculators to take their chisels to the privy parts of the finest works of art that have been wrought by human hands. History will da Volterra for one thing only, the fact that he put his hands to the private parts of the saints and, possibly, the savior himself. As I look back on it I confess, to my chagrin, that after Sheila left, in some ways I tried to imitate this pope. It was now the 1970s, and although we had lived together for nearly ten years, by 1972 I had new, and somewhat political, interests. I say somewhat because, though I had never been a political person per se, by 1972 I became increasingly interested in the National Education Association, which we teachers called the “union,” and, with and within it, the women’s liberation movement. My closest ally in this movement was Louise, who taught at the Cherry Street School and, after Sheila left, would move in with me. As a result of our friendship, I learned to embrace the chief principles of the movement, and indeed I continue to affirm some of its basic tenets, such as equal

pay for equal work, a woman’s right to deny a man’s unwanted advances simply by saying no, and the notion that women can and should hold political office; can and should become CEOs, college professors, doctors, and lawyers or pursue the calling to which they might be particularly suited; can and should not feel that marriage and family is the only possibility for or sole duty of a woman. I no longer, however, maintain my formerly mistaken posture that a woman (or anyone else) has the right to terminate a pregnancy. I was always a bit ambivalent about that, anyhow, and I know now, from the unique vantage point of being beyond the grave, that that position is gravely mistaken. Viva el niño. Yet even now my best attempt to make a political statement breaks down into a somewhat irrational, slogan-driven display of emotion. So did I argue in my life, normally relying on my own opinion rather than on logic. Not surprisingly, then, I often failed to make my point cogently and thus sometimes would come up short in debate, whether that might be with my son, Sheila, the plumber, or the mailman. An example of this can be seen in a political cartoon that I inserted into one of my notebooks from 1990. On the surface, it is a perfectly nice political cartoon, with a portrait of Saddam Hussein’s head coming out the end of a tank’s cannon barrel.

But the picture itself is problematic in a number of ways. In the first place, why did I put the dictator’s head coming out of the cannon barrel? Second, what exactly did I mean by the statement “Really, I had no idea that you felt this way!”? And whose words are they, Saddam’s? Further, whose tank is it (for it is unmarked)? Was the author of the cartoon, the viewer might well wonder, against or for the war? What is the significance of the mysterious floating placard “Iraq, 1990 this way”? And why add the date, both under “Iraq” at the top and then again beneath my initials? Even I was not sure, and am not to this day. But it made for a clever cartoon, even if one shrouded in mystery to both reader and author alike. To compensate for my incapacity to make my point cogently, after Sheila left I developed a coping mechanism that could be deployed should a conversation make a turn into territory too political or religious. I would simply have a heart ailment. Since my grandfather David Evans had died at an early age from this condition, I was able to convince my son (and anyone else whom I might desire to sway) that these incidents were real. Now let me be clear: some of them were real, for I did have a diagnosable arrhythmia. The frequency with which I had the episodes, however, I now it was a bit exaggerated, and these “attacks” became, over time, a bit of a habit, for by announcing one I could control my son or even Louise, who moved in within two months of Sheila’s departure. The drama with which I effected these episodes, real or otherwise, was the reason, my son often proclaimed, his favorite movie—and this irritated me not a little— was What about Bob? In any case, an episode of neurocardiogenic syncope gave me an easy out of any conversation that I did not want to finish gracefully. But to return to 1972. I was no longer Jewish, and I had not been Chinese since 1966, when Betsy had destroyed all my Chinese china. I no longer went to poetry readings, no longer found myself in the company of the cultural intelligentsia of New Hope, Pennsylvania, where Sheila and I had moved in 1967. I had secured a job in the nearby Neshaminy School District. My son was able to attend the highly regarded Solebury School in New Hope, where he received a fairly good education, thanks to wonderful teachers like Zineida Sprowles and Lou Penge, who both “discovered” my son when he was a junior in high school. Yet it was only “fairly” because it took quite a while for a teacher to discover him. There was a coach, too, a basketball coach, as I recall, by the name of Bob Corrigan. This coach used his favorite television show, Charlie’s

Angels, quite popular at the time, to introduce my son and the rest of the team to the female species. But I leave that aside to return to how slowly I drifted away from the New Hope intellectual scene. First, let me explain how there could have been such an intellectual capital in what was then a town of a mere thousand residents. New Hope was quite different and more distant than the other suburbs of Philadelphia. Indeed, Langhorne or Yardley, which are on Philadelphia’s commuter train line known as SEPTA, could be considered legitimate suburbs. A good twenty minutes from Yardley station, New Hope had and still has a very nonsuburban feel to it. Rather, it was and remains a weekend retreat for wealthy Philadelphians and New Yorkers alike. It was at the time a marvelous art enclave where artists hoping to have a show in New York came for first showings. Thus, it was a legitimate cultural center that thrived (and still thrives) not simply on its many boutiques but on the arts, from painting, to sculpture, to crafts of various kinds, including jewelry, articles of clothing, and even the art of cookery, fine cookery. Some of the best restaurants in the northeastern region of the United States are located in New Hope. In addition, New Hope has the market cornered on quaintness, and, if quaintness could be packaged, New Hope would be a prime exporter. I should also mention music, occasional poetry readings, and theater as well. The Bucks County Playhouse has been in operation since 1939 and continues to have a wonderful variety of off-Broadway shows. New Hope also boasts the fabulous Farley’s Bookshop, where if you go on a Wednesday morning you will be greeted by Julian Karhuma, who grew up in the midst of and now is a signal member of the intelligentsia about which I have been speaking. New Hope was and is a small and wonderful cultural mecca. So here Sheila and I lived, plugged into the arts community until 1972, a year that changed my life. The fault for our withdrawal from the intellectual scene lay, I confess, primarily with me. I wanted something more fulfilling than the arts, not realizing that nothing exists that is so self-fulfilling, for the arts are the imitation of life: they are the human expression of divine creation. But I appreciated the spiritual aspects of this idea more before 1972 than after, as can be seen not just in my religious journey during the 1960s but also in my choice of friends. Sheila and I enjoyed the camaraderie of one of the local art-noir New Hope painters, a certain Leni Fontaine. My son actually discovered Leni for me by befriending her daughter, Robin. Bringing Leni and Robin into our lives was,

at the time, a great delight to me and Sheila, and between us there blossomed a friendship that lasted even after Sheila left. Robin was a lovely child, a nice playmate for my son and another younger lad, Adam Ward, who also lived in the neighborhood. At least this female friend existed, which, in my book, was a vast improvement over Niney, who existed only in my son’s imagination and/or the world of abstract integers. Leni Fontaine, artist, spiritualist, intellectual, and dear friend, performed tarot readings that were—like the illicit tea readings of Mildred Davies, a certain friend of my mother—often chillingly correct. More importantly, however, Leni’s readings were of great value for the sustained development of our friendship. The same can be said of the séances, though these were, at first, merely exercises in frustration. Sheila and I were regulars at these specialinvitation events, which were held in Leni’s lovely apartment. The séance— lights out, candles lit, incense burning, and flower petals strewn on the table, at the center of which, just for decoration, Leni kept her crystal ball—began, more or less, as a tea party, though we mostly smoked cigarettes and drank wine, ginger ale, or sparkling water, the last of which was, at that time, far more exotic than it is today. Our group consisted of relatively young to middle-aged women gabbing away about the latest local tittle-tattle, not realizing that just a few blocks away, at a more proper tea party, we were undoubtedly the centerpiece of neighborhood gossip! Leni’s comportment and attire enhanced such rumor. She had wispy, usually noticeably dyed, hair, of which the colors varied between red and reddish brown —never blond—and the roots were never gray. Her outfits were always stylistically advanced and not infrequently even what one might call outrageous —low cut, sometimes all denim, often buttons only, bell-bottoms—the word mod comes to mind: mod, wild, and hip. Add to this that she had a crystal ball; she even gave me one exactly like it for my birthday one year. She was, in the American (non-French) sense of the French word, chic. In short, before Cher was Cher (or at best when she was dating Sonny), there was Leni Fontaine, artsy, spiritual, and sexy. And she looked and acted the part in a way from which Cher could have learned a trick or two, particularly when it came to accessing the dead. Leni’s loft apartment itself was rendered lovely more by her choice of exotic incense, suited to the occasion, than by her choice of less-than-lovable men,

none of whom suited any occasion—to wit, Ken, her potbellied, pot-smoking boy toy possibly more than twenty years her junior. For such an adult gathering as a séance, Ken was, of course, excused, and he no doubt sat drinking coffee and pouting at the nearby Golden Pump Diner. Such intoxicating power over men did Leni have that she could merely dismiss him for the evening. Leni was (what one might call nowadays) a bit of a cougar and, in every sense of the word, an exotic one at that. To say that she exuded sexuality does not adequately describe her comportment, for there was a certain naturalness to all her ways, so that she seemed almost accidentally alluring, less calculating than a real cougar. Furthermore, Leni was a marvelous artist, whose first artistic gift to me was a painting that she entitled Rabbi. The rabbi’s face, though clearly material and not otherworldly, had a ghostly aura, the way one might imagine Christ to have appeared to doubting Thomas—at once physical and spiritual, both tangible and otherworldly. This visage endeared her to me immediately, for it reminded me of a haunting version of the lustrous face on the family cheese plate—indeed, it was nearly a copy of it, completely coincidental. This painting now hangs in my son’s library and, like the cheese plate’s face, serves to frighten all the small children in the family. Indeed, I think he may display the rabbi in the library chiefly to keep children away.

DRAWING AFTER THE ORIGINAL OIL PAINTING RABBI BY LENI FONTAINE

In a certain sense therefore, one could safely say that Leni Fontaine embodied New Hope, Pennsylvania, in the midst of the sexual revolution. Mind you, she could have been at the center of New Hope intelligentsia, had she so desired. But Leni, naturally aloof, rarely entrusted herself to the people around her in the fullest measure, doing so only very slowly and with supreme discrimination. And while sensual and voluptuous, she was not morally “loose,” as the word was once used, when being loose was still viewed as immoral. Returning, then, to that particular séance—I found out only on my deathbed that it was not Fred. Fred Pacino, the local jeweler and erstwhile husband of Toni Pacino, was the spiritual target normally sought after in Leni’s séances, which brought great delight to Toni, who sorely missed her husband. Toni still managed the shop, which was located on Mechanic Street a stone’s throw from the canal, not far from where Pam Mimford’s Hacienda abuts onto Ferry Street Bridge. But after Fred’s fatal heart attack, Toni had leased to inferior craftsmen the work her husband had done with the utmost care when he was living. Indeed, all New Hope muttered about how the quality of the merchandise of Pacino Fine Handcrafted Jewelry had gone downhill. Toni, meanwhile, though she had loved Fred, was liberated by his death, getting herself “prepped” for action, as she said, by having a tubal ligation, a breast reduction, and a tummy tuck—all procedures quite avant-garde (and very expensive) in the early 1970s. Based on either her not very spectacular looks or her all too bubbly (and consequently not very alluring) personality, it is hard for me to grasp how any “action” could ever have come to . Nevertheless, according to her updates at each monthly séance, Toni apparently did see plenty of action after Fred’s death—surprisingly active action for a slightly overweight, rather ordinary-looking, and overly effervescent middle-aged woman. Thus, perhaps partly simply for bragging rights but no doubt chiefly out of her devotion to her former husband, Toni was a regular at Leni’s séances, especially because Fred was the one person whom Leni always tried to , for she knew him well, as he had been responsible for every piece of her “New Hope

collection” of jewelry. Accordingly, when it came to accessories and the little extras, no doubt Leni missed Fred more than the rest of us—possibly even more than Toni herself. Yet, when I say, “It was not Fred,” I mean that it was not Fred who responded to Leni’s invitation to communicate with the group, in particular with Toni, when Leni Fontaine invoked him: “Fred, if you are there, Fred, if you are coming into our midst now, speak to us in some way; let us know that you can hear us. Fred, are you happy, Fred? Do you have your jewels?” she would shriek. “Fred, give us a sign, Fred! Rattle your jewels! Give us a sign if you can hear us.” At this point, any one of the women at the table could have either purposely or accidentally rattled her bracelets, and everyone would have thought it was Fred. But instead, there was silence, a moment, a moment more, and then … three deliberately spaced echoing thumps rose up from the table. Seven of the eight women present shrieked, including Dr. Kenneth Leiby’s wife, Winifred, the most surprising and upstanding member of our supernatural coterie. Toni began to cry; Leni alone did not panic, seeking further communication. One or two more questions were answered. Was he alone, or were there others with him? Two thumps were given to indicate that yes, there were others. Did he approve of the new craftsmen of Pacino Fine Handcrafted Jewelry? One thump: no. (The next day Toni fired one of them.) Had he seen Leni’s former husband there? No answer. Fred was gone. Fred, it turned out, was my naughty ten-year-old son, who, having somehow slithered unnoticed between our collective assortment of sixteen legs, pounded on the underside of the table in response to Leni’s spiritual interrogation. My son firmly avers that he did this only twice, which means that maybe, just maybe, Fred’s spirit was present the third time, when Leni dared ask Fred how he felt about Toni’s “action.” No thumps followed, and Fred was never accessed successfully again. How my son kept himself from snickering I will never know. I do know, however, that he found our consternation amusing and that he took our séances as lightly as we took them seriously. I am certain that any other child would have laughed out loud when he banged vigorously on the table, which, in one instance, actually caused Alice Ward to tip back so far in her chair that she nearly knocked over the nearby armoire full of Leni’s eclectic collection of serving dishes, which she used only for dips for chips, since Leni rarely cooked.

None fell, thank God. Had I had such a collection of serving dishes, I would have cooked just to have an excuse to use them. But to return to the séance—it seems likely that it is because we collectively screamed so loudly that we never heard the deceptive child snicker with delight at how he had tricked us. Yet trick us he did, and he did it with style. And I here compliment him for his restraint, for on both occasions he answered only two or three questions and then wisely crawled away while we all still had our eyes closed. Just as my son’s personality could not have been more opposite to my own—he being highly resistant to trends and strongly attached to reason, even when, frankly, a bit more feeling might be called for—Robin Lea Mona Fontaine was also thoroughly different from Leni. Robin was not bothered by Leni’s tarot readings but took little interest in them. In contrast to her mother, Robin dressed casually, almost boyishly. Both were, however, charming in different ways, and they did share one characteristic, that of a sense of art, albeit poured out on canvas by Leni and worked with needle and thread by Robin. And fittingly so, for they would paint their stories upon my life, interwoven as our lives would be, for a lovely season.

Simply being the neighbor of Mr. Charles Miller—the cowriter with Johnny Gruelle and Will Woodin of Raggedy Ann’s Sunny Songs, music that had made him famous some forty years before I knew him—helped me, if not to remove, at least to assuage the pain of some of the blotches on the escutcheon of my character. Mr. Miller’s deliverance came not by any words he said, though his words were kind, but merely because Sheila and I made Mr. Miller the object of our annual “Christmas ministry.” This sounds strange, I realize, because, as I have explained earlier, both Sheila and I (especially Sheila, but also I, if only incidentally) were practicing Jews. Yet I had recalled and now imitated my father’s various ministries to persons of poor fortune, many of which had been performed under the auspices of the church, of course. Harry always went further than the mere parameters of any ministerial mission. If the church’s holiday ministry were to bring a poor family a Thanksgiving turkey, Harry would size up that family when he brought in the bird, accompanied, in accordance with the normal Jakesian attitude of generosity, by a full range of fixings and fresh bread and good Welsh Hên Sîr cheese. Having guessed the sizes of the children’s clothing, he would then go straight out to the army/navy store on Wyoming Avenue—for he loved to buy his clothes in that particular store—and buy ample amounts of clothing for the family. He would then put it in a box and leave it on the porch of the family so that they would find it when they came home. Indeed, Harry loved to use porches to give unexpected presents. On the occasion of my son’s fifth birthday, for example, Harry sent the excited lad out of doors to get the paper. Upon returning, my son delightfully discovered, hard by the front door, a shiny red bicycle with training wheels. Such were the days of joy when we lived in my father’s house. But I return to Mr. Miller, whose special breakfast we served, every Christmas from 1968 to 1971. This gentle little old man incidentally provided me with a baby step toward redemption, not by works—lest I should have boasted, which, I confess, I did—but by the infusion of grace, through faith that had not yet come to me, but was en route, if coming in a slow boat. Among his rich and varied accomplishments, Mr. Charles Miller had briefly played professional baseball when he was twenty years old for the 1912 St. Louis Browns. Mr. Miller’s modest abode was located among a small cluster of buildings and shielded from West Bridge Street by shops such as Paraphernalia, Ristorante Villa Vito (famous then and now for its “Mangia Platter”), and Rob Z. Rich Clothier, run

by two resourceful partners with palindromic names, Robert Richardson and Richard Robertson—if those were their real names, for no one knew—who delighted in men and their apparel, always wanting to make men look their best. Those of us who knew Rob and Rich also knew that the store’s original name was actually Rob ’N Rich, but the wooden N had not been affixed properly to the expensive (so I heard) original store sign. Thus, after a storm, the N had been blown around into the position that made it look like a Z. Rob and Rich left it this way because it seemed to enhance their business. After that storm they increasingly catered only to “high end” customers and soon began to stock only top-quality apparel, for the store name now sounded like a French version of “rob the rich,” which title may have subliminally functioned as a challenge to male clothing shoppers. “Am I automatically rich if I buy my clothes there? Can I go in there and not be robbed?” In any case, their business flourished. Mr. Miller and I lived just behind Rob and Rich’s store, and we slowly became friendly. Mr. Miller was virtually a shut-in by the mid-1960s, when he was already an old man, and Sheila and I invited him to Christmas breakfast. We knew he was not Jewish, and, though we were, we knew that he should not spend Christmas Day alone. Added to this was the fact that he clearly enjoyed our company. So, each year on Christmas Day, I would prepare him pancakes and bacon, though Sheila meticulously avoided eating any—nor would my son. I perhaps snuck a piece or two during the preparation of the unclean meat, but, I rationalized, this was only to ensure that it was properly cooked so that we would not make Mr. Miller ill. The delightful old man therefore offered Sheila and me a good excuse to celebrate Christmas, something I had sorely missed ever since quasi-converting to Judaism in 1964. I had always loved the story of the wise men, and, nearly as much, I wistfully recalled Christmas carols, with their eternally optimistic message of hope for humankind. Besides, having Mr. Miller over gave me an excuse to set up the Christmas yard, which I had loved to do since childhood. The Christmas yard, in turn, provided a reason to get a Christmas tree, which afforded me the opportunity to trim the tree and decorate the apartment, and of course to send out Christmas (and Hanukkah) cards, which gave me a pretext for celebrating both holidays, though emphasizing Hanukkah, of course. And celebrating Christmas allowed me again to create a space for my parents in the holiday season, because they could then visit us, mutely rejoicing in my gradual return toward Christendom with every Christmas present they gave their grandson.

Perhaps to deemphasize the material aspect of the holidays, I would always tell my son in advance of Christmas specifically what Harry and Blanche had bought him, and then instruct him to act surprised on Christmas Day. “Why, Mother, why?” he would ask. “Because you don’t want to hurt their feelings.” “No, not that. Why,” he would inquire, “do you tell me every year what they bought me in advance?” “So that you can act surprised,” I would say with a mildly aggravated tone. “No,” he would say, “I mean, why don’t you just not tell me so I can actually be surprised.” “Because, if you were not to like what they bought you, you would not want to hurt their feelings, would you?” “But Mother, in that case I could just act like I liked whatever it was that they bought me. Besides, I always do like what they buy me.” “Just shut up and act surprised. More tea, Mr. Miller?” I said on Christmas morning, 1968, changing the topic of conversation. “Yes, that would be fine, thank you.” “What was it like writing all that music, you know, for the Raggedy Ann musical?” “Well, it was exciting. We were in the big town in those days, in New York, I mean. Johnny Gruelle and I would go to the apartment of one of our closest friends, Will Woodin. Locking ourselves in for the whole weekend, we would just compose, and we would compose for hours. I mostly wrote down the musical scores while Johnny worked on the lyrics with Will, though we all worked on all of it together. I was the purest musician, and Johnny was the storyteller, while Will, whose true gift lay in keeping the finances, did a bit of both. Those were great days, and I was able to quit my job at Harms music and start my own business. There were tough times, as well, because in the midst of all our activity the stock market crashed and the whole country suffered in, well,

you know, Elaine, the worst of times. My company survived, but just barely. Still, we had a lot of fun in the midst of the storms of life.” “My mother spoke many times of those years,” Sheila said, “often with tears in her eyes.” This was a fitting statement, for I thought I saw a bit of moisture coming to the eyes of Mr. Miller himself, whether it was merely his age or the nostalgia that the moment afforded us all. “Yes, those were hard times, but Christmas always got us through, not simply because it was, and is, such a hopeful season,” Mr. Miller explained, “but because the sales of my musical scores did much better during that season of the year.” “Did you write more music with Johnny Gruelle and Will … what was his name?” Sheila asked. “Yes, we did work on a few more pieces together. But Will—Will Woodin—was only a musician on the side. His day job was that of a financier, and had our compositional trio stayed together, I’m sure Miller Music Co. would have made it much bigger than it did, for after leaving Harms—a name I always thought was too foreboding to have lasting success—I set up my own music business. And Will, well, boy did he make it big! Having garnered quite a name for himself in the financial world, he was tapped by none other than President Roosevelt to be the secretary of the treasury. This occurred during the critical years as America struggled out of the Depression. So fine at what he did was Will Woodin! About the same time Johnny had been having some health issues, so he moved to the warmer climes of Florida, which spelled the breakup of our team. Ah, but we had some great days in New York in the late twenties and early thirties.” He paused reflectively and added, “You know, my dears, I have no regrets, no regrets at all. It really was a wonderful life.” “Mr. Miller, did you really play pro baseball?” My son piped in. “Mom said you did.” “Well, as a matter of fact,” he said, stretching forth the neatly wrapped box that his old and wavering hands had brought with him, “I have a Christmas present for you, son. You open it, and I will tell you about my not-so-stellar baseball ‘career.’ ” My son opened the box to find within a beautiful new baseball mitt. Mr. Miller

explained the gift: “It’s a Rawlings infielder’s mitt, signed by Eddie Mathews. You know Eddie Mathews, don’t you? He was the famous third baseman of the once Boston, later Milwaukee, and lately Atlanta Braves.” He paused as my son turned the mitt over in his hands, sliding it on his left hand. “Mathews, you know, took Milwaukee to the World Series championship in ’57. What a fine long career Eddie had! He finally retired, playing his last season with the Detroit Tigers, just this past year,” Mr. Miller said smoothly, though it was clear that he was carefully reviewing the details of Eddie Mathews’s career in his mind even as he spoke. “You can use this mitt for any infield position, except first base. I think you’ll turn out to be an infielder, son; I just have a feeling. You have a good baseball look to you, and a good baseball name.” “Wow, Mr. Miller,” my son said, “I never had a mitt before.” “Break it in well, my boy, and put plenty of oil on it. Oil’s the best stuff for a new mitt.” So the next day my son went to Ristorante Villa Vito and oiled his mitt with a generous helping of Signora Favoroso’s olive oil, in which she had been soaking three cloves of garlic. For this reason his mitt always smelled more delectable than those of the other boys. “My baseball career, I’m sorry to say, was, unlike Eddie Matthews’s, very short lived. I only ever played one game, coming up to bat twice, and grounding out both times. But my moment of fame, such as it was, came on a diving play in the infield. I was the St. Louis Browns’s new shortstop, young—if you can imagine it—energetic, and known for my glove. You know what I mean by ‘glove,’ don’t you? It’s baseball talk for fielding ability. “Now I wanted to show the manager, George Stovall, that I could really play. The Browns had been terrible the year before and were not doing so well even for George, who had just taken over his managerial role, and was thus trying all kinds of things to get the team on a winning track. He wanted a good defensive unit, and when he heard about my fielding capabilities, he put me out there at shortstop in the seventh inning, hoping for my defense to help the team close out that game with a win. This was important because we had lost more than a hundred games in 1911 and we were on a similar trajectory that year. So here I

was, fresh to the majors—I had only been called up at the end of June—playing what would be my one and only game on August 19, 1912, against the crosstown rival St. Louis Cardinals.” “Oh, the nineteenth of August. That’s my birthday!” I piped in. “It was the bottom of the ninth, and, as I said, I had batted twice already, to no avail, but now I was in the field at my shortstop position and ready to help our team close out this game with a win. A runner was on first, and there were two outs. Crack went the bat, and the ball went toward our third baseman at a clip. Lunging to his left, Jimmy—Jimmy Austin—snagged the ball and then zipped it toward second where I had to reach for it. The ball was thrown low, toward the legs of the base runner in full slide. I caught the ball, and tagged the runner, but I heard a loud popping sound as I tagged. Nevertheless, I managed to get the ball out of my mitt cleanly and fire it off to first base, completing the double play and getting us a badly needed win.” “What was the popping noise?” my son asked. “When I looked down at my arm, I saw my hand just hanging there by the skin. The wrist bone was completely severed, and the pain was, well …” He paused and lifted his left hand, pulling up the sleeve of his old man’s cardigan sweater to display the slightly misshapen limb. “I could never play baseball again. But as you can see, over time it healed, if a little crooked. That’s why I pursued my second love, music, and became a musician. And, thus, my life healed, too.” It was time for cheese now, and I brought out my cheese plate, thanking God without words that Mr. Miller had forced me to keep Christmas, if not in my heart, at least in my home. It’s funny, I thought to myself, how Christmas is like the pungent smell of certain types of cheese. It has a kind of buoyancy, an annoying obstinacy. I later realized that Christmas shares that characteristic with Welsh Presbyterianism. Though we had eaten breakfast less than an hour before, Mr. Miller indulged in a sizable hunk of Hên Sîr cheese on a Carr’s water biscuit. “The face on that cheese plate is, for all its luster, rather disturbing, Elaine,” Mr. Miller said, as I served him a second piece of the flavorful Welsh cheese. “Would it be possible, do you suppose, to turn it round the other direction?”

Leni, though not Welsh, was as crafty as I was. She knew what a sucker both Sheila and I were for animals, and as a consequence, one fine day in August of 1969—just about the time, I recall, of the launch of the first mission to the moon —Leni left an orphan half-tabby, half-Persian (favoring this side) kitten in a box at the door of our apartment with a note: “To a good home, please, or else, for me, the gas chamber.” As always, she knew exactly what to say, what to write. When I opened the box and saw the kitten, even before I read the note, I suspected Leni’s handiwork. The first word out of my mouth became the cat’s name, “Damn it!” which I modified, within a few weeks, to Dammy Poo, because I was a bit less than horrified but a bit more than discomfited to hear the uncomely expression cross the barrier of my son’s teeth; besides, there were the dingle berries. Before I had renamed the cat, however, my son got into an interesting conversation with his schoolteacher and some classmates about the names of their animals. My son rarely spoke of Betsy, perhaps because he was still traumatized at the thought of having lost his sister to the Philadelphia Zoo. But the acquisition and maintenance of Poo was a different matter. Like all preteens —for he was about twelve years old then—my son delighted in dingle berries and related subjects and relished any opportunity to speak about such topics at school, especially to girls. Besides, having a cat named Dammit was a point of information whereby, he reasoned, he could upset his female classmates such as Vonnie Ort, a beautiful, blonde, someday-to-be-cheerleading classmate of his. After he had done so several times, someone told the teacher (it was not Vonnie who did so, as she privately found my son funny), the teacher told the principal, and my son wound up in “the office.” The principal was outraged not because the cat was named Dammit but because my son, as I had once done to Dean Laufermund, dared to stick to his story: “But we do have a cat named Dammit.” Dr. Stern, the aptly named principal of New Hope–Solebury Elementary School, insisted he take back the story: “Recant!” “I won’t!” “Recant!”

“Non revoco!” my son retorted, coming to his feet, tipping over the child-sized chair in which he had been sitting as he did so. “I tell you, sit down, young man, and rethink your recalcitrance.” “Here I stand,” he responded, and, glancing over his shoulder, added, “I can do no other.” My son and I shared this persistent obduracy. Dr. Stern—for my son was twelve at the time, near the end of the sixth grade—called me at Cherry Street School in the Neshaminy School District, where I was teaching, to see if we actually did have a cat named Dammit. Embarrassed and fearing repercussions, I flat out denied it—after all, by then we were calling the cat Poo—though I knew that my denial would likely not help my son’s situation. Needless to say, I had to come get him out of detention hall that afternoon. So much trouble that cat did cause, a cat that I had for many years, well after Sheila left and Louise arrived, and poetry and art began to be replaced with dogs, a farm, and the love of nature, as I moved from the artistic and poetic world of Arcadia to the georgic regions of Walden. Yet, as I mentioned at this chapter’s outset, the georgic dimension was paralleled with a newfound and thoroughly worldly political agenda that ran retrograde to my every attempt to become earthier but less worldly in of how I lived. Perhaps to punish that cat—for it was not just his presence, his dingle berries, or the ubiquity of his Persian fur in the apartment that vexed me but the fact that he would occasionally urinate on the radiator—I decided to get a dog, the first dog of many, but the best of them all. Like the famous Swedish doctor of Capri, I, too, was, and remain in my present state, very much a lover of animals—dogs, cats, horses, monkeys, birds, perhaps in about that order, though I would rather have a bird for a pet than a monkey. In fact, the reader will recall that I once did have a bird, specifically a myna bird (Acridotheres tristis), in the early 1960s. At that time my son was three years old, and it never occurred to me that by virtue of my having a talking bird the child might begin to formulate his earliest sentences in myna-bird-ese, which is precisely what happened. It was just after my divorce, and, even though I had moved back in with my parents, I was lonely. On Sheila’s advice, I promptly and impulsively bought the bird after Sheila responded to my query, “What if I buy a

talking bird?” “It might make you less lonely,” was her response. So I bought the bird forthwith and named it Cookie, after my father’s old cat, which had died a few years before. The fact that I gave his old cat’s name to the bird, coupled with Cookie’s ability to parrot back whole phrases, delighted my father to no end. Harry even taught it to say a few of the saucy things that men say when they work in a power plant, since he had recently transitioned from the mines to the United Gas Improvement Company’s new operation in Wilkes-Barre. Blanche had never allowed Harry to get a bird on the principle that they are dirty and that no Welshman she ever knew owned one, except for Mr. Mickey Musgrove, the itinerant violin teacher, sometimes of Plymouth, Pennsylvania. He was rumored to have a parrot. But was he really Welsh? Is Musgrove, after all, a Welsh name? No one had ever thought so, and the only other Musgrove anyone could recall came from Herefordshire, a shire near, but not in, Wales. Although discreetly cordoned off in my room, a talking bird was now in the house. Though my father saw her for only a few minutes a day, she afforded him a certain palpable delight, even though the bird had to share attention with a lovely dog, Zora, whom Harry had recently acquired. Zora had been my dog, but after my divorce I easily fobbed her off on my parents, and Harry in particular doted on Zora as a father might a spoiled child, amply proving that he was not simply a bird person or a cat person but an animal person, in general. It was not until years later that I discovered my son was an animal person, too. Yet, like Harry, he always seemed to have a foot in both camps (i.e., those of animals and people). Mine was, like the Swedish doctor of Capri, always squarely in the camp of animals. The most delightful thing about Cookie, the female bird named after a male cat, was not the rapidity with which she learned to say, “Cookie want a cracker,” a delightfully discursive turn of phrase, but rather the fact that she learned to say profanities with equal rapidity. I have already mentioned the mildly saucy phrases with which my father managed to inculcate her. But I was the master teacher. Thus, not infrequently she would squawk out the phrase, “Shut your trap!” or “You bet your ass!” either of which phrases the bird was prepared to say more than once, often two or three times in a row.

The twofold troublesome consequence was the fact that my small son was learning to speak “in bird” rather than with proper diction, giving fresh meaning to the nomenclature “pidgin English.” His pitch was, like the bird’s, higher than other children in his kindergarten group, and he frequently would repeat the same sentiment two or three times. Worse yet, he would, in his squeaky repetitive mode de parlance, repeat precisely the phrases of the bird at the most inappropriate moments. Just before the school lunch at the onset of hunger pangs, for example, he would say, “Cookie want a cracker,” repeating it two or three times until he got his lunch, often inducing the teacher, who might misunderstand the position of cookie in the sentence, to provide a sweet treat. When the teacher would ask if the children had completed the drawing assignment or were ready to go off to recess, he would squeak out, “You bet your ass,” again at least twice, sometimes even three times, exactly like the bird. And if he got into trouble for anything at school—say the teacher was riled up by his use of the word “ass,” or the seemingly sarcastic (but actually just squeaky) way he spoke—he would not refrain from letting “Shut your trap!” cross the barrier of his teeth, again not just once, but at least twice, and sometimes even thrice. For this reason the school authorities concluded that he had social adjustment issues. For his part, my son eventually realized, I am glad to say, that he should not simply parrot back what Cookie or any subsequent teacher might say. But let me turn briefly to my dog Harveyetta, whom I acquired in 1972, for I desire to speak of that best animal here. I first “accepted” her because I thought, since she was a sheep dog, she might be able to herd the cats, especially Poo, away from the radiator on which that cat so often urinated. This plan worked perfectly, as Poo, Biggest, Li(o) Bai Kaiko (partially named after the Chinese poet), and Fang all went from basically being indoor cats to charging out of the apartment as soon as the dog charged in. They never needed a litter box again, and the radiators and thus the whole apartment slowly ceased to smell of cat urine. Hitherto I have not spoken much about Fang. That is not because I did not love Fang, for I did, even as I obsessed over all my animals. But Fang’s departure in a Thunderbird convertible often brings to my mind a vision of Fang sipping lemonade by some rich person’s pool. I have always hoped that the wealthy people who drove away with Fang treated her well, as she certainly deserved, for she was a good cat, even, one might say, obedient, and, on the occasion of being (probably accidentally) abducted, perhaps too obedient.

8 Tea with the Professor

The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there, And warmly debated the matter; The Orthodox said that it came from the air, And the Heretics said from the platter. —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Parable”

I n contrast to her quiet departure, the acquisition of Fang the cat was particularly strange. The year was 1966, and it had been a bad animal year. That was about the same period of time when I had acquired Betsy from a Harrisburg pet store and deposited soon-to-be Jo Jo in the Philadelphia Zoo. On a separate occasion that year we took a drive to State College, Pennsylvania, the seat of Penn State University. We went to see the campus and speak with some professors, as Sheila was contemplating applying to Penn State for a master’s degree in social work. Betsy came along for the ride, in part simply to keep my then-six-year-old son entertained. She was a good traveler, tending to confine herself to the back seat, and mostly content, like a good child, simply to eat and play games with my son. He had a coloring book, and Betsy, as an act of emulation or rivalry or both, liked to color in the coloring book when my son was not doing so. The frightening aspect of that activity was its result: one often could not tell whether my son or the monkey had colored the object in question, so bad were his artistic skills, and so good, for a monkey, were hers. Fang always had a strong attraction to automobiles. That is how she came to us; that is how she went away, roughly five years later. She arrived, as it were, in an old 1957 VW Bug but rode away, as I mentioned earlier, in a 1970 Thunderbird, which most would say is a vast upgrade. The VW Bug in question was that

which Sheila and I used as the family car until we acquired, in 1967, a used Fiat Cinquecento to replace it. Sheila drove most, dropping me and my son off at the Shermans Dale school each morning, while we procured a ride home each afternoon with Barbara Cohen, whose sister had graduated from Wilkes College with me. When I met Barbara at the Shermans Dale school, I thought that I knew her, but I actually knew her sister whom, naturally enough, she resembled. On the occasion of our visit to Penn State, Fang the cat saw Betsy the monkey in the car and, I suppose, out of natural feline curiosity wanted to come over to the vehicle to investigate further. We had left the windows cracked and the doors locked, assuming that Betsy would remain calm and well behaved while Sheila and I and my son went into Rackley Building, the main social work building, to talk with Professor Wiley. Actually, it was Sheila who met Professor Wiley, as I simply wandered through the echoing corridors of power, inspecting the numerous portraits of deans on the walls. Each looked so very staid. It seemed that they had all used up every noble thought they had ever had and now just had gas or hemorrhoids, or regretted ever getting married, or wished that they had gone into real politics or had been better scholars instead of s. Yet there they were, proud of their vast array of accomplishments, provided, at least, they did not dwell upon how very limited those accomplishments in fact were. The puffed up German word stolz comes to my mind, as does the Welsh dolur rhefrol, which, when translated, means something like “my bottom hurts.” While I was spending far too much time reflecting on these portraits, Betsy was, in the meantime, going crazy in the VW Beetle. She was pushing buttons on the dashboard and opening the glove box in an attempt to get to the cat that had climbed up onto the sloping hood of the car and that was amusing herself by leering at the monkey through the front window, as cats, or at least especially bold ones, are wont to do to monkeys. The monkey was becoming increasingly desperate to get out of the car and get at the cat and therefore was leaping about in the car so much that her monkey diaper fell off, and a predictable mess ensued. After a few moments one of Betsy’s prehensile thumbs (for there are also thumbs on monkeys’ feet) caught hold of, quite accidentally, the lock on the door, popping it up. When, a few minutes later, Betsy tried the door handle, it wondrously came open and out went Betsy. I may not have mentioned that monkeys, especially woolly monkeys, are very fast and, of course, can climb quickly. That is why—when Fang, in swift retreat, tried to climb a nearby tree—her chosen mode of self-preservation proved futile,

as Betsy climbed that tree just as rapidly as the hard-charging feline. The cat jumped from the tree (which should have been a premonition of things yet to come), ran back toward the car, and, as cats do, crouched behind the front-left tire. Betsy, as monkeys do, and certainly as grease monkeys very often do, scooted on her back under the car, which caused her beautiful but soiled red dress to come off. I beheld this spectacle from just across the parking lot in front of Rackley Hall, fresh from contemplating the pained faces of the grand procession of college deans. The contrast between the panoply of diaconal visages and the naked monkey chasing the cat under the car was, to say the least, stark. How, I wondered, did the monkey get out of the car? Acting as quickly as seemed decorous in the erudite setting of the Penn State campus, I told my son to stay on the steps of the building while I briskly made for the VW Bug. The monkey had by now emerged from the other side of the car and was running around and around the car, slapping one hand against her side while using the other hand to strike her own head with an open palm, the way stage actors sometimes gesture to indicate a sudden and profound discovery, or the way that one might imitate, quite correctly, a monkey. As Betsy rounded the motor end of the car—one may recall that a VW Beetle has its engine in the aft—Fang saw her chance to escape. Darting from under the front-left tire, she completely disappeared from view. Had she gone up the tree again? Had she simply bolted inconspicuously through the parking lot? Her fate was as yet unclear. What was clear, however, was that neither Betsy nor I could find the cat, and now it was time for Betsy to get back in the car, after I redressed her in her soiled and matted dress and redressed her for insubordination and indiscretion. I made my son wait another twenty minutes on the step of the social science building as I cleaned up the VW Bug. I had the car back in borderline drivable condition within the twenty further minutes that it took for Sheila to finish meeting with Professor Wiley, who had also introduced her to one of his colleagues and offered her iced tea with a fresh sprig of the mint that Dr. Wiley’s secretary, Miss Mary Anne Summers, grew in a secret patch of dirt just outside the main entrance to Rackley Hall. Furthermore, Miss Summers had brewed the tea (Lipton) herself, stirred in just the right amount of sugar, and cooled it with a single tray of ice from the icebox in Rackley Hall’s basement, leaving the concoction cool, but not cold—tasty, but not crisply so.

Sheila therefore returned to the car refreshed and quite impressed with how she had been received, while I in the meantime had been mired in monkey poo. Had she not been able to smell it, Sheila might hardly have believed the incredible adventure of the cat and the monkey, which sounded as if it came straight out of a story from Wu Cheng’en’s classic Chinese tale of journey and adventure. As we drove home, Betsy showed that she was still a bit overwrought by the antics of the afternoon. Indeed, rather than travel well, as she usually did, Betsy kept trying to get into the front seat of the car while I drove home. Sheila, normally a quiet and very kind person, even had to raise her voice at the irascible animal. My son was trying to restrain the monkey by her tail, which Betsy was swinging about more often than usual, almost in the manner of a dog. At about the halfway point of the journey, Sheila picked up some of the items from the floor that had been in the glove box—a road map, a frayed owner’s manual, and a road flare, useful in case of a night emergency. Opening the glove box itself, she saw gray cat eyes looking back at her from inside the box, specifically two eyes and one set of fangs, the latter of which protruded from a very frightened cat’s hissing mouth. For this reason Sheila called the cat Fang, a name of which, frankly, I was never fond. I would have preferred Bellatrix, or La belle dame sans merci, which I would have shortened to Nôtre Dame, pronounced in the French manner. But Sheila chose Fang since it was she who discovered the cat, and this was appropriate, for the cat would return the favor of finding Sheila within a few weeks. The conflict between Fang and Betsy did not cease until Betsy was exiled to the Philadelphia Zoo. A few weeks after the two animals and the rest of us had settled into the house in Shermans Dale together, there was another quite turbulent cat-chasing incident. Betsy got into one of her anti-Fang moods and chased the new family member around and around the house. This was not hard to do because, as I said earlier, the monkey was very fast and the house, not much larger than a good-sized apartment, was small by comparison with other houses in the neighborhood. After a few go-rounds, my son wisely opened the back door of the house, intending only to let the cat out but accidentally letting out the monkey as well, which chased the cat up a very tall pine tree that gave shade to the tiny backyard of the tiny house. The higher the monkey went, the higher did the cat go to avoid her. Finally, both cat and monkey were at the very top of the tree.

Monkeys, being highly appetitious creatures, are easily distracted, like men, by food or sex; one recalls the multiple requests for a stud that two zoos made within a matter of days. Inasmuch as Betsy was really a male monkey, even though we conceived of him as a female, he was probably even more easily distracted than a man is. Since there were no enticing female monkeys in Shermans Dale, I simply used food, her favorite food in particular—namely, a plum. Inspecting at a distance the fruit that I was waving over my head, the monkey rapidly descended from the tree. Having easily duped the monkey, I whisked her back into the house and back into her cage. That left only the cat in the tree. I put the TV on to distract the monkey. Fortunately, one of her favorite soap operas was on at that moment. My son, who watched far too much television for his own good, stated that he had seen on TV cats stuck in trees, and he assured me that they always managed to get down on their own. Yet both Sheila and I were concerned that the cat would not find her way down, so we stood out in the yard calling her. “Fang! Fang! Come down here! Come down! Sweet Fang!” By now the neighbors had learned simply and completely to ignore us. No one came out of a nearby house to inquire about what was happening or whether he or she could help, for events such as this were not uncommon at our house, and, though they had first amused the neighbors, they now clearly annoyed them one and all. Thus, they shut themselves in their houses, battening all hatches for fear of becoming involved with “those crazy people with the monkey.” With the onset of dusk, to the further irritation of our neighbors, Sheila and I started calling more frantically. When our most proximate neighbor, whose name I never did know, opened the storm window on his door ever so slightly, probably just out of curiosity, I started to move toward his house, gesturing my hands in desperation. To my chagrin, he shut the storm window again, latching it loudly, and pretended not to hear me. And then, just as I was turning around, it happened. Fang, like a flying squirrel, plummeted from the top of the tree, all feet braced for a high-speed, high-impact landing, which is precisely what took place, directly upon Sheila’s head (I realize that this may sound improbable, but it really did happen). Fortunately, Sheila required only a trip to the emergency room and fourteen stitches. The real problem was that much of Sheila’s hair had to be shaved, an unfortunate consequence of the impact that for me evoked the memory of my electrical incident at Wilkes College. The monkey, the cat, and Sheila’s very odd hairdo

only served to heighten the scuttlebutt among the neighbors. The cat, at least, was fine, saved from certain death by embedding its claws in Sheila’s head. It occurred to me that I could lobby Sheila to change the cat’s name to Claw instead of Fang, but the wound was perhaps too deep and certainly too fresh for such a nominal transformation.

Animals were not at the heart of the problems associated with my desire to find, in psychological , my way home, for they were pleasant reminders of the pleasant unruliness of life, much of which was external and not associated, except incidentally, with the unruliness of my soul. My social awkwardness—as evidenced, for example, in my penchant for fawning—was intimately connected with my inner struggle and was often commingled with misinterpretation of data. This struggle waxed greater when, the next year, I moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania, about which wonderful town I have already spoken. With cats (specifically only Biggest and Fang, as Li(o) Bai Kaiko and Poo would come later) in tow but sans monkey, Sheila and I, and my son, too, could begin life afresh. When I speak of my social awkwardness as evidenced by fawning, I am not speaking of typical fawning, such as that which I did from time to time in “Abby’s Country Store and Coal Mine Museum” (sic) on North Main Street. I owed the discovery of Abby, as I did so many of my other friends in New Hope, to my son’s escapades in that tiny hamlet. The lad went to Abby’s store with the dollar that Mr. Nutzen, my new landlord, would give him for delivering my rent on time. “You see, boy,” Mr. Nutzen would say insincerely when my ten-year-old son would bring him the rent money (always in cash), “your mother is one of my favorite renters. But, you know, son, she is not always on time with her rent payment. Now let’s you and I make a little deal. You ‘inspire’ her to send you along with that rent by the third of each month, and I’ll give you a dollar. Get it here on the first, and I’ll give you two.” Completely separately, for I had no knowledge of this business proposal, I would often complain fiercely about Mr. Nutzen and how much rent he was charging. “He’s a Nazi,” I would say. “His name even sounds like ‘Nazi.’ Imagine him assessing a late fee for rent just two weeks late! The nerve of him!” I had taken a picture of him from an ment in the New Hope Gazette and put it behind the iron grid of my dartboard, shooting for his eyes, as I once had done with the photo of a certain petty German chancellor. My son, who was on Mr. Nutzen’s payroll (though I did not know it), would pipe in, “I don’t know, Mom. He seems awfully nice to me.”

“So did Hitler deceive the Hitler Youth!” I would retort. “But mom, he’s a nice man. I talk to him sometimes after I leave the rent.” “Don’t you be talking to strangers. Ydych fichi mochyn mawr!” I added in Welsh, calling my son a dirty swine—though actually it is a weight-challenged swine—to put the stamp of Welsh authority on my statement. Needless to say, my son only ever got an occasional dollar from Mr. Nutzen, and by occasional I mean once in a very great while. Had I known I would surely have regarded my son’s sympathy for the man as qualifying him to be a member of the “Nutzen Party.” Whenever he procured such filthy lucre, my son would go straight to Abby’s shop and buy string licorice similar to that made by his great-grandmother, Lizzie Ann, who uniquely loved my son and before she died predicted for him a special life. (I did everything in my power to ensure that his life would be as unique and special as possible.) Abby was a large woman beyond merely buxom or curvacious. She was portly and motherly in such a wonderful way that she had the capacity to endow every word, every glance, with a loving touch. She asked my son about himself and his family, and when she learned that his grandfather had been a coal miner and that I was the daughter of a miner, she simply had to meet me, so he went home, forthwith, licorice in hand and mouth to fetch me; distracted by the invitation, I failed to inquire just how my son had paid for the licorice. Abby’s Coal Mine Museum was really just an odd part of her candy shop within which, for fifty cents, one could enter the lovely coal-mining exhibit room, complete with coal miner’s gear, lantern hats, shovels and picks, plans of mines, and even sticks of dynamite. How odd, I thought to myself at the time, that Abby thought to pair candy and coal—as if a variation on the Christmas-stocking motif —thus outstripping my grandmother’s ingenious, if incongruous, marketing combination of boots and candy. I think for Abby and Ralph, her officially retired and most certainly retiring but nevertheless genteel husband, it was a great disappointment that they were unable to have children. Accordingly, they “adopted” me as the elder and my son as the younger child because of their ion for coal mining, the reason for which was never entirely clear to me. “Is it a great metaphor for child birth? Is it

that because they have been unable to bring forth a child from the depths of Abby’s body, and because the substance of coal offers itself as a fitting symbol of their unfruitfulness?” So I thought at the time, though I am now sure that I was overanalyzing the situation. My awkward fawning comes into the story because I was so touched that Abby would show such attention to me and my son that I could hardly stop myself from oohing and awing over every exhibit in the museum, as if I were in the Guggenheim or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Look at that vase; isn’t the Athenian fourth-century black-figure work extraordinary? I very much prefer black figure to red figure, don’t you? Classic form, classic beauty.” Such a conversation might be fitting enough in the Met, though, even there, it might be a bit pretentious. But to transfer that same conversation, mutatis mutandis, to a fifty-cent coal-mining “museum” in New Hope, Pennsylvania, is frankly ridiculous. But that was precisely what I did. “I always prefer a twenty-degree angle for the shaft entrance, don’t you Ralph? The reason shafts collapse is because some freewheeling, renegade mining engineer thinks he can go twenty-two or twenty-three degrees, which of course is too much for even the stoutest timber cross beams.” Like the dilettante in the Met—whose preference for “fourth-century” black-figure pottery is based on a slender amount of knowledge mixed with a hearty dose of manque-deconnaissance (for Athenian black-figure pottery was no longer produced in the fourth century)—I was shoveling the horse manure, to look smart, faster than a miner moving rubble after a dynamite blast. Could Abby see through this as mere fawning and story weaving? I don’t know, but I suspect that Ralph did. But all that “innocent” fawning is not the most annoying kind about which I am speaking and in which, from time to time, I found myself indulging in an ample manner. One further example will suffice. Dr. Champ Clark Carney was a professor at what was called, at the time, Trenton State College. (I rejoiced that the name of the New Jersey school was not, like so many of the smaller state schools in Pennsylvania, Trenton State Teachers College; it is now simply called The College of New Jersey.) I came to know Dr. Carney through his wife, Bess, with whom I taught in the Cherry Street School in the Neshaminy District of suburban Philadelphia. I was then taking an occasional summer class that I might achieve, over time, my master’s equivalency, because if one had even merely the equivalent of an MA,

one could get a noticeable pay raise, which would make it easier to pay Mr. Nutzen on time (which would have delighted my son, because of his despicable deal). Bess suggested I take a class from her husband, whom she called by his middle name, Clark, though his first name, Champ, seemed like a perfectly lovely name to me. And indeed, as I was considering the possibility of taking his course, I reasoned that I should first meet him, perhaps having the richly intellectual couple over for tea, which occasion would provide an opportunity for me to introduce myself. This, of course, was where my fawning, the fullest bloom of my thoroughgoing social awkwardness, came into play. It was about two thirty on a Saturday afternoon in March of 1971 when the Carneys arrived for tea. I had gone to great lengths, breaking out all the old Welsh serving ware that in the 1870s had made the journey from Wales in the great black coffin-like trunk: a white tea service, each cup delicately trimmed with gold leaf; silver, English-made, but nevertheless good and solid; Lucy Hughes Jones’s teapot with its unique swirl pattern. About the unique Welsh history of all of these I would shortly inform, in laborious detail, Dr. Champ Clark Carney, professor of geography; that explanation would surely give way to a similar exposition of every detail appertaining to my other precious dishes. “That way,” I reasoned to myself as I devised in my own mind how best to present my tales of the dishes and their deep significance, “I can evidence my native intelligence and give myself a leg up in the class.” So spirited was my competitive nature. That flaw followed me throughout my life and probably explains, to some degree, my penchant for fawning, as well as some of my social awkwardness. “But wait,” I muttered to myself and then said outright to Sheila, “we cannot forget the cheese plate. We must have it out on display as well. But if we put out the cheese plate, we would have to serve cheese, and cheese doesn’t go with tea. . . . Or does it?” “I don’t think so,” Sheila responded to me, dismissively, as I thought aloud. “There must be some sort of cheese that goes with tea.” “Well, perhaps …” Sheila started a sentence but broke off, pausing before speaking candidly. “No, I’m sure there simply isn’t any; at least I’ve never heard of one.”

“Perhaps what?” I said. “Well, perhaps Roland might know. But cheese does not go with tea. I cannot think …” I interrupted, “Roland of Ye Olde Cheese Shoppe of New Hope?” Then I paused and, in short order, affirmed, “Yes, he might at that!” “Still,” I thought to myself, “he just might ‘make up’ some cheese to go with tea, alleging that a little old lady who lived way out on Aquetong Road in Solebury told him that it would go especially well with a certain kind of tea, of which type of tea, no doubt, he would just happen to have a fresh supply in his Ye Olde Cheese Shoppe. Certainly he would sell tea, if he had peanut butter.” Yet where else could we turn at so dire a moment? Ruminating thus, I concluded that the best way to find out would be to dispatch my son on an errand to Ye Olde Cheese Shoppe of New Hope to find out. At least I had some confidence that Roland would know, for he did know a great deal about cheese. Whenever I went to Ye Old Cheese Shoppe (a name that has a strange ring to it, as, read the wrong way, one might imagine such cheese to be dangerously laden with mold or bacteria), Roland would always wax lyrical in his lovely Irish brogue—was that spurious, too, I now began to wonder?—about how this cheese befit a port wine or that some Prosecco, or how another one was superb with strawberry jam and was best without alcohol altogether. Roland certainly knew his cheese, and he, beyond all others in our little town, could say what cheese was right for each and every occasion. Moreover, given his temperament, I knew that in my hour of need, he would be most gratified to tell me: “Lassie, there’s your cheese, there’s your cheese.” Yet I did not have time to go myself on this occasion, busy as I was with the tea party preparation, so I sent my son to quiz Roland about what type of cheese might be palatable, or possibly even more than merely palatable, with hot English (sadly, but there you have it) tea. My son came back with a fine mound of Havarti: “The universal cheese,” Roland had said. “A real ‘type O’ cheese. You can tell your good mother that of all cheeses on the market, this one alone is truly fit for every occasion.” Thankfully, my resourceful Welsh son also talked Roland into selling him some of my son’s favorite—Hên Sîr, the tasty, if strong, Welsh cheese—which would

befit the Welsh cheese plate on which it would be served alongside the Havarti. It may not be a “tea cheese,” but at least it is Cymraeg (i.e., Welsh). “Da iawn!”—the Welsh equivalent of the Italian bravissimo!—I said to my son, as from his bag my son produced and pronounced Hên Sîr correctly. I carefully set out the tea service, giving pride of place to the brown teapot, Grandmother Lucy Hughes Jones’s favorite. Its brown bands undulated like waves of the sea, if a sea characterized by a dark, unwelcoming current. Stationed in front of the pot were the teacups— adorned with petite English silverware, pawns on the tea set battlefield—and, on the right and left rear flanks, were a cream pitcher and sugar bowl, not quite matching, but nice pieces and thoroughly Welsh. There was also a small plate of lemon wedges, stranded to one side, should Dr. (Champ) Clark Carney and his good wife, Bess, his better half and my best colleague, so desire. In the center of it all was the grand oversized cheese plate, like a tank, lid in place, bearing its Cheshire smile that always frightened the small children in the family. I had my lines down about the black trunk, the inferior pawn-like English silver, the superior Welsh undulating teapot—I would leave out its mud-like appearance, of course—and then, having touched on all the rest, I would tell the story of the cheese plate, the central symbol of our family’s history, our struggle out of the mines and our ascent to the heights of, well, if he would let me into his class, a master’s equivalency. I was doing it only, I would insist, to make my parents proud and to show that it was not just my cousins Blythe and Warren who were the smart ones. No, no, I thought, that would sound too competitive. And then a series of questions occurred to me, giving me pause: “What if Roland was, for the first time in his life, wrong about the Havarti? What if Clark—might I call him Clark?—was unwilling to try or, worse, was allergic to the Welsh Hên Sîr? Would Dr. Carney, professor of geography, doubtless a well-travelled and highly cultured man, find it inappropriate to eat cheese—indeed, can cheese even be served—at a tea party? I needed to brew some tea and try it with a small bit of Hên Sîr first, just to be sure, and then some of the “universal cheese,” Havarti, as well. Thus, hastily, I set myself about a sampling of this unique combination of tea and cheese. I chewed the Havarti and swished the tea over it in my mouth. The cheese melted oddly in the flood of the hot tea. The same was true of the Hên Sîr, which

seemed to me to be less tasty with tea. Roland was right about Havarti being “type O.” Perhaps the entire project was not, all in all, as weird as it sounded. One problem remained, however: the smell of the cheese, when I took off the lid from the tray, was off putting, particularly that of the Hên Sîr. Was it too off putting? I wasn’t sure. How could I mute, or at least temper, the olfactory disturbance of the removal of the cheese plate’s lid? Baking soda, I knew, absorbs odors. So, I thought, perhaps I might tape a small open plastic bag of baking soda to the underside of the top of the cheese plate; surely, it would go unnoticed. Yet what if the professor decided to inspect the top and should turn it over? He was, after all, a researcher. I decided against the baking-soda-in-the-lid trick, for, I reasoned, the baking soda might leak onto the cheese and make it look oddly powdery and taste odder yet. Perhaps I could, however, put two toothpick holders filled with baking soda on the cheese plate itself; that might work. But what if he thought he was to dip the cheese into the baking soda? I made Sheila try some Havarti with baking soda; it was, she said, inedible. Doubting her judgment, I made my son try it, and I did so as well. She was right, though my son actually liked it. De gustibus non disputandum. What to do? After a few minutes, Sheila came up with the perfect solution. Invite Cookie McMurphy to us. Cookie, first of all, was very graceful in social contexts such as tea parties. Furthermore, her dog, Thom, always sent Dammy Poo out of the apartment, which would ensure that the cat would not spray on the radiator during the tea party—“an important component of a successful event,” Sheila keenly reasoned. “And, Elaine,” Sheila added, “Cookie always smells of cheese. If she is seated near Dr. Carney, the olfactory shock of opening the cheese plate will certainly be muted. Besides, as soon as Cookie enters the room everyone will subconsciously start wanting to take a bit of cheese. That is why Cookie is so attractive to men, you know.” Sheila was now starting to wax psychological. “She makes men hungry for her; they want to take a bite of her, like an enormous piece of sharp Irish cheddar or Scottish ‘Gruth Dhu’ [popularly known as “crowdie,” it is still made following an old recipe that, some say, can be dated back to the Vikings in Scotland].” “Enough,” I cut in. “You’re right. Cookie is the answer. But her name is suggestive, too. We must have a plate of cookies to go with the tea.”

“Brilliant!” Sheila said. “Shall I get the cookies and you get Cookie, or shall I get Cookie and you get the cookies?” My son snickered at this incidental paronomasia, thinking back, I suppose, to his first teacher of rhetoric, yet another more distant Cookie. “You get Cookie,” I said, “I, the cookies.” If my hyperattention to detail has not already suggested the length to which I have been known to go in my socially awkward behavior, the rest of this story will provide ample evidence. The Carneys arrived just on time, graceful in their demeanor, as I expected. Bess and Clark were a handsome couple in their early fifties, though he looked younger than she. I showed them into the apartment, such as it was at 14 West Bridge Street, New Hope, offering them a seat around the diminutive but very nice marble-top coffee table in my living room, a small but not uncomfortable space. After they had taken their seats, the cat, Poo, made his entrance and began to rub his feline physique against the Carneys’ legs. I worriedly thought to myself, “Oh God! What if the cat has a dingle berry? I should have checked. What if he pees on the radiator before Cookie and Thom arrive?” “So, this is quite an affectionate animal,” the professor said, “a very friendly one. What is his—is it a male?—name?” Before I could answer—I was about temporarily to rename the cat Alexander, after Alexander the Great, to pique the professor’s historical and geographical interest—my sometimes too-intrepid son piped up, “Dammit!” The Carneys looked alarmed. “No, no, no …” I broke in with an awkward chuckle. “My son is not using profanity; it really is the name of the animal. You see, one of my close friends, Leni Fontaine, the Leni Fontaine, a famous local artist (. . . perhaps you know her work?)”—they shook their heads at the same time, indicating they did not —“gave me the cat. I mean she left it in a box on my door with a note ‘to a good home,’ and the first word out of my mouth was, well, you know, ‘Damn it!’ ” I chuckled again, nervously. “So we named the cat Dammit. It’s just a kind of …” I broke off. “Tell me about your research, Clark, er, Dr. Carney,” I said, interrupting myself. He was elegant and reassuring. “No, please call me Clark, at least until you are

in my class this summer.” I was overjoyed to hear these words. “Yes, yes, I am so very interested in your class!” “Do you know a lot about African history?” Until that very moment I had had no idea that the course was to be on Africa, but as you can imagine, given my eclectic taste, this was truly interesting to me. “How lovely,” I responded. “I have always wanted to study the history of the dark continent.” He seemed delighted with this response. But then, lest he should probe me on African history or geography, I began my dissertation about the Welsh serving ware. “The dark undulating teapot that you see before you was that of Lucy Hughes Jones, my great-grandmother. It was her favorite piece. We’re Welsh, you know. Ydych fichi mochyn mawr,” I said, cocking my head to the side as if to call attention to my cleverness, thereby causing my Chinese rice-bowl haircut to jump just a bit. “Interesting,” he said, not disinterestedly. “Do tell me about the large centerpiece.” “Oh no,” I thought to myself, “Sheila is not yet back. What could be detaining her? What if he takes the lid off the plate?” “First some tea,” I said as formally and as authoritatively as I could, trying to keep the lid on the plate and, for that matter, on the entire affair, while also being careful, in of my tone of voice, not to overstep my bounds with the professor. I rose to make the tea and to stall, humming the Welsh national anthem as loudly as I could while boiling the tea water in the kitchen, as I thought to myself, “You alone can restore the state of the affair simply by delaying.” Thankfully, it was not long before Sheila returned with Cookie and Thom in tow. After the requisite introductions, Thom forthwith chased Poo out of the room as Sheila placed Cookie McMurphy smack next to the professor, that her aroma might begin to permeate the room’s atmosphere before we took the lid off the plate.

“It is hard not to notice the grin on the lustrous face that adorns the plate’s lid,” Clark said in a moment of complete transparency, as I was pouring the tea. “It is really very disturbing, almost repulsive.” “Little children have always hated it,” I said in an attempt to affirm his observation. Yet I realized immediately that I had just likened him to a small child. He ignored the possible insult. “You know,” he said warmly, “I can see why, frankly. It’s kind of creepy.” “I think of it as a Cheshire smile, a cunning grin, that of a trickster like Odysseus.” (I could thus reveal to him my knowledge of the classic tales.) “Or perhaps of Fabius Maximus.” (I ed Fabius Maximus, known for his cunning leadership, from a history class I had at Wilkes College with Mrs. Professor Keinhoffe, and I had always ired, but rarely in my life been able to emulate, his patience, which I thought he had used in some victory associated with Africa). “Yes,” he said, acknowledging my attempt to show off my breadth of knowledge, as if I were the black-figure bluffer in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And here was my downfall for—thinking I had just the right memory in mind and assuming that, even if I were a bit off in my recollection, I would seem intelligent—I just had to add, “He was the Greek general who defeated Caesar in Africa by his ‘delay tactics,’ as I recall.” “Well, you’re onto something there,” Clark said with genteel gentility. “It is remarkable that you should mention Quintus Fabius Maximus, for I begin my course on African history with the story of his victory over, not Caesar, who was 150 years or so his junior, but over Hannibal, the great African general whose elephant corps crossed the Alps and might well have overthrown Rome herself, were it not for the tactics of delay that Quintus Fabius Maximus employed.” “Well I knew the Romans and the Greeks were somehow involved,” I said insipidly. “Mom,” my son broke in, “there were no Greeks in the story, unless they were mercenaries.” “Not in the story as we just summarized it,” said the professor, “but the great battle that never quite happened—that nonbattle, I mean, which Q. Fabius

Maximus waged against Hannibal—did involve some mercenaries from Spain and Gaul. They fought for Hannibal—or, rather, they would have fought, had Hannibal been able to engage Quintus Maximus in battle. But Maximus kept delaying and delaying, and ultimately just frustrated Hannibal and his troops. Furthermore,” the professor droned on, “the only battle that Maximus actually won was that of the recapture of Tarentum in 209 BC.” “All this talk of war makes me hungry,” Cookie piped up. “Do you smell cheese?” Bess Carney inquired. “I think I smell cheese.” “The cheese you smell is perhaps Hên Sîr,” Sheila said. “It is typical of a Welsh tea service,” I added, enhancing Sheila’s well-timed introduction of the cheese. “I couldn’t help but notice that you were humming the Welsh national anthem as you tarried in the kitchen,” Clark affirmed. He had noticed, and this delighted me. Bess Carney was just then getting her first solid whiff of Cookie McMurphy and Thom, which, fresh from expelling the cat, had stationed himself near the table, hoping for a scrap. Opening the cheese plate and setting the ominous face of the cover to one side, I issued the epicure’s clarion call, “Please, help yourselves.” “I must say,” Bess continued, apparently having taken no notice of what Sheila or I had been saying, “I have never had cheese with tea.” “I did once,” the professor said, “in Tartu, Estonia. I had cheese with tea there, I recall quite clearly, and, on another occasion, honey, with pickles—strangest thing. The waiter insisted that pickles with honey are good with beer, which I can assure you they are not.” “Yes,” I said, desperately trying to steer the conversation back to the Welsh serving ware. “Many Welsh emigrants settled in Estonia, in the Tartu region—all along the coast,” I added. “Yet Tartu is not on the coast,” the geographer quipped.

“No,” I said, “I know that, of course, it is not. I mean that they settled in Tartu and along the coast of the, the . . . is it the Baltic?” “Yes, very good,” he said, ignoring my momentary geographical lapse. And so, though a bit uncomfortably, I managed to bluff my way out of my mess, serve cheese along with tea, and carry on a rich conversation with the professor, albeit not with the grace that I would have liked, for my tendency to fawn, evidenced in my overly meticulous planning, was then, as usual, my undoing. “Do you mind if I turn the cheese plate the other direction?” Bess asked. “That face is really beginning to disturb me.” A much more disturbing aspect of that cheese plate, however, was discovered later that evening. “May I help with the cleanup?” Dr. Carney asked. Before I could say no, Dr. Carney had taken several of the dirty dishes into my small kitchen and, in his charming and disarming manner, was carrying on a full conversation about the interesting tea and the wonderful company of Cookie, Sheila, and my son. “There’s a brightness to that young man,” he said, observing me cleaning up the last of the Hên Sîr. “Now, carefully hand me the cheese plate, carefully now. I wouldn’t want to damage it.” Reluctantly, I handed it to him, first the cover, then the base. Baptizing it in the soapy water, he rinsed and inspected each of its two pieces carefully, discovering a stamp on the bottom of the serving dish. “How odd,” Dr. Carney said. “This Welsh cheese plate bears a stamp on it quite like those of seventeenth-century Bavaria.” He paused and, removing his glasses, inspected the stamp closely. “Indeed, it is Bavarian.” I had never noticed this dreadful piece of information that contaminated the principal portion of family identity that my mother had given me. Mother had given Lee Ann a serving platter, old, beautiful and completely Welsh. Though I clearly had received the better token of the family’s history, Lee Ann was quite happy with the Welsh serving platter, and I more so with the cheese plate, until this moment. How could I have gotten a spurious heirloom? I could not allow Clark to sense the depth of my disappointment. At least I had, after all, also gotten Lucy Hughes Jones’s teapot and the old black coffin-like trunk that came from Wales with the platter and the cheese plate tucked inside, wrapped carefully

in warm Welsh sweaters. That trunk was unquestionably Welsh, for it was too ugly to have been imported into Wales. But the cheese plate, how could it not have been Welsh? It was—and no one had ever doubted this fact—the object of the family. And now the beloved cheese plate—with its leering Cheshire grin, cherished by all except the small children —turned out to be neither Welsh nor Cheshire but German. What a horrid secret! “No wonder the children have always feared it,” I thought. “It is German … not only German, it is Bavarian. Perhaps it is not a cheese plate at all.” And then, with an uncomfortable grin, I said to the professor, “Perhaps, if it comes from Bavaria, it is a chocolate plate.”

9 The Gracious Dr. Davies

… let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves … and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world. —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

O ther than Bernie Schupp, Harveyetta (the Old English sheepdog that I also called Girlie) was the only true love of my life. It delighted me to find out after my death that my son had an engraving of Girlie affixed to my urn. I am also glad that he had my body cremated, as there was little left of it after the ravages of Lewy body disease took my life. What an irony that such a debilitating and enslaving disease could have been the vehicle that God used to set me free unto eternity. Girlie was not a dog; she was the Platonic form of dog. Here I part company with the Swedish doctor, who on page 64 of his book about his lovely villa states, “It is not a dog we love, it is the dog. They are more or less the same, they are all ready to love you and be loved by you. They are all representatives of the most lovable and, morally speaking, most perfect creation of God.” I it I loved my other dogs very much, prominent among which were Zora (the cocker that I had when I was married but that became my father’s dog when the baby was born), Winnie (a border collie), Lizzie (a blue merle collie), and Fee (another English sheepdog), the last of which approximated the Platonic form, though she was not Girlie, who was the ideal form and the ideal dog. Neither my father nor my son, who as I said were animal lovers, quite understood my affection for Girlie. Even the Swedish doctor would not have understood; but, then again, perhaps he would have.

Girlie’s arrival not only solved Poo’s pee problem—which I realize invokes a paronomasia similar to “Cookie want a cracker”—but also, because of her size, put in motion a plan for me to find a larger place to live, for English sheepdogs are quite large. So Louise and I started looking at houses, real houses, which were plentiful and not too expensive at the time, even in Bucks County. I was a bit worried at first about owning my own house, but Louise convinced me to consider the possibility, for it was to be mine and Louise’s together. Under Louise’s influence, I decided to look for a country house. The house that we bought had a New Hope mailing address but was located in Solebury, proximate to the Hotel du Village, which then served as the lower (“girls’ ”) campus of Solebury School. I proudly named my property “The Lizzie Ann” after my grandmother, the wife of my violin-playing grandfather, David Evans. I even had a sign forged by a local metalworker, who normally rendered only interpretive nudes in bronze in the modern fashion; yet for me, this one time, he was willing to make an ordinary sign that said “The Lizzie Ann”—ordinary for everyone else but me. The Lizzie Ann had once been a female dormitory of the Holmquist School for Girls, which was later absorbed into the aforementioned Solebury School. Pearl S. Buck once even had a room in this country house, when it was a part of the Holmquist School. I fell in love with this house when I first saw it, and I am delighted to have had the pleasure of living there for nearly thirty years. This house was home not only to me but, so I thought for roughly a year, to gnomes as well. I should, actually, say elves, not gnomes, for there is a difference. I thought, however, they were gnomes at first. A gnome, one will recall, lives in the ground and, most importantly, lives outside. Now this gnome was not a gnome but an elf, which is a less predictable and therefore more quixotic creature than a gnome. And it was just such a creature that I saw, or, more properly, it was an elfin hob, for they are the sort of elves that live in one’s house. This elfin hob purported to be named Gwilym, though you can never be sure with hobs, especially Welsh hobs, which are quick to fabricate a good yarn.

GWILYM THE ELFIN HOB

I append here a page from a notebook that I kept at the time that contains a drawing of Gwilym. While it is not necessarily apparent from the drawing, Gwilym was in fact a small elf, which I had imagined once lived in Snowdonia; how he came to New Hope, Pennsylvania, can only have been explained by the coffin-like trunk that had preserved the family cheese plate and serving platter, along with Lucy Hughes Jones’s special teapot with its undulating brown wavelike pattern; he must have stowed away in there when the ship sailed from Wales. He was so small, I wrote in my notebook at the time, that he could stand under your chair or sit on its rungs quite without being noticed. If he imagined that anyone saw him, he had the capacity to run away, despite having rather oversized and clumsy feet. That is why, as I first wrote about him, he could be mistaken for a mouse, which I suppose he might have been. But I still maintain that he was and is, if he now lives, an elfin hob. Mice, one or two of which occasionally came in from the field for the winter, seemed to delight in settling into the Lizzie Ann’s attic. While they were not welcome guests, it seemed unnecessary for me to call an exterminator since they politely moved out each spring. Among them, hob Gwilym was clearly a bit more of a social rodent than the others, as he somehow slipped downstairs and moved straight into my upright piano, which I had bought when I still lived at 14 West Bridge Street, well before moving the two miles or so away to the Lizzie Ann. The piano came to the Lizzie Ann without a mouse; that same instrument left for Texas many years later only after the forcible eviction of Gwilym with his nuts. To allege that Gwilym had an ample supply of them would be an understatement. The piano was by then so full of nuts that none of the black keys and few of the white keys could still function properly, as they were obstructed by Gwilym’s obsession with nut storage. Perhaps he simply liked music and musical instruments, like the itinerant music teacher Mickey Musgrove, sometimes of Plymouth, Pennsylvania. The piano was for the Welsh hob what the beard was for Mickey Musgrove, a convenient place in which bits of food could be stored to be accessed at a later date.

And so it came to that nearly every evening I could hear him, working as busily as a Welsh hob inside of the piano as I lay on the couch reading books, many of them truly great books, others of them, like Dr. Munthe’s not-quiteclassic classic, classy but not classic in the classic sense. It was only then, when I lived alone at the Lizzie Ann, that I learned to love to read the literary works that I should have read in college, when I had Dr. Davies for the second time. But I should explain how it happened that I came to reflect on Dr. Davies’s literary selections at all. The happenstance that allowed me to encounter Dr. Davies a second time at Wilkes College was effected by a most unexpected turn of events. I had reenrolled at Wilkes, through my cousin Blythe’s kind lawyerly intervention. You can imagine my shock—not as electrifying as my earlier jolt at Wilkes, but shocking nonetheless—when I sat down in the front row of the “English Masterpieces” class and saw the door give way to the powerful push of Dr. Evan Davies, who walked in and announced boldly, as he had at Bloomsburg State Teachers College, “ ‘A’ is for God, ‘B’ is for Davies and anyone who thinks he can match wits with Davies, and ‘C’ is for the hoi polloi, if they are willing to make the effort.” I nearly defecated on the spot, as two of my future pets would do regularly. Would he recognize me? Would he me from Bloomsburg State Teachers College? Surely, I was the one person he would never forget. I was a good fifteen postpartum pounds heavier, and I now wore a different style of glasses and sported a Chinese bowl haircut. Perhaps he indeed would not recognize me. Should I drop his class? And yet would doing so reopen old wounds? Perhaps the best thing was to keep my head down, sit in the back of the class thereafter, and avoid eye with him. Besides, since I had only recently divorced, perhaps the college registrar’s office had my married name on the course roll, for when I had reapplied to Wilkes, I was still technically married. In any case, for the present, I reasoned, I could begin the quest for anonymity by fixing my eyes upon my notebook and not looking up. Yes, that was what I needed to do. “It will take me a few days to learn your names,” he said, “but learn them I will, for Davies prides himself on learning his students’ names.” Why did he have to speak of himself in the third person as if he were Caesar writing commentaries? “Well,” he said, “it seems that Davies does know the name of one of you already. Miss Jakes,” he said, “it is good to see you again.” Though it seemed odd, the tone of his voice and the way he treated me that day

(and throughout that entire semester) demonstrated that he was actually glad to see me. Oh, Dr. Evan Davies, how your graciousness impressed me! Like the rest of the hoi polloi, I received but a C in the class, but it was not undeserved, inasmuch as my brain was so like a sieve that, at the time, my capacity to retain the details of the works we read was very weak. Add to this that, with all the bouncing between schools (and in spite of my journalistic endeavor at Bloomsburg State Teachers College), I had not yet learned how to write well. Indeed, it was in this class through Dr. Davies’s kind intervention that I began the long process of sharpening the particular skill of writing. Yet, even then, though I had the golden opportunity to learn how to learn lying right before me, as I sat at the feet of the literary master in Dr. Evan Davies, I still did not take full advantage of the opportunity; I continued to read reluctantly, and, in my headlong desire to learn the material simply to the course, I resisted the material itself. Though I failed to grasp literary lessons at that time, as my life unfolded over the next few years, I was able to gather, albeit piecemeal, the lessons of life. One of these came to me about a decade later, when I had moved to New Hope after my sojourn in Shermans Dale. I had first encountered New Hope on the day that I left Betsy at the Philadelphia Zoo, for Sheila and I decided to meander our way back to Shermans Dale by taking a scenic drive through the Delaware Water Gap, just a few miles north of where the famous Hot Dog Johnny’s restaurant is located in Buttzville, New Jersey. To access this particularly beautiful vista, we drove north on Route 611. A short detour (on Route 202) through Bucks County allowed us to visit the exceptionally quaint New Hope, Pennsylvania, with which town I immediately fell in love, located as it is just on the Delaware River that exquisitely divides Pennsylvania from New Jersey. In New Hope, one of the lessons I learned—if not the most profound, certainly the most memorable—occurred during an excursion that Louise and I made with one of my teaching colleagues, Dolores Davis, who, despite her Welsh-sounding name, was not Welsh but African American. I shall state the twofold moral of this story now: the first and most obvious is that looks can be deceiving; the second and less obvious is that church, or at least its underwriter, is ever welcoming and never gives up on you. The event in question—naturally and unnaturally laden, as it was, with symbolic significance—consisted of an excursion to Gerenser’s Exotic Ice Cream. The lesson I learned on that occasion was not derived from the establishment’s mere

exoticism, such as the fact that this ice cream vender, and this one alone, served (even to minors) Polish plum brandy or that it carried a flavor (“Swedish Olallaberry”) based on a fruit that no one in those days was completely sure existed (except possibly a visiting Swede). Rather, the lesson that I was to learn was derived from the wonderful midnight call of Mr. Gerenser (whom all the locals affectionately dubbed Mr. G.). That call invariably drew late-night partiers of all kinds into his store, if only at the last minute. On the particular night in question, my son happened to be working the closing shift at Gerenser’s Exotic Ice Cream. Thus, he could work three nights per week at Gerenser’s Exotic Ice Cream—he otherwise worked as a muleskinner, but I shall expand upon that at some other point in this story—usually coming home at about a quarter past midnight, which was safer than it sounds, for New Hope was (and still is, in its central area) a small and quite safe town. The distance between Gerenser’s and 14 West Bridge Street, where our apartment was, was only about thirty yards, just twice as far as Benny Sidon’s Rexall apothecary, which was itself just across the street from the Village Store and the Golden Pump—so small and wonderful a community we had in those days. One Saturday evening in the autumn, Louise and I went out walking through New Hope with Dolores Davis, the most flamboyant teacher at Oliver Heckman Elementary School in the Neshaminy District. (Cherry Street School had closed and been remodeled and renamed Oliver Heckman after, as elementary schools often are, a legendary principal—here, Oliver Heckman. If they had named the school after a legendary teacher, it would have been aptly named Dolores Davis Elementary or Bess Carney Elementary. Yet it is always the principal who gets the honor. In that case they should have named it John Tauromina Elementary; but, of course, whoever it is who names these schools rarely, if ever, recognizes even the best of the principals, let alone the best teachers.) As Dolores, Louise, and I were strolling leisurely back toward 14 West Bridge Street, we ed the old Methodist church, whereupon Dolores, who was a deeply spiritual person, commented first about the architecture and, then, on my lack of church attendance. “You really ought to go to church,” she said flamboyantly (for everything Dolores ever did was flamboyant), “to this church. Look, Elaine, it is right here, just around the corner from your flat.” Her use of such a Briticism was, of course, further proof of her flamboyance. Still, as I look back on it, I am certain that she chose the word flat for reasons beyond mere flamboyancy.

First, it was entirely incongruous for an African American woman who hailed from inner-city Philadelphia to use an essentially British word for apartment; and Dolores loved incongruity, which is why she was such a good teacher. Second, the word “flat” dignified the tiny apartment at 14 West Bridge Street, making it seem far more charming than in fact it was; Dolores was generous in that way. Third (and this is the most important reason), the innocent word “flat” introduced a red herring into the conversation so that she could at once rebuke me for poor, actually nonexistent, church attendance—a legitimate topic, since Dolores was well aware from many of my teachers’ room discourses that I had been born Presbyterian and had not practiced Judaism for over two years—while at the same time compliment me, if rather indirectly, on my paltry but, in of location, quite chic living arrangement, an arrangement that was coincidentally proximate to a church that Dolores was sure I should be attending. While I was distracted, as she intended, by the word “flat” and therefore accepting the onition vis-à-vis church attendance, out from the front door of his tiny and open-rather-late ice cream shop bounded Mr. G., bellowing at the top of his Hungarian lungs, “ ’Zis is ’zee last call for iz’a crême!” Such a proclamation seemed strange to all three of us at once on at least two counts: first, who could really understand what he was saying with so thick an accent, especially in the poor acoustic environment of New Hope’s main street? Second, it was odd that he should do this at all, for who at five minutes to midnight really cares about ice cream on a cool October evening? Odder yet was the strange fact that (so my son told me) a good number of people would invariably head for the ice cream shop, as if entranced by the words of Mr. G., who served as a strange Orpheus figure, bewitching all within earshot to drop whatever they were doing and come, forthwith, into the tiny store to choose between “Ancient Roman Ambrosia,” “Chinese Green Tea,” and “English Toffee.” Odder yet was the attire of these late-night snackers: they wore high heels, silky or fishnet stockings, tight-fitting dresses, bangle bracelets with matching hoop earrings, and ruby-red or dark-maroon lipstick, topping off so lustrous a foundation with nicely styled and often very big coiffeurs. They were all females in their midtwenties, as it seemed to me. “How odd,” I quipped, “that so many physically fit women should descend so late all at once upon Gerenser’s Exotic (and very high calorie) Ice Cream shop.”

“Yes,” Dolores conceded, “it is very weird. And they are so stylish! Let’s go get some ice cream and check them out.” Dolores seemed to be concealing a thought, a thought I had not yet thought but could see that she was thinking. I should mention at this point that Dolores dressed very much like—save the fishnet stockings—the aforementioned group of midnight ice cream lovers, though her figure was ittedly more robust, with pronounced curves “in all the right places.” Thus, when we crowded into the back of the store, only Louise and I—sporting casual, almost masculine blouses and jeans—looked at all out of place. I, in fact, was wearing a Trenton State sweatshirt that I had bought when I was a student of Dr. Champ Clark Carney a few years earlier. It was a pleasure, for a minute or two, to behold the activity of my young son, who seemed with every dip of the ice cream scooper to become a man right before my eyes. He could dip with the best of them, and dip he did indeed. He even helped some of his in-shape, and rather sexy-looking, clientele choose their flavors. “Can I have a sample?” the largest one—nearly six feet (would have been my best guess) of unadulterated beauty—asked with a surprisingly beautiful smile and an equally surprisingly deep and raspy voice. “That’s so yum! What is it?” “That’s one of my favorites,” my son said, “Turkish Delight.” “Oh, it’s so good,” the tall one said. “Well, now, honey, I’ll take a cone of Swedish Olallaberry, with a daub of that Turkish Delight right on top.” Then she made a big wink at my innocent son, and the whole gaggle of girls giggled at once. “Coming right up, ma’am,” my son said politely, efficiently dipping while he spoke. The gaggle giggled again, even more volubly. “Did you hear him, sweetie?” one said to another. “He called her ma’am. Got that right, didn’t he, sweetie?” “Thank you, honey,” she said to my son as he handed her a burgeoning ice cream cone while the other ladies muttered to each other with equally deep and almost as raspy and certainly seductive-sounding voices. “Isn’t he a peach?” “Shut your face, girl,” the tall one said playfully, and they giggled again all together in a deep raspy chorus.

“O my God,” Dolores whispered to me in an alarmed tone of voice. “They’re men!” “Watch your mouth, girl,” one of them near the back said, whirling about quite literally on one of her high heels. “We’re just a bunch of ladies enjoying a girls’ night out. How ’bout you?” “We’re just doing the same,” Louise said with her no-nonsense, rural Virginia accent, glancing somewhat uncomfortably toward the ceiling. “Yes, yes, you betcha,” said Dolores flamboyantly, “just us girls about town.” “So, you wanna party with us?” the big one said, by now licking erotically the Swedish Olallaberry at the bottom and working her way up toward the Turkish Delight. My son kept dipping away in the background, paying no attention to the suggestive situation. “Sweetheart,” Dolores said, “I’ve partied with the best of them, and now I have come to know that the real party is across the street tomorrow morning.” “You mean it goes all night? Baby, let’s go!” said another one who wore fishnet stockings that enhanced the muscular but by no means unattractive shape of her legs. “I mean church, ladies,” Dolores said, with a wiggle of her head, her sails of flamboyance fully unfurled. “Would they let us in dressed like this?” one of them said to another chorus of giggles. “I don’t think us kind of ladies are ladylike enough to go to church.” “Jesus wore a dress!” the quick-thinking Dolores replied (I already have mentioned her flamboyance). What she meant to say, of course, is, “Jesus wore something like a dress!” Yet, to get her point across—and Dolores had a way of getting her point across—she shortened the sentiment and skipped “something like,” which ittedly added a lot of zip to the delivery. “Oh my God, he did!” one of them quipped. “He would have loved us!” “He still does,” said Dolores.

“Closing time!” Mr. G. intervened in his usually affable tone. “ ’Iz time to go. ’Zhank you for your business. Nice night, ladies!” As we walked home with my son, we laughed ourselves silly, for it was a silly affair. Needless to say, given that I raised him in New Hope, I never had to have a “sex ed” talk with my son.

Many of life’s lessons we learned simply by living in New Hope, the experience of which then provided an odd substitute for the poetry of Longfellow, whom I had read too well but not well enough in Dr. Davies’s English Masterpieces class at Wilkes College. Even the words of Robert and Elizabeth Browning had failed to touch my soul adequately, and though I listened much, I had heard little. The problem lay in me; I could hear, it seemed, only selectively, paralyzed by the fear of learning. I was a true child of Eve, though in my case banished even before I could get a taste of the tree of knowledge. Years later, my seclusion in the country house in Solebury, however, gave me a second chance with the Brownings, with Longfellow, with Keats, and with a host of others. But not straightaway, because Thoreau interrupted. After Sheila left and Louise arrived, I took the opportunity to read Henry Thoreau’s Walden, and thus I was in a Walden state of mind when Louise made the strong suggestion that we, two humble schoolteachers, buy a second piece of property in Monterey, Virginia, where Louise had grown up. Louise and I settled on that sizable swathe of land that lay directly across the street from the smaller farm of Louise’s mother, Maggie. Instead of my own story, I might well have made this entire memoir about Maggie. Dear Maggie, heroic mother of a heroic son, dying, you gave Monterey eternal fame, where to this day your honor obtains, and, if there is such a thing as glory, in the great land of western (not West) Virginia, honor marks your bones and your name. Oh that your story might never be lost in the fallen leaves of days gone by, leaves that fall from trees, like the fallen tree that killed your husband, leaving you with nine children. Sam, your noblest and most heroic son, was a good man, surrendering his hopes and dreams to help you raise that family. Sam, though twelve years my elder, preceded me in death by only about a year. A good man died on May 1, 2010. Sam’s goodness helped Louise and me decide to buy that property, for the care of which we were, in fact, depending on Sam. We dubbed the new acquisition Crossed Arrows Farm and filled it with livestock. During the winters, Louise and I resided in New Hope at the Lizzie Ann and taught at Oliver Heckman School, but we spent the summers and all vacation days at the farm. Sam’s decency and generosity permitted us to keep our normal lives but add to them a new rustic dimension, a fulfillment of my Walden disposition.

Needless to say, the farm of 250 acres had a large helping of rusticity, which encomed a marvelously diverse biosphere. Though I rarely walked the grounds completely, my son did many times, and I take the following description from one of his notebooks, to which I have added some of my own glosses, below, in brackets. I found his notebooks in his room only after he went off to college.

14 July 1974: Got up this morning early, as usual, at 5 am to get ready for Sam to pick me up at 5:30. Waited at my usual spot by the watering trough but Sam did not show up as expected. I had forgotten that today was the day Sam was to take me to Franklin [West Virginia] to pick up the new gearbox for the old [Ford] tractor. [Franklin was, at the time, the nearest sizable town. It was the only municipality where one might find a store capable of “placing an order” of any kind.] ing that Sam was to pick me up at 8 today, I had plenty of time to visit my secret place, the pine grove. Took my morning walk to the grove, and I now have just enough time to write about it. First I proceeded along the trail that weaves through the various outbuildings that serve as ladies-in-waiting to the farmhouse’s queen estate. These include the meat house, the spring house, the chicken house, the tractor house, and the [horse] barn. I stopped to give Chinganook [my horse] and Arrow [Louise’s horse] some grain, and pet their noses while they blew horse snot. Then I ed the blackberry bushes by the split rail fence, where you can smell the berries a good three yards away, maybe even four. Here you can pick some breakfast, messy though it is, as the juice from the blackberries will just run down the sides of your face as you pop them into your mouth, even if you don’t take that many in your hand. At midday they would be warm from the sun, but this morning they were nice and cool, with a touch of dew on them, just the way I like them. I don’t know which, but God or nature gave me breakfast this morning. Then I walked up the dirt road through the woods next to Matt James’ farm, and I climbed up on the old Model-T, once someone’s prized mode of transportation, now just left to rot from a hundred years ago, but really just seventy or so, I suppose. When I jumped down, I gave the old engine a crank, but the rod had come loose underneath from all the rust and made no sound. Then I went up to the far field, far south and far east, and cut along the back fence where the small forest begins and soon pours out into the pine grove. The pines are tall there,

taller than any I have ever seen in Pennsylvania. I sat beneath one such spreading pine, and got moss smeared onto the seat of my pants. Where I sat was wet and mossy, like most of the ground in the pine grove. Then I came out into the big forest, and I climbed my favorite tree, the biggest tree, up to the top. I could see for miles and miles, even to West Virginia, I suppose, maybe even as far as Franklin. I figured by now it was getting close to 8:00, so I scurried down the tree—almost fell—and got back by cutting through the three bailing fields. The hay is finally getting high now; that’s why we’re going to Franklin. It has been a dry summer; that means one cutting, just one. I ed the old outhouse and traversed the hay field to the western gate back into the farmyard, ing right by the meat house and the swinging tree. I’ll always be a Yankee, I suppose, but I’ll also always love this place.

How deeply these words moved me when I read them, how I wept to know that the farm, Crossed Arrows Farm, had meant so much to my son. It was for him almost what it was for me, I think, a chance to connect with nature in some way, at once fresh and pristine, and entirely unknown to the residents of the greater Philadelphia area. And then there was the farm’s finest feature, its garden. Now this garden was not just a garden. It was a hundred times the size of any garden I had ever seen up north. Each spring, on Easter break, Louise and I would come south and plant that garden, which was cordoned off from the farm animals by a good strong wire fence, though the rabbits could, of course, penetrate it easily enough. When we came back at the beginning of each June, the garden, weeds and all, would be in full bloom: lettuce, green beans, carrots galore, cauliflower, broccoli, and leeks. These, except for the lettuce, we spent the entire summer “putting up,” a term that, in southern parlance, means home canning in glass Ball jars. These would provide most of the vegetables that we would eat during the coming winter. And then there were the fruits that grew everywhere wild on those 250 acres: blackberries, such as my son described, so lovely, fresh, succulent, the juice of which might stain the scratched hands of the pickers, mingling its red-black nectar with their own red-black blood, making us nature’s blood brother, and permitting us to snack all throughout the harvesting ritual. Funny, I thought to myself, that my son had noticed and thought so much about

blackberries. These would make unusually good sweet jam. Then there was the hay. We had to put up the hay—oddly enough, one “puts up” hay the way one puts up canned vegetables—with remarkable industry. This was, in part, because neither we (with our mere teachers’ salaries) nor, even less so, Sam (as a struggling farmer endlessly toiling at his own farm and that of his mother, Maggie, along with our own) had the money to buy the kind of hay baler that shot the bales onto a trailing wagon. Instead, we bought the most basic hay baler on the market and simply followed the tractor and baler with our pickup truck, gathering the bales one at a time and stacking them in the truck. We would then take them, one truckload at a time, back to the barn. Thus, all throughout the winter, we (or rather Sam) were able to put out the put-up hay as daily fodder for our herd of 150 Black Angus cattle. In some ways Sam was like a father to my son, though he never called him by his proper name, referring to my son only as “boy” or occasionally “Andy,” for reasons neither I nor anyone else (including possibly Sam himself) ever knew, since my son’s name was not Andy. Sam rarely spoke to my son, perhaps because the fact that my son had been a muleskinner was not seen as a positive example of work experience. What in the blazes (Sam would have said, “What in the hell…,” if he had said anything at all) was a muleskinner, anyway? A muleskinner, as I mentioned earlier in this memoir, is not a mule flayer but rather one who drives mules. My son had been working for the New Hope Mule Barge Company since he was twelve years old, beginning at first by sweeping the barge decks but soon being invited to undertake the Herculean task of cleaning the mule’s stables. Lizzie, a wonderfully gentle mule, once kicked him, which taught him all he ever needed to know about how not to comport himself around the mule, or a horse, or a jackass, the last of which lessons no doubt has served him well as an academic. That aside, as a muleskinner my son was unsured, and the reason I say this is because he actually loved the mules. I should have realized then that he was, at least to some degree, an animal lover, but I failed to understand that aspect of his personality at the time. Sam was not, however, looking for an animal lover, even one with as tough a title as muleskinner. Besides, my son was a Yankee, which in Sam’s eyes meant that he was inferior and had probably never done a hard day’s work in his life. Add to this, of course, that my son never had known his father. Oddly enough,

because my son never had a father, he had to work hard as a child, as I mentioned earlier, at least since he was twelve. Besides, Sam obviously did not know about the stables or that it was my son who had found Lizzie—the mule that, though she had kicked him, he especially loved—dead, her rear hoof stuck in her halter. In her attempt to extricate herself, she had broken her own neck. Nor did Sam know that my then-thirteen-year-old son held back his grief and, in a manner befitting a professional muleskinner, called the owner of the New Hope Mule Barge Company—Jürgen the German, another story for another collection of tales—to report that Lizzie had died. But Sam, though he virtually never said anything to my son, was a good man, from whom it was fitting that my son could learn how to be a man. The first characteristic that Sam taught him was reticence. The second came from my son’s overhearing Sam’s Spartan conversations with others: I think this helped my son to become a little less trusting of people—thank God—and of Yankees, in particular, of which, of course, he was one. While the latter of these points never sat well with me, hailing as I do from Pennsylvania, the circumspection that my son gained was a useful quality, even if, being neither quite a northerner nor quite a southerner, he was to some extent an outcast in both cultures. But this is nothing that a child who had had a monkey for a sister or who was raised as a Chinese Jew but had been baptized a Welsh Presbyterian could not deal with. Religiously, I myself had withdrawn from any culture or community, and thereby I had withdrawn my son, as well. Religion just did not seem to agree with where I was in life at the time. One might recall that I had consistently failed to make a distinction between God and religion. In the 1970s, religion was, as it had always been, only a way for me to demonstrate my personal piety. Now that I was getting into nature and natural food and large-scale gardening, I was working out my personal piety in the field, whether putting up hay or putting up vegetables. All of this was, in certain ways, healthier than the false piety and self-righteousness that had characterized much of my seeking in the 1960s. By divorcing myself from religion, I thought that I was divorcing myself from God, but instead I was beginning to turn in another direction, one that potentially could bring me a step closer to the divine. That first step is backward, not forward. And I stepped back and it was good, for I beheld the day of vegetative life, the third day of creation. Agriculture with its trappings was now the centerpiece of the third stage of my life. I had become a free-spirited farmer.

During the winters, as I mentioned above, I kept my teaching post in the north, where I became involved with the teachers’ union, the agenda of which I bought into without question. Yet the more progress I made with that sociopolitical agenda, the less happy I became. This may partly be attributed to the fact that I chose to quit smoking during that same period. To do so, I indulged in some of the fads of the day, among the most outrageous of which was, to the chagrin of all with whom I kept company, lettuce cigarettes. These are much worse than they sound. Both Louise and my son were very encouraging and tolerant of everything they owned smelling like burnt lettuce. If you have never had the occasion to dry out, carefully chop, and roll your own lettuce, I can save you a lot of trouble by telling you that—other than one’s house smelling like an animal bathroom, which I experienced when Betsy the monkey was swinging from a ceiling fan or my apartment’s radiators had been peed on by the cat Poo—nothing else smells as bad as a lettuce cigarette. The nicotine-free lettuce cigarettes were much less expensive than actual cigarettes and came in a wide variety of flavors—iceberg, romaine, red leaf, endive, and bib. I smoked one right after another because I was desperate for nicotine, and thus, until I realized that they lacked nicotine altogether, I kept smoking them in what amounted to a chain-like fashion, even lighting the next smoke from the previous one so as to save on matches or lighter fluid. After two months of this, I came to realize I could not keep smoking lettuce by itself, not only because I smelled more of burnt lettuce than Cookie McMurphy and Thom ever did of cheese, but also because even I found it strange that I was smoking lettuce. Add to this the fact that when Louise and I took a summer’s day drive to Ocean Grove, New Jersey, a police officer nearly arrested me for marijuana usage. Only the authentic label on the pack of “Bib Lettuce Smokes” saved me from certain incarceration. Accordingly, not merely to replace some of the missing nicotine, which I still craved, but also that I might cut a more socially acceptable figure in public, I took up puffing away on cigars. My son was sixteen at the time, and though the house smelled much better, it was still a bit of an embarrassment for him to come home with one of his friends to find me (his mother) and three or four of my

friends all sitting around a table playing cards and smoking cigars, although I was the only one of my girlfriends who actually smoked cigars. He later confessed to me that it was indeed disorienting, especially when I dealt the cards and chewed on my by-then burnt-out stogie. The time finally came when I had kicked the habit, as they said in those days. It was also the point in time when my son was to leave for college, an opportunity rendered him through the intervention of my dear cousin Blythe, who so often played the role of the family’s guardian angel, this time assisting my son with the writing of the essay for his college applications—one to the Virginia Military Institute, one to Wilkes, one to Bloomsburg, another to Dickinson. My father, Harry, also had a hand in my son’s ission to college, for he happened to have known the dean of Dickinson, Dr. Ben James, since childhood. Dean James did Harry the proverbial “favor” of keeping a watchful eye on my son’s application. My son’s entrance into Dickinson would change all of our lives radically because, during his studies there, grace found him. But it was not actually there, as now I am getting ahead of myself. First, he had to travel over water twice, to the Virgin Islands and then further away yet, to set his feet on the way of reconciliation, a reconciliation that would anticipate the scent of my own redemption.

10 The Way of Reconciliation

God is not dead, nor doth He sleep. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Christmas Bells”

H ad I looked properly to the deep magic of the Welsh hymns of David Evans or the words of Reverend Griffith, words from my childhood that never left my mind, never left my soul, half in Welsh, half in English—had I looked to those things, the strange turn of events of 1979 that happened in my son’s life might not have appeared to me to have been so absurd. The circumstances surrounding and reflecting the occurrences of that year consisted of three things: love letters between my son and his second girlfriend (and later wife); his discovery of God, or rather God’s discovery of him; and, finally, two voyages that served as fitting symbols for spiritual migration in his life and the furtherance of my own. These events found their archetypes not only in Grandfather David’s hymns but in his letters to Elizabeth Ann, my grandmother, letters that I had in my possession until I died, letters that revealed their love, signs of true love right before me, signs I could not understand. While from time to time Reverend Griffith would select one of David’s hymns for the Welsh Presbyterian Sunday evening service, I could not understand them, not because they were written in Welsh, a language of which even as a child I ittedly did not have a complete grasp, but rather because I failed to understand the grace that informed them and about which they incessantly spoke. Even though my mother Blanche did not have Cymraeg perffaith (perfect Welsh), she knew the hymns well, in both languages, and she grasped their deeper meaning. As far as her knowledge of Welsh went, suffice it to say that she bore with her an unmistakable trace of a Welsh accent until she died, the same way my son bore with him a slight myna bird accent (though it lasted only until he was about thirty years old), always squawking and repeating phrases at

least twice, which to some extent ed for his social awkwardness. To me, however, even if the hymns had been written in English, those hymns would likely not have made much sense. Besides, Reverend Griffith, as I have already mentioned, did allow many a hymn to be sung in English, though some in the church objected that this kind of contemporary service was “objectionable.” I had, as many others, grown up singing “Rho im yr hedd” (“Be Still My Soul,” 97 in the old Welsh Hymnal) and “Dyma gariad fel y moroedd” (“Here Is Love, Vast as the Ocean,” 109). Each of these speaks not of religion but of a deeply emotional, even personal, experience of God’s redemptive grace. Number 109 (the Welsh lyrics of which are those of William Rees, while William Edwards has rendered the English) summarizes it well:

Dyma gariad fel y moroedd, Here is love, vast as the ocean, Twysog Bywyd pur yn marw— Lovingkindness, as the flood, Marw i brynu’n bywyd ni. When the Prince of Life, our Ransom, Pwy all beidio â chofio amdano? Shed for us His precious blood. Who His love will not remem

Being especially careful to reveal it to no one, Reverend Griffith actually took this beautiful hymn from The “Baptist” Book of Praise (my quotes), published in Wales at the turn of the century. He chose it because it told the story of grace, as he understood it, better than most Presbyterian hymns. Though that story unfolded itself before me as a child—in the language of both the Welsh and the English, Baptists and Presbyterians—and lay treasured in my memory as an adult, still, I could see it not. Even after all that had touched me, and all that I had seen and felt and heard, I still confused religion and God. It would take one further sensory experience to fill my sails with a homeward wind, but that I shall deal with in the next chapter. With all this in mind, then, it is perhaps not surprising that, when I sent my son off to college, I onished him in the following manner: “Don’t get anyone pregnant—use, well, protection—and …,” after an appropriate pause to disconnect these ideas, “do not become too religious.” Religiosity was all fine and good within reason. My position had changed radically from my earlier days. After my Walden years, I saw religion as fine and good but only to be taken, like wine, in moderation. Yet if some Socrates had pressed me on the matter, I would have itted that what God chiefly expects from a person is piety, pure and simple. The kind of religiosity at which I looked most askance was one represented by out-of-control religious fervor, “ion … too high a price to pay” as Coleridge says in Biographia literaria. I suppose I was hoping my son would find, between the ion that could lead to pregnancy and the ion that could lead to God, an Aristotelian golden mean, some place in the middle where life and happiness lay. Yet neither I nor anyone else ever seemed to find it, at least insofar as it lay in the mean itself. It was an ideal that I, like Aristotle, believed was somehow achievable. Yet neither Aristotle nor I thought like the writers of the Scriptures, and little did I know then that my very words would be almost as incongruously prophetic as those of Caiaphas, the religious order’s high priest when the highest of high priests was put to death. “There is good news and bad news,” my son said when I picked him up at the Philadelphia airport just ten days into the new decade of the 1980s. He was a junior in college then, and lest you think my autobiography—which, I confess, is now turning out to be more of a memoir—is to be about my son and not about me, I should explain, even confess, that a good portion of my life was lived vicariously through that child, who played a variety of roles in my life, as

Monica had for Augustine, though with the roles reversed, of course. One of these roles he fulfilled quite naturally as a child—namely, that of a son. As he aged, however, I needed him also to play the part of my father, especially after my own father’s death, which also occurred in the fateful year 1979. Add to this, of course, the role of husband, though only insofar as I relied on him for some simple chores like cleaning gutters, painting, and fixing things, though he was never any good at the last of these. Most important, however, was the role that I assigned him, consisting of a combination of therapist, confessional priest, and life counselor, all of which were particularly important to me after Louise left. Louise’s departure occurred roughly when my son turned twenty-two—that is to say when I was forty-four, which is to say 1981. But this had not yet happened when we went to Philadelphia that day, and Louise was in the car—in fact she was driving the car—when we picked my son up at the Philadelphia airport. After we had put his bags in the rear portion of the Volkswagen station wagon, he stated sheepishly (though it seemed at the time churlishly) that there was good news and bad news. “What is this news?” I asked, provoked, naturally enough, by his proclamation. “The good news is that no one is pregnant.” “Surly little bastard,” I thought. “So what is the bad news?” I asked aloud. “I have become a Christian. But I have not become ‘too religious,’ Mother. Actually, quite the opposite: I now know that I have never really been religious, and I am not now. I am merely a Christian.” Before I go on, I need to clarify something. There are only a few things forbidden to a Jewish boy. Pork is one of them. Becoming a Christian is another. Inasmuch as I had been practicing Judaism until 1972, he last thing this child actually was, religiously speaking, was a Jewish boy of thirteen, about to be bar mitzvahed but saved from that because Sheila left; I say “saved” because, poor child, he thought that bar mitzvah involved circumcision, and he reckoned that the ritual would be performed at an open ceremony attended by many relatives. Duw caru ef (God love him!), my son was unduly or perhaps all too duly worried about the appearance of ceremony, or more properly the appearance of his private parts at a ceremony.

When Louise and I gathered him at the airport that Thursday, January 10, 1980, I was, however, thinking not of how he was nearly bar mitzvahed but rather of an incident that had occurred just a few months before. The date of that earlier incident was March 30, 1979, the last Friday of the month, just two days after the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor had begun to undergo a partial meltdown. In my normal state of paranoia—on this occasion, however, much of the country and the world was in a similar state of worry, as the movie The China Syndrome had come out just two weeks before—I called my son at Dickinson, which, in fairness to myself, is a meager twenty miles from Three Mile Island, and I instructed him to come home immediately. He did not have a car at the time, so I told him to buy a bus ticket. The bus ran through Harrisburg, right next to Three Mile Island. “No,” I cried out on the phone to him, “I forbid you to travel by that route. Buy a bus ticket south to Maryland and proceed from there.” Of course he protested, in part because he thought it typical of me to dramatically overreact and because Dickinson had not yet declared that it would give students a second “spring break” that year; the college officials did so while he was en route, for, I am gratified to say, he conceded to my demands, buying a ticket to Hagerstown, Maryland, where he then purchased a separate ticket to Washington, DC, and then, finally, from Washington to Philadelphia, a long journey, but one that allowed him to read and no doubt flirt with Leslie, his girlfriend of, by then, four or five months. Leslie came along because her parents lived in the Virgin Islands and she had no relatives nearby. Thus, he brought home a girlfriend for the first time; perhaps I have mentioned by now how incredibly awkward he was around the opposite sex. When my son and Leslie arrived at the bus station in Philadelphia, Louise and I were there—in Louise’s same orange Volkswagen (Type 3) station wagon that I mentioned above—to pick them up. In that car, Louise always had classical music playing, which she kept at an unusually high volume, perhaps meant to cultivate in me a taste for classical music on the same principle that one might speak louder to a blind person, as if the person were deaf instead of blind. My son and Leslie were glad to see us, tired as they were from the ten hours of travel and from the various ixtures of bus connections. “Don’t touch me!” I said as he came to greet me with a hug. “Get in the car, hurry! Nice to meet you, Leslie. Now, into the car, both of you!”

“Louise,” I said, “get us out of here; get us on Interstate 95 as quickly as possible.” The main Philadelphia bus station was located not very far from I-95, so that proceeding down Race Street, one can get to the I-95 on-ramp from the bus terminal in just a few minutes. Thus, we raced down Race and came up to the I95 ramp just at the massive base of the equally massive Ben Franklin Bridge that heads over into South Jersey. The moment we got onto the interstate highway heading north, I, as if a platoon sergeant commanding his troops, barked out my first order: “Take off your clothes, both of you!” “Pardon, ma’am?” Leslie said in her half-British (for she was born in England) and half-Caribbean accent. “You heard me,” I said with a Phillyesque drawl, as I lit a cigar (for this was the very end of my learning-to-quit-smoking period; I had finally graduated from burnt lettuce and would within a few months cease to smoke altogether). “Why, Mother? Why do we have to do this?” “Your clothes are radioactive.” “Mother, we traveled through Maryland, Hagerstown, Maryland. We are not radioactive.” “You were in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, before that. Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a mere twenty miles from the reactor core.” “Yes, Mother, but we left right when you told us to. We are not radioactive.” “You might be. Now take your clothes off, carefully. And don’t smear them all over Louise’s car. Throw them out the window.” “Mother, listen to what you’re saying. This is crazy.” I turned around, puffing away on my cigar. “Throw them out the window, now!” My son muttered something to Leslie along the lines of it being pointless to resist me. He then took off his shirt, and she removed her button-down sweater and began to unbutton the delicate and pretty chiffon blouse that lay beneath.

“Throw it out the window!” I reiterated firmly. “Out the window, out the window,” he parroted, like the myna bird who had taught him how to talk. “You’re upset with me,” I said with a slight impediment caused by the cigar between my teeth. “You bet your ass, you bet your ass,” he said, now clearly speaking in bird-ese. “This is embarrassing, Mother. Do we really have to do this?” Leslie looked troubled, even vexed. She continued unbuttoning her blouse. “Off with it!” I said, glancing over my left shoulder, between puffs on my cigar, as if the cigar smoke might provide some covering for their nakedness and the ultraloud classical music might drown out Leslie’s occasional sweet-voiced sighs of shame.

She now sat there, shirtless, in her bra, virtually plastered into the crevice between the uncomfortable armrest and the far corner of the backseat, while my son stared out the opposite window. More commands followed, between drags on my cigar commingled with authoritative looks. As one article of clothing at a time came off, they both realized that this was turning into a bizarre game of spin the bottle, orchestrated by a cigar-smoking mother and her reticent yet clearly conspiratorial driver. “Not my belt,” my son complained as we came toward the nether regions. “I just bought that.” “Off with it,” I bellowed. Then I ordered them a second time, one and then the other, to toss their clothing, one piece at a time, out the nearest window. This was done at relatively high speed (roughly sixty-five miles per hour, for loudly blaring classical music always inspired Louise to drive ten miles per hour over the speed limit; she never got a ticket, not even once; she listened mostly to Bach but always drove like Mozart—precisely and skillfully, but by no means slowly). Sitting there in their underwear, they looked completely bewildered and cold— for it was March, a month far from warm in Pennsylvania, and the windows of the car had been down quite a while to allow for the discarding of the clothing, even my son’s brand-new leather belt. Now I crossed the final barrier by demanding the rest, too. “Mother, this is mortifying, mortifying.” I said nothing, but just continued to glare at them and puff on my cigar. My son, realizing there was no hope, then turned to Leslie and said, “We have to do it. There is no point in arguing with her, no point.” The myna bird had taught him well. Indeed, my son knew my tactics. I would soon have had artificial heart palpitations had he not surrendered his boxers. Now they were naked and they most certainly knew it; Leslie, like a seated version of the Greek statue Crouching Aphrodite, crossed her breasts with her left arm and covered her pubic area with her right hand. My son continued to stare uncomfortably out the right-side backseat window, holding his copy of Virgil’s Aeneid, which he was

reading in the original that semester, over his manhood. It took a long time, but eventually my son forgave me for this moment (and for many similar moments of panic that caused me from time to time to overreact). Thus, when we made that second trip to Philadelphia to pick him up, this time at the airport in January of the next year, he was perhaps surprised at my attempt to remain calm when he began to tell me the “good news and bad news” that no one was pregnant but that he had become a Christian in Rome a month or so before. I had been quite convinced that his primarily Jewish childhood identity would insulate him from becoming too religious. I knew he was unlikely ever to become an Orthodox Jew, because Sheila and I had been associated with a fairly open and freethinking sect of Judaism (conservative in name, but “code” among Jews for “liberal”); and, anyhow, Louise and I had almost no Jewish friends, limiting his with Jews. Besides, he was a WASP, and he looked like one, more Welsh than anything else. Furthermore, when the next summer he went to visit Leslie in St. Croix, at the kind invitation of her parents, he had successfully resisted that family’s devout religious leanings. To wit, the only condition to visit St. Croix that Leslie’s parents imposed upon my son was that he attend church with them whenever they went. I suspected that this proviso might have been intended as much for their daughter as it was for my son, just to “inspire” her, too, to attend church services. Of course, the once-naked couple, incongruously forced to be naked in the backseat of a car by the parent herself, complied with this gentle request, for if they could under compulsion get naked in the backseat of a car together, then going to church could not be too much to ask. Inasmuch as the family was Roman Catholic, church meant simply going to mass. Now, if these masses should have been anything like the rare Catholic ceremony, such as a wedding or a funeral, that I had attended, I figured that there would be little chance of my son’s converting to Catholicism. That said, I was equally sure that he would never become Protestant, but that is precisely what did happen, for he returned where? Oddly enough he returned to a place he had never been but a place in which I had begun—namely, the faith of the old Welsh Presbyterians, traced back to Elizabeth Ann, my grandmother, and her husband, David Evans, the Welsh hymn writer, faith sown deep in their souls by the great Reverend Griffith, about whom I may someday write another book. It was this

pastor who first mixed Welsh and English in his Sunday morning sermons in the Gaylor Avenue Welsh Presbyterian Church in Plymouth, Pennsylvania; he baptized both of my parents, my sisters, my brother, and me. My earliest memories of church are inextricably connected to the sermons of the great Reverend Griffith. Yet in my son’s conversion, Catholics played a leading role. One of these was a certain Father Jarcourent (pronounced Yarcour), who, the summer that my son visited Leslie’s family, was on loan from St. Thomas to the church in St. Croix because the regular rector, Father Mitch, had had a bout of bad health. Though no one wished Father Mitch’s condition to worsen, the entire congregation was clearly overjoyed that Father Jarcourent was in residence. This was not because of his delightful disposition and perfectly charming demeanor or even his marvelous and captivating island accent. Rather, it was because of his preaching, and that preaching—if it did not share much with Reverend Griffith’s old onehalf Welsh, one-half English sermons (indeed, many in the old Welsh community of Plymouth, Pennsylvania, felt Reverend Griffith was a traitor to the old Welsh ways when he started using English in addition to Welsh)—did share one very fundamental feature: the consistent exposition of grace. Father Jarcourent, conveyer of grace, was not a provider of the sacrament to my son, as my son, not being Roman Catholic, did not ingest. Furthermore, at the time, Father Jarcourent’s preaching of grace had no apparent effect on him. This fact distressed that priest, who was very concerned for my son’s spiritual welfare. My son did not respond to his preaching, but remained polite and willing to listen, just not to believe. Yet Father Jarcourent not only preached grace; he lived it, and he had a graceful charm about him that touched my son, even if his homiletic words did not. The summer wore on, and near the very end of my son’s time there, all the Roman Catholic churchgoers on the island assembled in a great tent for what, I suppose, in Monterey, Virginia, people would have called a revival meeting. (I normally avoided revival meetings during my farming years precisely because I always found the altar calls often associated with them repulsive; I still do for the most part, though I now better understand why some preachers feel compelled to resort to such methods.) This grand assembly in this vast circus-like tent of the Catholic believers and their invitees convened on a Saturday evening in August of 1979. Only my son,

Leslie’s family, and Father Mitch—in his weakened state, he helped only to distribute the host during the Communion ceremony at the close of the massive mass—were not native islanders. Everyone else was likely to have been born on St. Croix, except, in the case of Father Jarcourent, St. Thomas. They all had lovely accents, which one could even hear in the way they sang. By virtue of them all being island natives, everyone save my son, Leslie’s family (who hailed from England), and Father Mitch were of African descent.

For this reason I know for a fact that my son felt perfectly safe when Father Jarcourent stood in front of the assembly and, after his grace-filled homily, led the singing of several beautiful songs with all the audience swaying and singing, many with their hands raised up. Then Father Jarcourent proclaimed: “The Lord [which he pronounced Loard] has spoken to me. And what does he say? What does he say?” There was, at this point, an appropriately stunning pause of a few seconds. He then continued, “The Spirit of the Lord tells me that someone here is about to become a Christian [which he pronounced Chreest-ee-an]! Yes, someone here wants to become a Christian. The Lord has told me!” This pronouncement was followed by a further appropriately stunning pause. And then he continued, “Who is [pronounced ease] it, Lord?” There was then another momentary pause, followed by, “Who, Lord, have you called out? Who have you chosen?” Reverend Griffith would have been very satisfied with both Father Jarcourent’s homily and his prayer. Again, my son felt completely safe, as I said at the outset of the story, for he was a nonislander. There must be—he reasoned, and I would have, too—a kind of unwritten rule about making an example of a nonislander. “He simply cannot single out a nonislander,” my son thought. Thus, as Father Jarcourent was making his way through the crowd, row by row, raising his hands and following up his imioned words with a no less theologically charged “Who is it, Lord?” my son was in no way discomfited. He would be spared. He knew it would be gauche, even unspiritual (owing to the obviousness of the choice), for Father Jarcourent to single him out. Father Jarcourent approached, seemingly led by a higher power, from time to time leaning upon the shoulder of this islander or that, but proceeding on his Spirit-filled mission. It was as if he were engaging in a huge game of duck, duck, goose. Pressing on the shoulders of the regular Roman Catholic parishioners, Father Jarcourent was muttering something—of course, it was not “duck, duck,

duck,” but it might as well have been—as his eyes were turning now in this direction, now that (which may be the real reason that he was touching the islanders on their shoulders, lest he should fall as he ascended the bleachers of the circus-like tent). Stopping directly in front of my son, Father Jarcourent lifted up the hand that he had placed on a nearby parishioner’s shoulder, and lowered the other, which had been raised toward heaven. Having made some kind of blessing motion, he then placed his hands both together, his thumbs parallel to and touching each other as if he were about to fashion a fleshy sweet-potato horn that I can tooting on as a child (for during the war years we had to find an endless number of ways to entertain ourselves). Yet instead of cupping his hands, he opened them and set them, palms down and fingers spread, directly on the head of my son and cried out in the midst of the assembly, “This is the one, Lord, the one you have chosen. I thank you, Lord, that you have called him to love you, Lord; yes, Lord, bring him into your kingdom!” You can imagine Father Jarcourent’s disappointment the next day when, after Sunday mass, he half-asked, half-exhorted my son, “So you are now a Christian!” (I say ask, but, as the punctuation reveals, it was more of an exhortation than a question, as if he, the right vicar of God, were God himself imposing faith in Christ upon a nonbeliever; again, Reverend Griffith would have cheered had he been privy to this turn of events.) “No,” my son said, “I am not. To be honest, Father, I do not intend to become one. But I very much appreciate you and your religion. You have taught me that religion is a beautiful thing, and I have enjoyed coming to church, which mostly has been a new kind of experience for me.” Father Jarcourent was crestfallen. “But the Lord told me you would be a Christian, and he said it would be very soon.” They agreed to leave it at that until—when my son was at the airport ten days later, about to embark for home—Father Jarcourent came to the waiting area to see him off. After a bit of chitchat, the caring and kindly priest asked again, “So, are you a Christian yet?” “No, Father,” my son responded, “but I really appreciate your concern and all you’ve done for me.” “I will pray for you,” Father Jarcourent said in parting, and then, in his grace-

filled way, with the Catholic-islander version of the very Welsh Calvinistic authority that I had seen as a child, he added, “and you will pray for me.” I was delighted to hear that story when my son returned from St. Croix just before he left for Rome in the late summer of 1979. It delighted me for a few reasons. First, because my son “appreciated” religion as I always did. He had found religion without finding God and thus had imitated me perfectly. I was also cheered because the story was, it seemed to me, quite funny. “Imagine,” I thought, “the priest singling out my son in a crowd that large, in spite of the fact that he was not a local.”

My father had died in June of that same year, on Father’s Day, about a month before my son had left for St. Croix. The house felt empty with my son now away and my life continuing on sans père. My son had become the one male figure to whom I could talk during my times of melancholy, taking the place of my beloved father, Harry, the bastard Welshman. I say bastard precisely because that is what he was; for he was in fact one-half French, and the other half, I am sorry to say, was likely to have been English. His name was Harry Reed Jakes. Reed is an English name; Jakes (Jacques), French—which left little if any room for the Welsh. Although Harry was inserted among the Welsh by his father, his mother, Anne Louise Reed, though English, comported herself more as a Welsh woman than an English one. Her favorite hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross,” oddly enough, was neither Welsh nor English but composed in Michigan, of all places. Harry’s father provided as best he could for his family by working in the mines as a cook, or, as he liked to say, a “chef.” Yet it was well known that the irony was greater than simply his name or where he worked—that is, at the top of Shaft 17, the very mineshaft in which his son, my father, Harry, would eventually work to harvest the magic black stones that bring warmth by being burnt in the furnaces that in those days everyone, from the middle class up at least, had in the basement. We had a good furnace, of course, yet it always frightened me because its cavernous door looked like a large mouth, a mouth that led to a fiery furnace where I never expected to see— but might well have seen if I had looked with eyes of faith—Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego, and a fourth standing there to protect them. Harry’s father, James, had married Ann, the daughter of Emma Hall and Charles Reed, whose country of origin was England. Of this couple and their noble names, I know very little, not even their precise port of departure for America. Yet I set the lost memories and vagaries associated with them aside to return to James’s employment as a self-styled “French Chef,” who would marry into the forgotten nobility of the English Reed family. The evidence that James was as good a lunchtime cook as he claimed was noticeable in the miners themselves, for within two years’ time, not a single miner at Shaft 17 packed his lunch, all preferring to buy it from James Jakes’s vending cart. The cart consisted of a Soyer “Magic Stove,” which was a portable kerosene cooking device, the

precursor of the Coleman stoves of today. James had learned that the “magic stoves” were available only in New York City, which is where he ultimately purchased this apparatus, having traveled there to impress Mr. Charles Reed, his future father-in-law, with his entrepreneurial spirit. Grandfather James wanted to start his own cooking business, especially catering to Welsh miners, for he knew well that they were capable of working up a hearty appetite. The long trip to the big town pleased his future father-in-law, and it had precisely the intended effect of forging a path toward a future in cookery.

Further evidence that James was a good cook could be found not only in the fact that the miners stopped bringing their lunches—which engendered not a little friction between those husbands and their wives, particularly among the younger couples—but also in the miners themselves, whose appearance was surprisingly different than the other miners fed at the mouths of the other mine shafts, who brought with them their typical lunch of a pasty (pronounced with a short –ă-, as in “has” not “paste”), the origin of which lunch item is of course not really Welsh but Cornish. The Cornish called these pasties “hoggan.” When the Welsh miners (or, more specifically, when their wives) got hold of that particular food, however, to make it their own, they seemed to have employed the now widely disseminated word “pasta,” which by that time, even in Italy, had begun to serve as an all-purpose word for various different kinds of food. Suddenly, the Cornish “hoggan” was the Welsh “pasty,” with no credit whatsoever given to the Cornish at the time; the pages of history were corrected only later in cookbooks published by honorable Welsh chefs, who felt guilty about the theft of one of the most common lunches prepared by the hands of honest, hardworking Welsh wives. But it was most certainly not pasties that James Jakes made as his specialty, for while a pasty will put meat on the miner’s bones, it won’t thicken him up the way James’s cooking clearly did. James’s specialty was ragoût de veau, a delicious veal stew, the recipe for which had been handed down to him by his father, Charles, who did some of the cooking—especially on special occasions— in the Jacques household, over the not-occasional objections (but to the epicurean delight) of Charles’s wife, Ruth (née Priestman), James’s mother. She was a woman of great faith but of ordinary culinary skill; her specialty was “Missouri” (also known as “Missouri Casserole”), a dish that became my personal specialty dinner, as I had about as much a knack for cooking as my great-grandmother Ruth—edible, quite; delectable, not quite, but rugged, rustic, and good. Missouri consists of ground beef (at bottom), precisely cut slices of peeled potatoes, equally precisely cut onions, and diced tomatoes. James Jakes, however, inherited his father’s unique culinary knack. Accordingly, James expanded his repertoire to include noix de veau Brillat-Savarin, which involved much more than warming some flavorful veal ts. Rather, add to that ample foie gras (which, beyond its use in Strasbourg pie, can be an excellent

flavor enhancer for a number of dishes), bacon strips, morel mushrooms, and other various vegetables (chief among them carrots), all in savory béchamel sauce, with a few shallots added at the last minute, to taste—one should always be careful with onion products; perhaps, he added them a bit earlier than the last minute. Of course, the vital ingredient that he added—the key ingredient of any true French chef—was butter. All this on three substantial saucepans cooking on three portable Soyer (which he pronounced in the French fashion, “soy-yeah”) stoves, all at once, with sizable chunks of real French bread—surprisingly, the Welsh miners loved the French bread, for the supply of which my grandfather found a young baker who had a small bakery in Kingston at 334 Pierce Street— put on the side of each plateful served. And these were only two of his numerous French feasts. Among others, one could also find poularde Talleyrand Escoffier (a French dish paradoxically coming from London, a new dish at the time of my grandfather’s culinary apex). On top of all this, even during the dark years of prohibition he discreetly provided for his best customers a small glass of red wine, gratis—small because they had to go back to work, of course. The miners’ wives had no way to compete with these hot dishes, the French bread, or the occasional glass of vin rouge. Although Grandfather James Jakes’s business ittedly never made a great deal of profit—for the overhead for such a miner’s lunch was, one can imagine, high—he did feed the miners well, so well, as I was saying above, that the miners of Shaft 17 had a different appearance from the other miners. That difference could be measured in of their size, for they were slowly but surely becoming more and more corpulent. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that the miners of Shaft 17 gained, on average, a solid three inches around their waist per year, stuffed as they were with my grandfather’s scrumptious French cuisine. This led to upheaval because Shaft 17 was the only functioning mine shaft in the history of the Wyoming Valley that had to be recut to accommodate its workers. Furthermore, a greater number of the miners of that shaft had to see their church rectors for marriage counseling than any other shaft. Such was the depth to which my grandfather’s cooking led the miners to descend. Fortunately, I learned from that side of the family not the way of cooking à la française but only the Missouri recipe of James’s good wife, Ann, who was also not Welsh.

When it comes to the preservation of ethnic identity, the Welsh have always talked a much better game than they played. My grandparents on my mother’s side were both Welsh, and their two children, Blythe and Blanche, were brought up to marry within the Welsh community. Blanche married my father, Harry, who was not Welsh at all. Blythe managed to find a vivacious Welsh orphan girl named Marian Hubbard—if that was her real surname and if she really was Welsh, although that seems probable based on the way she lived, for she was thoroughly gwallgof (a bit batty). About her a book might easily be written. Marian and Blythe’s two boys, Blythe Jr. and Warren, were also encouraged to marry within the Welsh community. Warren did not, but he married quite well, June Hanks, a beautiful bride and a completely charming woman, who became an archaeologist of some note. Blythe Jr. managed to keep the Welsh marriage rule, marrying a wonderful Welsh woman named Marlette Manthe—very Welsh of very Welsh, begotten not made Welsh (quite unlike Harry, who was made Welsh)—a woman who would become a leading expert in the life of the hymn writer Fanny Crosby. Marlette often toured as a one-woman stage show in which she impersonated that fine musical poetess and explained with great ion her motivation to follow so unique a calling as the writing of hymns, a theme that circles back, as much of this book has, to David Evans, my Welsh hymn-writing grandfather. Neither my sister nor I, however, married Welshmen. I married a Scot, though either his parents or his grandparents had allowed the connection with their Scottish Presbyterian heritage to slip. Instead, they ed with the Church of England, the Anglicans. Lee Ann went a bit further than I, marrying a Swede, Ed, whose Catholicism became so cerebral that it ultimately crystalized into atheism. But to return now to the other Catholic who played an important role in my son’s story. It was October 1979, and John Paul II, whom many call the great pope, had just a one year before been chosen by the cardinals in the not-yet-cleansedand-transformed Sistine Chapel to become the 264th Pope of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. I refuse here to get into a discussion of Catholicism versus Protestantism. Suffice it to say that God, in his infinite wisdom, used the sins of man to achieve a great healing for the church. You can imagine that in the previous sentence I am referring to the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation

or both, as you like. The day before the event involving the pope, there was a certain confluence of circumstances that occurred in Naples, Italy, on a warm mid-October evening. My son and other students from various colleges and universities were participating in a semester-long study-abroad program in Italy. The day before, the students had traversed the streets of Pompeii in a long, hot, and intense day of learning. The program coordinator, a certain Signora Beria, gave the students the next day off. This act of kindness she would, within five weeks’ time, greatly regret—as, just after a Thanksgiving celebration, two very bad boys in the program, my son and his friend Chuck, stole a sizable piece of sacred pumpkin pie out of the large refrigerator in which the cooks placed leftovers for cold safekeeping in the basement kitchen. Signora Beria was outraged, lining all the suspects up and demanding a confession. I know that my son would have confessed were it not for the fact that he knew that to do so might have caused him to divulge too much, especially who his coconspirator was. Instead, he held his tongue, which meant that Mrs. Beria—the only four-feet six-inches woman who could by her very presence take command of any room or space she chose to occupy—no doubt went to her grave ing the class of the fall of 1979 as the most despicable of all classes at the Rome Center, for among them were undiscovered pumpkin (pie) thieves. On that day, however, in October, just a few weeks before the great pumpkin burglary, my son came back from a day of Bacchic revelry in Capri, a lovely island that lies just across the Bay of Naples from Naples itself, in close proximity to the Sorrentine Peninsula. That very day, in their drunken states, he and his friend Chuck had performed the (incredibly stupid) “feat” of swimming to, through, and back from two spectacular rock formations known as the Faraglioni, perhaps a hundred yards off the island’s southeast coast. Briny, smelling of wine, and proud of both, they disembarked from the transport boat that had returned to Naples from Capri, when to my son’s surprise and to that of Chuck, the sound of Handel’s Messiah came wafting toward them, booming over large loudspeakers that were affixed to the urban lampposts. These speakers were likely to have been the same ones used for Mussolini’s various propagandistic announcements and, later, for air-raid warnings during the war. My son and Chuck, still intoxicated, espied a white jeep wending its way down

Corso Arnaldo Lucci, just as it merges with Via Reggia di Portici, the large boulevard quite near the shipyard. The figure in the jeep was none other than the relatively new Polish pope himself, a pope destined for greatness. From his perch in the heavenly white jeep, he turned toward my son and made the sign of the cross directly aimed at my son’s head, and this at a distance of a mere ten feet. At such a distance, even an inexperienced pontifex would be unlikely to miss the mark, which he did not. This was the second Catholic event that occurred for my son, an event that no doubt Father Jarcourent’s prayers precisely produced. Still, perhaps because the myna bird was partially responsible for his speaking during his formative years, my son could not yet articulate what was going on all around him. Though he still did not believe, he had been attending an informal and intellectually stimulating Bible study that term, in which some of the college students in the program were reading recreationally in ancient Greek the first letter of St. Peter. It was but a few days after the notorious pumpkin-stealing event that my son took the walk that would change both of our destinies. From Philly, to the New Hope intelligentsia crowd, to the Walden years on the farm in Monterey, Virginia, I had managed to lose touch fairly completely with my Welshness and its concomitant faith. Neither I nor my sister proved to be very fertile ground for that faith. We were, in fact, oblivious to or inoculated against whatever the Welsh, such as our saintly cousin Blythe, for example, might say from time to time about God; besides, Blythe always spoke as if I, being Welsh, already embraced the historical faith and understood the depth of the family’s Welshness. So it was, whenever I visited them, that he and Marlette would offer me some Hên Sîr cheese and say, “It never loses its flavor, Lainie, does it?” But for me, in those years, it had. I had all but forgotten about Hên Sîr, the old Welsh tea service, and the black trunk that had brought the lustrous but frightening-faced cheese plate from Wales. Yet now, the turn of events in my son’s life served as a strange reminder of my Welshness. In the meantime Lee Ann embraced her husband’s lack of faith, though no doubt imperfectly, for being a faithful atheist is nearly impossible and certainly much harder than being a Christian. If the Christian doubts for a moment, an hour, a day, or even a season of life, as I had, he is not therefore automatically disqualified from being a Christian, for struggling with faith has been what all Christians have always done—need I go further than St. Peter himself to find a suitable example? But

the atheist who doubts his position for even a moment is no longer, it seems to me, an atheist. Rather, he has become an agnostic and thus temporarily a “spiritual person,” which is probably why there are so many spiritual folks these days. But the consequence of the prayers of Father Jarcourent, the pumpkin thievery (for which my son rightly felt that he needed divine forgiveness), and the papal blessing consisted in the following unlikely turn of events. My son went to the Vatican that day specifically to buy a Bible that he might better prepare for the aforementioned Bible study, which it turns out was held in the room of one of the young women in the program. This young woman, whom he would later marry, was instrumental in helping him better understand the Scriptures. But it was this walk that he took to buy a Bible that brought things to a head quickly. He wanted only the Bible, as he recounted the story to me later, for educational purposes. He went to the Vatican bookstore located just in front and to the left of the Vatican. Having bought the Bible, he proceeded down the large avenue (Via della Conciliazione) that leads to the front of St. Peter’s Square, which is itself characterized by its flanking apsidal colonnades that Bernini purportedly said represented the “maternal embrace of the church,” perhaps allowing the dome of the basilica to imitate the papal mitre. Carrying the book under his right arm, my son with every step struggled with the issue of whether he could believe any of this business about Christ being the sacrifice for all humankind’s sin, or the business about the empty tomb, for that matter. Christmas and Easter—that is to say, the significance of each—those were the topics most preson him, though the whole matter still seemed to him mostly hocus-pocus. His prayer, as he later told me, was simple and dismissive: “God, if you can hear me, I would like to thank you for this opportunity to have attended a Bible study and to have learned about Jesus and all that, but I really don’t want to believe. So thank you, but I need to move on with my life now”—something to that effect, not at all unlike the kinds of things he had said a few months earlier to Father Jarcourent. Yet, when he turned from the street that runs toward St. Peter’s, he began to move from reconciliation to revelation, and then, as he walked along, from revelation to penitence, only to be compelled, as he went out of the gate from Vatican City proper, “by an external force from within,” so he said, to read the

Bible, which he did in the American Academy library, skipping all of his classes that afternoon. A few hours later he told the young woman who would later become his wife that he had become a Christian; she, however, at first did not believe it.

PORTA SANTO SPIRITO

I should, at this point, issue a disclaimer: the street names in or near Vatican City are all fairly predictable. Via della Conciliazione, for example, means “Way of Reconciliation,” or “Reconciliation Street,” and it is one of a good number of theologically oriented place names in that section of Rome. He turned right off Reconciliation Street, and the revelation that we spoke of earlier came to him as he turned onto the street of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which turns immediately into Via dei Penitenzieri, the Street of the Apostolic Tribunals of Mercy (for the forgiveness of sins); there he repented of his sins and understood for the first time the meaning of the theologically loaded word “propitiation.” As for the gate, that was Porta Santo Spirito, which means Gate of the Holy Spirit— after ing through which, he was filled with a strong desire to read the Scriptures, which he did the remainder of that day and of his life. Of course, this was all the doing of Father Jarcourent. But that did not occur to me until years later. When Louise and I picked up my son at the airport in January of 1980, all I could imagine, as mothers are wont to do, was the worst: he had ed a cult; perhaps he had been swept in by Moonies. In any case, he certainly had broken the unspoken Jewish covenant by studying the Christian Scriptures too diligently. At the very least, he had violated one of the two instructions—mind you, I gave him only two instructions—when he went off to college. Now my son would spend his life, I reckoned, a mind-numbed fundamentalist. Oh my God! What had happened to my only begotten son? What was I saying? It did not occur to me that his feet could be on solid ground; indeed, he might well have been converted on (or almost on) the very spot where Peter was crucified upside down and lost his feet to the crucifier’s sword. (Peter, you may know, was hacked off the cross, on which he was unwilling to be crucified in the manner of Christ, in the Circus of Gaius and Nero that lies directly beneath the large street approaching St. Peter’s.) My son may have been converted just where St. Peter had died, as if Peter himself were transmitting his faith through the pavement, flowing from the saint missing feet straight up into the feet of the sinner missing faith. In any case, Peter did so through his epistle that my son was concurrently reading in the Bible study that he had been attending.

“Well,” I thought to myself in the car as Louise drove and said nothing, “religion is all fine and good, but stories such as this are quite undignified. Thank God nothing of that sort has ever happened to me.” And I was right; nothing quite like it had happened to me. Not yet.

11 The Scent of Redemption

Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed nose of mine! What will you not be smelling? —William Carlos Williams, “Smell”

I had lost my father a few months before my son’s conversion, and with that conversion, I felt I lost my son, as well. Louise decided to relocate, and, in many ways, I felt that I was on my own for the first time. My mother, Blanche, who was then suffering from Alzheimer’s, was in a nursing home, and my saucy, wonderful aunt Emily, Harry’s sister, had fallen and broken her hip and soon had to go into a nursing home, as well. Blythe Sr. had died, too, leaving Marian a widow, if a vivacious one. I felt terribly alone in this dark world and wide. Time had flown and run out its race, and glutted itself on what its womb devours, which is merely mortal dross. It was for me a season not of life, or laughter, or love, but of reflection. I confess, I did not wish to look back, but I had to, if I was going to make sense of any of it, of any of the rich medley of Chinese poetry in the Marco Polo; séances and tarot readings with Leni Fontaine; Kosher Chinese food eaten with chopsticks; “Baruch atah Adonai” (the opening words of the prayer I had said with great religiosity every day during my Jewish period); my thoughts of the farm I left behind in Virginia, where my horse, to whom I gave the wonderful Native American name of Chinganook would, about that time, from this life. Louise would call me on the telephone and, with great comion, tell me of that sad end for my horse, then hers, now God’s. To console myself over the loss of my horse, I went up to my attic to rummage through old photographs and other physical memories of the farm. I found my farm photo album under an old sword and a tangled puppet. The sword was one

of the most practical impractical things I brought with me from Philadelphia, for it bore its blade loosely, as it always had, in its intricately wrought hilt. On the one hand, there was the ever-present danger of the sword coming loose from that hilt and, if the sword were actually wielded with vigorous motion, of its flying out and striking someone; on the other hand, the sword blade simply rattled in the handle, which, if it inspired in the swordsman something other than confidence, could easily frighten a foe. It was therefore both practical and impractical at once. The manner in which I acquired this sword was as unexpected as my coming across it years later in the attic. At the time I got it, Sheila and I were living on Pine Street in downtown Philadelphia in a one-room apartment. We had no money, and, thus, early each morning, I would go out to canvass the garbage cans of the wealthy residents of the swanky section of Philadelphia’s old town, which was merely a few blocks from our shabby apartment near the corner of Thirteenth and Pine. I did this to procure “antiques” to sell to antique dealers in the downtown area, that we might have enough money for food—all this until Sheila could land a job as a social worker (for her degree was in social work), which she did after a few weeks. Thus, when I stopped by my favorite antique shop, Eastwood Antiques, that day with a dilapidated wooden horse puppet that I had found floating near the top of some rich person’s garbage can, I did not expect to leave the store with much. Nevertheless, both I and my son, who helped me harvest the trash barrels, found the horse particularly attractive. It was fully wooden with taut or broken strings affixed in whole or in part to a stout frame and with thick, strong legs with broad and powerful hooves, dignified to behold, nobile visu, as my Latin-teaching sister said later when she saw the thick-legged puppet. But my personal affinity for this horse lay in the fact that it appeared to be a Chinese puppet of very high quality and capable of being, with a little paint and some new puppeteer’s string, restored to its pristine glory. All this potential Dr. Ostwald immediately saw in the puppet. He offered me in exchange for the beast not only money for dinner that night but also a bottle of wine—for he had taken a liking to me and my son, as we had slowly become his chief suppliers of discarded “antiques” that he would restore and then sell at a profit. “Your son really likes ’zhe horse,” Dr. Ostwald said in his thick German accent.

“He has good taste. ’Zhis one will fetch a good dollar. It should not be too great a labor to bring it back to good beauty.” His German accent allowed him, as accents often do foreigners, endearingly to use not quite the right words to describe what he was seeking to explain. Dr. Ostwald’s accent remained thick although, as I understood it, he had lived in America since his doctorate at Heidelberg just before the war. His focus had been on history—what part of history I never knew—but that was all I knew of his no-doubt rich and various past. “Did you happen to know a Professor Dr. Keinhoffe at Heidelberg?” I asked him. “No,” he responded, “but I believe I recall a student named Keinhoffe. He drank a lot of beer as I recall, and studied perhaps it was Jewish mules—not a popular subject during that period.” “Yes, that would be him. He was my professor, or rather his wife was my professor, at Wilkes.” “Sehr interesting,” Dr. Ostwald responded. “I did not know him well, and one day, I believe, he just disappeared from ’zhe university. But time to close up now. You have a nice evening. Enjoy the wine [pronounced vine]!” I left his shop, located at Thirteenth and Spruce, grinning broadly, bearing with me not simply the wine and a fistful of cash—four dollars, to be precise, more than enough for porkless Chinese takeout from the one Chinese restaurant that we had found that made some dishes without pork—but also the rickety old sword that Dr. Ostwald had, owing to the looseness of the blade, been unable to sell for two years. Since the thoughtful Dr. Ostwald had seen me handling the sword just a few days prior to this, he decided to reward my discovery of the Chinese horse with a little something beyond the little something extra that the bottle of wine already represented. “Take ’zhis, too,” he said, as I was leaving the store. “You like it. Also [German for “well then,” pronounced alzo], you have it.” Thus, I came away with the shaky but safe sword, a sword that someday would save the lives of me, Sheila, and my son. That someday came three years later when we were living in New Hope. The peculiar attraction to living in downtown New Hope (aside from the fact that it was ideally situated for enjoying the quaintness of the town with its canal, the

New Hope–Ivyland steam train, and wide variety of boutiques and shops) was its access to the artists and other intellectuals that formed the backbone of the fauxacademic but nevertheless not unintellectual culture of the town in the late 1960s. The disadvantage of living in town, however, was that occasionally an unsavory nonresident hood might show up at your door, which happened on one August night in 1969. That evening, not long after the landing of the Apollo 11 mission, Sheila, I, and two friends were playing an unusually intense game of Monopoly on the screened-in front porch that my father, Harry, had installed—without asking Mr. Nutzen’s permission. The other players in that particular game were Emily Ward and the then-quite-young Sallie Bailey, who was only about twelve years old at the time but lived right next door. (Sallie was the daughter of George Bailey, a Renaissance man who played tympani and, in the middle of his wonderful life, would become the town’s greatest mayor.) Having made their way down the alley that led to the porch of the apartment and finding four “defenseless” young women on the porch playing Monopoly, two rough and rude ruffians pushed open the screen door and feigned the need for cigarettes. We immediately sensed danger; Sallie, being the youngest, looked scared, while Sheila and I, then in our early thirties, were also quite frightened. Sheila began to rise to get them the cigarettes from indoors, but, apparently concerned about her true intentions, the alpha thug commanded her to sit down. Emily, sixteen years old at the time, alone of our group was unfazed and told them to get off the porch or she would call her brother. “Go ahead,” the larger one, the alpha leader, said. “I’ll show him a thing or two.” Now even Emily showed a twinge of fear, for alpha and beta together blocked the door when she rose to get her brother. Emily had many brothers, no less than five, as I recall. I myself might have, at this point, dived out through the screened-in porch and run, crying out loudly, to the house of George Bailey—though if he had been practicing his tympani, he might not have heard—or hastened to Emily’s house, also quite nearby, to get one of her brothers, had I not been concerned for my ten-year-old son, who was playing just inside the door to the apartment. “The cigarettes are inside,” I said.

“Where?” “In my balsa-wood cigarette box.” “Where?” the leader said with irritation, and far more authoritatively. “In the living room.” “Okay, get them,” the hood barked out, opening a switchblade he had taken from the pocket of his black leather coat, “but stay where I can see you.” Owing to this last directive, I knew I could not get to the telephone, which was in the kitchen, but, as I entered the small living room, where my son was playing, I whispered to my son, “Get the sword, the sword,” which he did stealthily, sensing in my voice not just drama, or myna-birdlike repetition, but real danger. Once I had the hilt in hand, I turned and charged the switchbladetoting punk, causing him to panic and drop his blade as the sharp end of my sword struck his solar plexus, knocking the wind completely out of him but, owing to its dullness, not puncturing his skin at all. His switchblade went flying out of his hand with a spinning motion, in the manner of a whirling dervish, ultimately landing with great torqued-up velocity point down in his boot. Such cessation of motion caused him no physical harm per se, as the device stood erect upon the central portion of the shoe, giving the impression of an anatomically incorrect Priapus. In the effort to help his winded master, the beta-male accomplice now stepped away from the door of the screened-in porch, allowing Emily to run through it at breakneck speed in order to get one of her older brothers, perhaps Charlie or Peter, should they happen to be home. Charlie came forthwith, but, by then, the beta-male hooligan had helped carry away his once alpha-male, now gamma-male, comrade. The switchblade fell out of his boot, and, finding it on the ground, I kept it as an interesting souvenir. I named the sword Sir Lancelot as it had acted as a lance rather than a sword, but to wonderful effect, and named the switchblade Maid Marian since it was properly property of a man made a maid who, carried away, was made to walk only with assistance of another man made a maiden-in-waiting. George Bailey, who of course heard about the incident, convinced me to tell my story to the police and surrender Maid Marian to them, which I did.

Sir Lancelot saved the day on one other occasion, and he did so to such a degree that I had to make a special trip to Philadelphia, about an hour’s drive from New Hope, to tell the story to Dr. Ostwald, to whom, because he had given me the sword as a gift, I felt I now owed my life. “What is ’zhis wonderful story you must tell me?” Dr. Ostwald inquired after he had finished with a long-winded art “connoisseur” who had spent no less than forty-five minutes buying from him a painting of Betsy Ross. “That long sword, do you recall it,” I asked, “the one with the loose blade?” “Aber natürlich, ja,” he said. “I gave it you when you gave me ’zhe horse,” to which he then pointed across the shop, proudly hanging by its restored strings, painted in bold colors—red, white, black—with yellow feathers sprouting from the top of the restored delicate leather bridle that adorned the horse’s head. My son’s eyes danced with delight as he looked upon the fully refurbished puppet, the nobility of which was probably finer now than on the day it was first painted in China, some fifty or so years previously. After I told Dr. Ostwald the story of how Sir Lancelot got his name, I continued, “You won’t believe what your sword did for my son,” intoning my words, I suppose, to such an extent that I made it sound as if the sword was magic and had acted on its own, which startled the old antique expert a bit. “Was ist das?” he asked with surprise in German, as if he had forgotten the simple English phrase “What’s that?” But I knew what he meant, even though I had very little German at my disposal. “My son came home one night last spring with the light duty of having to buy some balloons for a school party. I gave him some money, and, though it was approaching dusk, because the store was only across the street, I told him that he could go and try to see if Benny Sidon’s Rexall apothecary might still be open, for Benny sometimes closes the store as late as 6:00 p.m., so genuinely concerned is he with the health needs of all those in the neighborhood. Though the lights were out, into the store my son bounded, entering through the front door that was still unlocked, at first seeing no one inside. I know Benny quite well, since Sheila has occasionally worked part-time in the apothecary. She is no longer doing social work, you know.” “No, I had no idea,” Dr. Ostwald responded, showing that he was listening to my

tale. “Finding the balloons, my son approached the to pay, but no one was there. ‘Mr. Sidon,’ he called, ‘are you here? Is anybody here?’ ” “Well, son, ’zhis must have been sehr exciting?” Dr. Ostwald asked my son, who was paying no attention but rather looking around the store, the bric-a-brac in which seemed to bring back to him a distracting flood of memories. I continued. “At this point Benny himself emerged from the back of the store looking disheveled and frightened, and whispered to my heroic young son, ‘Go call the police; I’m being robbed!’ My son ran quickly out of the shop’s front door, with one of the thieves in hot pursuit…,” and now I paused for dramatic effect, “… and that thief had a gun!” “A gun?” Dr. Ostwald inquired excitedly. “Yes, a gun. When I heard my son running through the parking lot, yelling at the top of his lungs, ‘Help, robbery, police!’ I grabbed Sir Lancelot, fully trusting him because on a previous occasion he had proven faithful, and came running out into the parking lot. I was swinging Sir Lancelot round and round over my head. The torque of the brandishing took the good Sir Lancelot from my hand and sent him in rapid motion toward the robber, striking him in the forehead, just above his brow. Ever the gentleman, Sir Lancelot did not break the skin but left a striking indentation. He was not knocked unconscious, but the sword strike caused him to discharge his gun, the bullet of which grazed his leg so severely that, as he ran away, he left a trail of blood. That trail led, drop by drop, west on Bridge Street toward the office of our most famous writer-in-residence, the wonderful John Pfeiffer, whose books about prehistoric cave paintings and other anthropological subjects are esteemed by researchers of the artistic capabilities of early humankind.” “Ja, I know indeed Pfeiffer’s work,” Dr. Ostwald interjected with interest. “The brigand did not attempt to enter John’s writing studio but rather made his way to the towpath that ran alongside the canal. He stumbled along that towpath, as the disturbances with the dust of the path and the blood trail showed, trying to conceal himself in one of the mule barges—do you know that we have real mule barges in New Hope, Dr. Ostwald? You really should come for a visit one weekend.”

The rapidity of movement from midstory to invitation was a bit incongruous, even awkward, but did not prevent him from proffering a gentle gesture. “Call me Markus,” he said warmly. “You know, Elaine, ’zhis man’s getaway is not unlike ’zhat of my own, from a train ’zhat take me to a concentration camp in 1937.” “I had no idea,” I said with a horrified shudder, allowing him to wait on another customer. When he returned, he resumed the conversation, showing me the number branded on his arm. “ ’Zhey had already branded me at Bergen-Belsen before ’zhey were transferring me and about ’zwenty others to Dachau due to overcrowding—as if ’zhey cared! I ’zhink ’zhe reason for ’zhe transfer was only because ’zhey ’zhought ’zhat we had ’zhe skills ’zhey needed to build bunks at Dachau. ’Zhey treated us like swine [which he pronounced schvine, of course].” After a dramatic pause, he resumed, “I was one of ’zhe lucky ones, for I escaped, first swimming across Pichler See [pronounced say], and ’zhen getting on a barge on ’zhe Paar River … but tell me, what happened to ’zhe man on ’zhe barge?” By now my son had made his way through the maze of antiques, carefully avoiding touching even one of them—I was never ill at ease taking that child into any store, for he never touched or bumped into anything—and he stood in front of the Chinese horse puppet, not saying a word, but merely iring it as he imagined it prancing along with a rider on its stout back, its thick and noble hooves striking the ground in stately stride, with tail waving behind in the breeze. He ired also its plumes and imagined them, too, nobly displayed and bobbing with every step of the great beast, with its mane responding, too, to its prancing. “You like, don’t you? She really turned out good,” for the last of which words he seemed to use the German adverb gut, “didn’t she?” “Oh, yes, Dr. Ostwald. She is beautiful. What would you name her?” my son responded politely. “I don’t know her name. I ’zhink I will let her owner name her.” “Well,” I continued, after a brief pause that allowed me to get back to my story.

“You can’t imagine what happened next.” “’Zhe police followed ’zhe bloody trail to ’zhe barge?” “Jawohl!” I said excitedly, using nearly the full range of my German in just one word. “You figured it out so quickly.” “Yes, well, ’zhat’s more or less what ’zhe Gestapo did to me, ’zhough ’zhey used dogs, not blood. So, as I could see ’zhem along ’zhe shore tracking others and stopping to search some of ’zhe boats, I dived off ’zhe barge and swam away to ’zhe across shore, making my way first to Reichertshofen, and ’zhen even furzher south to Gottshofen, which I ’zhought would be a safe place for me, wizh’ its auspicious name. But my leg, which I hurt badly jumping from ’zhe train, was very sore for a while.” “Is that the reason for your limp?” I asked, perhaps a bit impertinently. “Genau [meaning “precisely”]. Now you are ’zhe good detective. But tell me ’zhe end of your story.” “Oh, yes,” I said, “and this is certainly the best part. He denied, of course, that he was the robber. He claimed that the robber had shot him and he had run away to hide on the barge. He had dropped the gun in the canal, so there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime. Neither I nor my son had gotten a good look at him, and Benny Sidon, who was eighty-six years old at the time, had fainted when he heard the gun discharge, thinking my son had been shot, perhaps even killed!” “What an exciting time you had, my good fellow,” Dr. Ostwald said to my son. “Oh yes,” my son replied, “and Sallie Bailey even said at school that I had been a hero and saved Mr. Sidon!” “But you are a hero,” he said. “I am sure you are.” “Well,” I said, “the police had no sure way of identifying him until I came running down the towpath, still carrying Sir Lancelot.” “One should not run wizh’ a sword, my dear,” Dr. Ostwald said in an avuncular tone.

“Of course, you’re right,” I said, indicating all proper chagrin before proceeding. “But here’s the best part. When I told the policeman that I had hit the gunman in the head with Sir Lancelot—I did not use the sword’s proper name, of course— he took the weapon and fit the dull tip into the noticeable crevice on the robber’s forehead. ‘A perfect match,’ the officer stated and then, turning to a subordinate, commanded, ‘Book him with a two-eleven!’ You can imagine my joy and my deep emotional attachment to the lovely sword that you gave me. I just had to come back and tell you what an inspired gift you gave me that day and to thank you for saving both the lives of me and my son, for who knows what could have happened if Sir Lancelot had not struck that evil assailant in the head and helped to identify him, to boot.” “Of course, I just gave you ’zhe sword; you brought out its magic, my dear. And now I want to give you something else, or rather, I want to give your boy.” Taking the horse down from its lofty perch by the puppeteer’s cross that held the strings that gave it life, he said to my son, “For you! I don’t ’zhink ’zhis one will save you so, but I ’zhink you will have a good time with her. And now, what will you name her?” “It’s a him, Dr. Ostwald,” my son replied. “I think it’s a ‘him,’ and I shall name him Markus.” My son walked the horse all along the Philly sidewalk of Thirteenth and Spruce until we came to my tiny automobile, a Fiat Cinquecento. I held the puppet by its puppeteer’s cross, wedging that cross in the metal crossbeam of the sunroof of my tiny car so that the horse could dangle and amuse my son on the drive home. As I drove out of Philadelphia that late afternoon, my son fell asleep gazing at the horse, imagining its stately stride displayed in a Chinese New Year parade. “Wait until I show Sheila this horse,” I thought. “She will Markus Ostwald’s kindness afresh.” And then I thought, “That Sallie Bailey always was a very nice kid. Imagine her calling my son a hero at school.”

It took a few years even to begin to put together all the pieces of this complicated puzzle that was my life. With my son now married and living in Vermont, I had time—time to read and even to pray. And read I did, widely, encountering some of the classic works of the Western world, some of the works that Dr. Davies had tried to teach me so many years before. Ovid’s Metamorphoses was a particular favorite of mine, possibly because the transition amidst chaos that that document embodies reflected in so many ways the transition and chaos of my own life. I prayed, too, but the prayers were still mainly of a religious ilk—that is to say, reflecting my natural desire to have God on my own , thereby creating a god in my mind who was simply like me but bigger (of course, very religious, yet oddly, unlike God, incapable of significant magic). Such a god is, I am afraid, the very god that many want but cannot have, shrouded in religion and piety, accessed via the pious works of the pious few. That god, the disionate but fully indulgent god, is the god to whom I was crying out day and night. Yet God, quite different from the god to whom I called out, heeded my prayers. That God, the God with a distinctive name, heard those prayers though they were directed not to him but to a mere imitation, to the Dis of his Zeus. The God of my forefathers came to me in the spring of 1986. He came in the form of a muse. Much had happened in the time leading up to that moment. Girlie, my beloved sheepdog, died in the fall of 1982. As so often happens with large dogs such as English sheepdogs, Girlie’s hips failed. It was difficult watching her back legs become less and less functional. I had insisted that my son drive back from Vermont to bury the dog. In order to be released from the responsibility of his graduate seminars, he had to make up the excuse that “a close friend of the family” had suddenly ed away. He drove halfway back, Duw caru ef, getting as far south as Albany, when he called to see how I was feeling. “I am okay now,” I said. “I don’t need you anymore.” He thus found himself in an embarrassing state of affairs, for it was necessary for him to return to the university and explain to his professors, “It turned out that the family friend was not as close as I thought.” They overlooked, I suppose, this awkward situation, as he did manage to graduate the following May.

Girlie’s death left me devastated. I had no one, as my parents were dead or, in my mother Blanche’s case, very close to death, as her Alzheimer’s disease was in its final stages. My son was married and far away in Vermont. Louise was gone now, and to top it all off, Girlie was gone, too. I buried my dearly beloved dog near the front gate, planting in her honor a willow sprig, which over the years grew into a lovely tree near the grave.

THE WILLOW TREE NEAR GIRLIE’S GRAVE

I cried out to God about my dog’s death. God heard my prayer, and within a few days of Girlie’s ing, a new English sheepdog miraculously wandered into my yard. I named this dog Fee on roughly the same principle whereby I had named a cat Dammit, or another wonderful cat, who was my sole companion at the time of Girlie’s death, 81. Fee was so named because after I had taken her to the veterinarian, who told me that she had probably run away from a situation involving some degree of abuse or at least neglect, she assessed me a noticeable fee for Fee’s shots and the exam. This was a new veterinarian for me, and I liked her, for she reminded me of the vet who had tended my animals when I was a card-carrying member of the New Hope intelligentsia. I and several other people in the New Hope area had changed from our regular veterinarians to this particular new vet, Dr. Bianca Waddabunga, even though most of us feared this was not her real name. She was the only veterinarian to whom I had ever gone who physically looked like a fashion model. In the office, however, she sported a turban fastened with a great emerald stone, which clashed oddly with her large ruby earrings. These earrings were especially visible owing to the distinct size—I should actually say length— of Dr. Waddabunga’s earlobes, which the weight of the rubies seemed to have increased by stretching them downward. She had in her nose a striking gold ring protruding, as nose rings do, from both nostrils at once. Her facial features were not especially noticeable, except for the pronounced line between her cheeks and her mouth and the fact that she had one of those sets of lips that, adorned with lipstick put on somewhat sloppily, bore a permanent, and rather odd, smile. Her body, however, as I mentioned, was that of a fashion model, and it appeared that she wore absolutely nothing—certainly, she did not wear a bra—under her doctor’s coat. Dr. Waddabunga claimed to have been trained in holistic healing, which was then the latest thing in veterinary medicine. There was some kind of diploma hanging on her wall to that effect from a training center in Switzerland. Though I was unsure what it said (since it was in German), it certainly looked official enough, with its shiny gold seal and all the German words leading up to Dr. Waddabunga’s name. Perhaps this was her real name, after all.

When she examined an animal, she rarely touched it with her hands; she would use her wand, which she always kept in her left hand, to stroke the animal’s back as her right hand circled over the animal’s head, while she closed her eyes and sighed deeply as if connecting spiritually with the animal. I insisted that my son, who was then studying literature at the University of Pennsylvania (where he went for his doctorate after his MA at Vermont), bring his cat, Piazza, who seemed to be psychologically tormented in some way, to Dr. Waddabunga (a name that my son believed to be a pseudonym despite the Swiss “diploma”) for healing, but he said he would do so only if I paid. From the first, he was skeptical about the holistic approach, especially when I told him that she used a wand. Still, as usual, he complied. On that occasion, Dr. Waddabunga put the wand down and used both hands, waving them over the animal in the same circular motion that she usually did with one hand. She looked at the ceiling—almost as a person possessed, it seemed—and shrieked. “What is it?” she exclaimed. “Tell me kitty, baby kitten, sweet baby, what is bothering you? Does it hurt? Tell me, sweet baby, tell me.” She then paused, incongruously coming out of her trance as rapidly as she had gone into it, to ask the cat’s name. “Piazza,” my son said with an incredulous look on his face. “What?” she asked equally incredulously. “That’s an unusual name.” At this point I knew what he was thinking—namely, “You’re a fine one to talk.” Thankfully, instead he said, “It means ‘square’ in Italian.” “Square?” she asked. “Why would you name your cat Square?” Using self-control, he did not respond, “Why would you wave your hands over my cat? What is that magic wand for? Why do you have a nose ring? Why are you wearing a turban, and long flowing robes?” Instead, he simply said, “She is named after a particular square, the Piazza della Minerva.” Yet Dr. Waddabunga, who spoke no Italian, still did not understand that the type of square about which my son was speaking was not a geometric shape but a gathering place within a city, a gathering place where the culture of the city could thrive. How much greater a country America would be, if we had piazzas.

Sadly, a good thirty-five dollars later, the cat’s discomfort was not alleviated by the magic treatment of Dr. Waddabunga, but it had been quite a show and had brought joy into my life at a time when I needed joy. Fee, the dog that magically wandered into my yard only a day or two after Girlie’s death, brought even more joy, for she was a wonderful dog, and though none could ever take the place of my Girlie dog, she was a great comfort to me, and to 81. Just as Fee was named after the fee that I had paid to Dr. Waddabunga, I named 81 after the interstate that runs through Virginia into Central Pennsylvania and further north beyond that to the Canadian border. I found Baby 81, as I tended to call her, when she was just a kitten, perhaps only three weeks old, black from head to paw, and blown along the highway like a little tumbleweed by the draft of a huge semi. This was the kitten I rescued from the highway and then named after that very road, adding only the word “Baby” to the number, a name that befit this cat, for I was to feed her by hand, like a real baby. This I did by putting 81 in the high chair in which I had fed my son when he was an infant. I used a long feeding spoon, hitherto used for the futile pursuit of mixing sugar in a tall glass of iced tea. Thus, the cat learned at an early age to sit up in a high chair with her front paws, precisely like a baby’s arms, resting on the tray. To move the metaphor beyond the mere appellation “baby” to the reality of my transformation of this cat into a small human being, I fed her Gerber baby food. Baby 81 loved this cuisine, and, in fact, because I gave her Gerber exclusively, she never acquired a taste for cat food, which made her an outcast among the other cats in the neighborhood of the Lizzie Ann, which, one may recall, was my lovely house in Solebury.

Her favorite foods were Gerber puréed beef, Gerber puréed chicken, and Gerber puréed turkey. But what set her apart from any other cat I have ever had (or any animal I ever loved) was the fact that she liked also Gerber puréed peas, Gerber puréed green beans, Gerber puréed baked beans, and—now this may have been her absolute favorite nonmeat product—Gerber puréed peach cobbler. When she got hungry, she would climb into her chair and cry until I came to feed her. She was precisely like a real baby, except that she needed no diapers and she was able to get into her high chair unassisted. At least she could for the first two years that I had her. By year three, however, she could no longer pounce into the seat of feeding. This was especially pronounced at her birthday party in August of 1983. I had bought for the occasion Gerber puréed bacon, as an appetizer, and Gerber puréed chicken, as the main course, along with the Gerber puréed beans and, for dessert (along with ladyfingers soaked in amaretto, which made them soft enough for her to eat), a huge helping of Gerber puréed blackberry cobbler, simply as a variation on the more usual Gerber puréed peach cobbler. This time, my beloved cat found herself unable to jump into her feeding place, even for such a feast. Further, she could not find an alternate means of accessing that sacred space (for example, by jumping from cutting board to stool to high chair). This development was a cause of great distress for me, and I worried that perhaps she had hurt one of her paws or had some other pain. It never occurred to me that she was simply too fat to make the leap anymore. I suppose I had not noticed her weight gain because I loved her so. When one loves someone, one looks past small imperfections such as mere heft. My son, however, on one of his visits home, made obvious to me the change in the cat’s weight, insultingly repeating twice, like the myna bird who taught him to talk, “Your cat is getting fat, your cat is getting fat.” And then adding, “It is getting very fat, Mother.” I denied it. This provoked him, and he returned to his double speech: “It is because you’ve been feeding her baby food, baby food. Don’t you understand,” he queried, “that baby food is meant for babies? That is why there is a picture of a baby on the jar.

Baby food is meant to make babies fatter, and it works, since most babies one sees are at least a little bit fat. And whoever heard of a cat eating peach cobbler? Peach cobbler!” he parroted. How I wish then that I had never bought that bird, Cookie, so many years before. “Do you really think it is healthy for a cat to eat cobbler? Mom, you are enabling this cat.” I had never been called an “enabler” before, and I found it very offensive. I was in complete denial, and I had not taken responsibility for any of the cat’s health problems. For example, the cat was no longer able to wash herself, as most cats do, with her tongue, for there was so much fat around her neck and chin that she could no longer actually reach with her mouth any part of her body except her front paws. These extremities, at least, she could still bring into with her tongue, as if cleaning up after a feast, and she performed this limited cleanup ritual, I suppose, just for show. I alone bathed her from time to time, to the extent that she was ever clean, just as I was the one who fed her, guiltily lifting her bulk into the high chair day in and day out. And I was the one who told her that she looked beautiful. I was her enabler, but I knew it not. Baby 81 was not a large cat—that is to say, she was not “big boned” except in the sense that the word is used occasionally to describe an obese person. Thus, as her fat waxed ever greater, it had little space with which to work. The need for fat storage first became apparent, though subtly, with the gradual disappearance of the cat’s tail. The tail, I should say, never fully disappeared; there was, even at the end of my beloved cat’s life, at least a little bit of the tail protruding from the massive lump of fat that constituted the cat’s rump. More noticeable, however, was the cat’s loss of mobility. This began simply with a greater degree of sluggishness on her part. After the enabler had transported her (with increasing difficulty the portlier she became) from her feeding shrine to the couch, she would simply lie there the rest of the morning watching TV. “Why don’t you make an effort to get outside and play with the other animals?” I would frequently ask her. But she would just look at me with her longing eyes and lick her front paws, as if to say what she was desiring was not activity with other animals, not even the vain attempt to chase a bird, for example, for all cats like to chase birds. Baby 81, however tasty a raw bird might be, either had no interest in catching birds or realized that she simply was no longer capable of chasing after them. Instead, she would just lick one of her front paws with greater and greater vigor,

sometimes even pulling at the claws with her teeth in order, I think, to communicate to her enabler that it was snack time. I would, of course, dutifully bring a snack to this now-massive lump of matted fur and fat that was once the beautiful little kitten I saved from the dangerous highway several years before. Indeed, her incapacity to bathe herself in the feline mode was one of the most vexing aspects of her obese condition, as she became increasingly greasy and covered with dander and bits of hair that she could not remove with her mouth. I took to giving her sponge baths, which she hated but could not resist because she was gradually losing her ability to walk, let alone run away. When she was no longer able to walk about at will—to use the cat box, for example—she had to learn to shuttle herself across the rugs on the floor by hooking her front claws into the rug and dragging her body, back legs straight out behind her (with just a bit of what was left of her tail streaming along, too, between the extended rear legs). To make it handicapped ready, I cut a large U-shaped hole in the side of the cat box through which entrance Baby 81 could drag herself in order to utilize the facilities. Every time my son would come home, he would dutifully remind me that I was contributing to my cat’s eating disorder. I continued to deny it, and only became aware that he was right about this when my dearly beloved cat suffered a massive coronary at the age of seven. I made my son come home to dig the hole in the backyard to bury Baby 81 because it was too hard for me at age fifty-one to excavate so large a pit. Tears were shed, many tears with a twinge of guilt. My son, thankfully, did not heap any guilt on me that cheerless day, after which I never chair-fed any cat ever again.

That same year, I was saying earlier, was the year that my Easter-time God came to me in the form of a muse. My son and daughter-in-law and their baby were living in New York, a move to which I had (quite literally) violently objected, hurling a fireplace log at my son (but missing him) when he broke the news to me; the log, in turn, broke my gate. Actually, it turned out not to have been too difficult a place for them to live, for he moved not to New York City proper but only to Mount Vernon, a suburb of New York in southern Westchester County, thoroughly proximate to the city, wedged as it is between Yonkers, New Rochelle, and the Bronx. Though they lived there for two years, as an act of protest I never once visited them. I had not given my approval to their move from Philadelphia, and thus I would not acknowledge it. I was quite distressed that year. My cat had died of a heart attack, though my son cruelly called it “food poisoning,” and my relationships with my friends were deteriorating. This was because one particular group of friends with whom I had associated used drugs recreationally, which gave me a bad reputation with other groups of my friends. Indeed, I attended some marijuana parties, common enough in the early 1980s, but, like the then-future president, I did not inhale. For this reason I always did believe President Clinton about that statement, for I had been in a rather similar circumstance on more than one occasion. In addition to all of this, menopause was starting, so I was becoming quite cross with people and animals alike. Accordingly, I lost some friends and devoted myself increasingly to reading and writing. And then it happened: Neshaminy School District offered an early retirement package, a package so wonderful that many of us, even those who were in our fifties, could not resist. It was my chance to become the author I had always wanted to be. Having taken the opportunity, I could now fully devote myself to writing. None of the many things I wrote during those years was ever published, but all of them have certainly informed this current volume. One of the things I wrote stemmed from a most unexpected experience I had in February of 1987. I had taken a long and lonely walk from the Lizzie Ann, my home at the base of Phillips Mill Road, along a short stretch of River Road until I came to Phillips Mill itself, where, having crossed over the canal on a small

bridge, I could walk along the towpath, on which my son had been a muleskinner so many years before. It is quite a distance (perhaps three miles or more) from Phillips Mill, on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, to Stockton, New Jersey. Phillips Mill was named for Aaron Phillips, who constructed the old farmhouse in the 1740s. I will not comment here on the unsubstantiated legend that the inn that now occupies this property is haunted, save to say that an old rocking chair there is said to start rocking at times of its own accord, and the wind has been known, on a sudden, to blow open securely latched storm doors, even on evenings when the sky is calm. But I leave this aside, that I might describe another sort of spiritual happening that day. En route to the towpath, I ed through the grounds of that inn, which radiates old-world charm, though the charm is, of course, not that of the old world per se but instead the charm of historic and beautiful eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. I knew quite well the inn’s owners, Joyce and Brooks Kaufman, having met them through the intervention of my neighbors, Fred and Marian Krupp. Marian was a professional illustrator (and quite a wonderful artist), and she and her husband both loved dogs, particularly Scotty dogs, but also dachshunds. Of all the neighbors I ever had, Fred and Marian were by far my favorite. Their lives were rich in neighborly affection, as Fred often came across the street, or more properly across Phillips Mill Road, to play a trick on me—like putting a huge store-bought watermelon in my tiny watermelon patch—or to tell me a funny joke he had heard. Among his jokes, by far my personal favorite went like this: “A young preacher, ministering down by the stockyard, said to a drunken derelict perched against an empty barrel, ‘Sir, do you love Jesus?’ to which the old vagabond replied with an intoxicated slur, ‘Sure, I love all kinds of cheeses.’ ” At the time, I had no idea how symbolically important that pun would turn out to be for me; yet, at least I got the joke. Truth be told, on first hearing I did not normally understand the majority of Fred’s jokes; this was not because they were not funny but rather simply because I was one of those people who rarely “got” jokes until they were explained to me, which I realize kills the moment. Nevertheless, in an effort not to subvert the storyteller, I always laughed at the jokes, only itting later that I had no idea what the essence of the joke was. Still, neither the Krupps nor I ever had a cookout without inviting one another. How I missed them when I had to leave my beloved Lizzie Ann and move in with my son, as my health began to decline.

That day, as I walked along the canal’s towpath, I thought about all these things, a bit depressed for how my life had gone, yet clinging to pride in all I had accomplished. I had been a very good teacher; over the years I had cared about all the fifth-grade children entrusted to me. I had virtually single-handedly raised a son who had been moderately successful, though explaining to my friends why he had gone on to study literature was not always an easy task, especially since they rarely could understand why in this day and time anyone would study something as outmoded as literature. I here it that I did not always have a ready response to this question until I began to reread some of the great classics during my retirement. I came to realize why my son had forsaken other possible careers that would likely have been more lucrative for the sake of his pursuit of literary matters. I thought about such things as I walked that long walk to Stockton, New Jersey. When I arrived in Stockton an hour or so later, my feet were sore, but I decided to explore a bit, something I had, oddly, never done in this nearby town, at least not on foot. Thus, I was soon wandering along Main Street, ing Skeeter’s Alley, until I found myself before a lovely old stone church known as Stockton Presbyterian. I had driven past this building in my car probably a hundred times without noticing it. Lord knows, with the exception of the occasional wedding or funeral, I had not set foot in a house of worship of any kind in years. And there I was before a Presbyterian church for the first time since, I think, the wedding of my cousin Blythe. Blythe had been married relatively late for that day and time—I think he was in his early thirties—to a most lovely bride, that best of Welsh women, Marlette, whom I mentioned earlier. That wedding was memorable for two reasons. First, Marlette’s brother, a groomsman, overcome by the heat of that particular day, fainted straight onto the altar. Though he was resuscitated shortly thereafter with some cold water, it did delay the ceremony a bit, causing the patient parishioners to persist in the precipitous temperatures of that tiny Welsh Presbyterian tautologically Calvinistic church. I recall I heard a muted muttering from someone’s two lips: “So this is what they mean by the perseverance of the saints.” Also noteworthy was the reception, at which my son, then only eight years old, seemed to me, as I kept an eye on him at a great distance, to be having the best time of his entire life. That affair was held in a building adjacent to the old Welsh church, at which my son had helped himself (albeit innocently, he has always maintained) to a tray filled with plastic glasses of whiskey sours made at

Blythe’s not-quite-teetotaling request, “Extra light on the whiskey and extra sour on the sour.” Since my son was one of the few children I ever knew who could actually eat a lemon, and would occasionally even eat its rind, extra-sour whiskey sours suited his taste perfectly. After he drank seven or eight of these extra-light whiskey, extra-sour sours, he found himself, or rather I found him, extra-thoroughly schnockered. The occasion of my walk to Stockton was much less festive. When I entered the church, something occurred that had not happened to me for a very long time. As I stepped within the relatively small but quite welcoming structure, I noticed immediately a smell that I recognized from somewhere in my remote past. I could not put my finger on it at first. I sat down in the back pew of the church. No one was in the building save me, so instead of rummaging through my purse, as I usually did in church, I could sit and think, which is precisely what I did. I thought about God, and I asked if religion is really the place where God can be found. And I ultimately arrived at the correct answer: yes and no, but, like the whiskey sours, it had to be light on the former and heavy on the latter. It had taken me many years to come to this conclusion. I thought about my life and reflected on how long it had been since I had actually gone to a proper religious service of any kind. “Do I need religion for my life?” I asked myself. “And even if I do, who would want me in their church, me, whose memories and vagaries had led so far away from Christendom? Could I ever again actually go to church?” Suddenly, a most unexpected moment of olfactory enlightenment overcame me. I knew that smell from when I was a child in Reverend Griffith’s controversially bilingual Welsh Presbyterian Church in Plymouth, Pennsylvania. Was this the smell of Welsh Presbyterianism? No, not quite. It was the smell, or so it seemed to me that day at any rate, of cheeses, or actually of one cheese in particular— namely, Hên Sîr, the distinctively Welsh cheese that years ago in Plymouth Mrs. Griffith set out as a snack, along with crackers, for the parishioners after the service ended. The Welsh call that particular aspect of church casglu cymrodoriaeth, a gathering held during the few minutes after church during which time the faithful chat while taking a bite of good cheese. That is what I smelled, but what I ed were the words of Reverend Griffith, in English and Welsh, that told me that God would always take me back—not the church, not the steeple, not the people, but God. So I said a prayer, the first serious prayer, I think, that I had said in a very long time. This was all the doing of

Reverend Griffith, no doubt. And I thanked, God, too, for Hên Sîr. Moved by the muse, I composed in my mind a poem, a poem I put to paper later that evening. The next day was Easter Sunday. I did not attend church Sunday, for I had not yet quite worked up the courage to do so. Nevertheless, I called my son, who was celebrating the holiday in Michigan with his wife and her family. When I read the poem over the telephone, he cried again. I say that he cried “again” because on Good Friday, I found out later, he had been praying for me with great emotion, involving tears and deep concern. He indicated that he had no specific reason to pray for me; he simply had done so. And like Father Jarcourent’s prayers for him, I believe that my son’s prayers for me likely compelled me to take that walk, if not on the way of reconciliation, at least along a canal that, as canals do, found its origin in a source separate from and greater than itself and then took its course parallel to the source. The poem that I wrote, now lost, was, like all my poetry, chiefly emotive, focusing in this case on the ion of Christ, rather than my own ions, although then still without a full understanding of the reason for his ion. Still, for the first time in thirty years, I now acknowledged that he had suffered. And I could relate to that because I had suffered much, not just in 1987 or 1986 or 1985, but throughout much of my life. I suffered, in part, because I always wanted God and did not want him at the same time. I had sought—through mere piety, or what I regarded as piety—to garner God’s notice without drawing his attention. Nevertheless, that poem and that smell—both old and Welsh in different ways, fraught with the memories of the good pastor of good years—drew me back to church. I confess that the poem, coming when it was due to come, and the smell, coming when it was due as well, confirmed my choice to return to church, if not quite yet to God. So that next Sunday, the anticlimactic Sunday after Easter, I climactically went to church, a Presbyterian church, the foreordained nature of which would have made both Reverend Griffith and Father Jarcourent very happy. This was their doing. Though Greg was a very different kind of pastor—quite different from the other pastors who have come and gone through Stockton Presbyterian Church, which was a kind of training ground for young pastors fresh out of Princeton Theological Seminary (numerous ministers came and went while I was in

church, but I will focus only on Greg)—he will always be my pastor. Like the other Presbyterian vicars in training, he came to Stockton Presbyterian because it was near Princeton, where he was finishing his degree, and because it offered something many churches could not offer. The church did not have much money, but that manse was something special: rent-free living, within an hour of Philadelphia and an hour and ten minutes of New York—not that a pastor and his family could afford to go to New York very often—and located also in the beautiful historic town of Stockton, New Jersey, which was founded by and named after Senator Robert Field Stockton, whose descendants still live in the area. My son went to school with one of them, a certain Tod Stockton, as I recall. So the church became a regular part in my life, and Pastor Greg became my personal St. Ambrose, guiding me and explaining afresh the faith that I had known as a child, picking up right where Reverend Griffith had left off, in ways that I could finally understand. All was starting to come full circle in my life now; I unfurled over the Lizzie Ann the old Welsh flag that had arrived in the black trunk that came from the old country. That trunk bore in it much more than that flag: it carried the Welsh memories in its cups and dishes, the meager possessions of the mostly dispossessed. Prize among these possessions was that baroque, almost rococo, cheese plate, great-grandmother Lucy Hughes Jones’s favorite piece, the old Welsh cheese plate that was not Welsh and may have been intended for Bavarian chocolates. My granddaughter is now the keeper of this cheese plate, which has been ed down some seven generations. Like my son, my granddaughter, when she was young, hated the visage on its lid, as in fact all the little children in the family had in every generation. In words similar to those that my son had once said to me, she would say to her father, “Daddy, if ever I wish to take a bit of cheese, it leers at me.”

12 Jemima

Ydych fichi mochyn mawr! You are a big pig! —Jones family expression

O ne of the great joys of my having reconnected with the church and having begun the process of reconnecting with God was my reconciliation also to my Welshness. I tried to relearn the language, but it was simply too hard to teach myself. For all of its artsiness and its richly intellectual atmosphere, New Hope was simply too far from the Wyoming Valley for me readily to find someone to teach me. In the old valley, I might have been able to come across someone, perhaps an old-timer, who knew enough Welsh to tutor me, even though it had been at least a generation or two since the stream of Welsh settlers had trickled out. Still, I ed a few phrases from my childhood, the most notable example of which was Ydych fichi mochyn mawr , “You are a big pig,” a phrase said, often by my great-aunt Jemima, to a child, such as me, that came inside the house in a dirty or disheveled state. When in 1991 my son invited me to go with him to England and Wales, at first I was hesitant. Almost no one in my family had traveled since the trunk and the cheese plate had made their way across the Atlantic by boat—no one except my parents and, more extensively, my globe-trotting son. Naturally enough, therefore, I, like a true Welshman, was hesitant to get into a ship or, worse yet, into an airplane. Still, with my son going along, I thought it would be safe. It was, however, not safe. The reason for this was clearly attributable to that selfsame son. A fiscally conservative idiot, he on that occasion insisted on purchasing the cheapest possible flight, perhaps because he was an assistant professor and was paying for the flight out of pocket. That flight—on Air India,

an airline that under normal circumstances is quite delightful, I’m sure—seemed at first just that, delightful, and not at all risky. Each stewardess was bedecked with a saree, the traditional female Indian garb, and was perfectly well mannered and courteous. They served us a wonderfully abnormal airline meal—mirabile gustu—lamb vindaloo, my favorite culinary delight. After dinner, earphones were handed out that we might enjoy a typical Indian Bollywood film (complete with English subtitles, of course), a charming feature of the equally charming Air India. And then it started. Since this was my first plane ride, I had no idea what it was, this thing that the captain, in a charming Indian accent, called “turbulence.” The plane was bouncing about in the heavens, causing cups of various kinds of beverages to dance on the tray tables, their liquid contents jiggling about like Siôn Corn’s potbelly on Christmas Eve. The lamb vindaloo was blazing a hot and spicy path back up from my stomach into my esophagus. In addition to all of this, a dripping occurred just above my head—my head alone—a dripping that landed squarely on the blanket that was covering me. My son was trying to sleep, something he had encouraged me to do after dinner because it was an international flight; I, of course, did not heed his onition. Besides, how could I have slept? This might have been my only chance to see a real Bollywood movie on a real Indian airplane. Besides, there was all this bouncing. Now, when I needed him most, he could not hear me because of the heavy industrial earplugs that he had placed in his ears. And he could not even see me through the mask of darkness that was tightly held over his eyes by two elastic bands that ran around the back of his head. He looked like a combination of Rip Van Winkle and Zorro, a handicapped version of the latter, blinded and deafened by his own choice. “Help!” I loudly whispered, almost called, across the aisle to him, as I struggled to extricate my arm from the colorful Indian blanket, working my appendage between the armrest and the tray table so as to tap him on the shoulder. “Help! Help!” My son heard me not, but the other engers did, and one of them—who earlier in the flight had, on my query, identified himself as a Sri Lankan—now proffered a “Shhhh,” which is, apparently, an international signal. I was silent for a few seconds, perhaps a minute. Then I decided to do what is

clearly the single most forbidden act that one can do during turbulence: I unbuckled. I think they must purposely design airplane buckles to make a distinctive clicking noise, for mine certainly did, causing two stewardesses and one steward to descend upon me like hawks. The pesky Sri Lankan said, in his thick Sri Lankan accent, “You know, you are supposed to be buckled in during turbulence.” I ignored him and tried to wriggle my then slightly overweight body out from underneath the tray table while the flight attendants were still making their way toward me, so that firmly on my feet I could tap my son on his shoulder. “Mother, what do you want?” the bird-brained idiot inquired, removing one of the earplugs, but not yet touching his eye covering. His tone of voice was, it seemed to me, unduly irritated. “The airplane is leaking!” I bellowed. “Why don’t you ring the call button?” he retorted. “I don’t want to get electrocuted,” I said, vainly (since he could not see it) pointing to the water coming from the ceiling near the call button and recalling my own brush with death from electrocution in the basement of Wilkes College’s Chase Hall. After a moment, he raised one side of his sleeping mask. “Land’s sakes,” he said. “Mother, it is just a bit of condensation.” “No one else has condensation,” I said. And I was right, for I saw no other engers with condensation over their seats. Ignoring his lack of concern, I hailed a nearby stewardess who was already en route because I had violated the holy of holies by unbuckling my seat belt during turbulence. “Help!” I said, to the chagrin of my neighboring travelers. “The plane has sprung a leak.” Bowing down elegantly and using the fringe of her saree to block the sound of her voice from the engers who were trying to sleep, she apologized, insisting however, as my son had, that it was just a bit of condensation and that the travelers were perfectly safe.

“But it is leaking,” I insisted. “The water is streaming in.” “No, ma’am,” she said, warmly. “That is just condensation from the airconditioning unit.” “Why would we need an air conditioner at thirty thousand feet?” I protested. “It is probably thirty below outside.” “Well,” she said, puzzled by this observation, which was surely about right, “the airplane gets very hot … from the engines.” I could tell she was bluffing, but I wisely let it go, though I did not sleep the rest of the trip, even after the turbulence stopped and the leak abated. By the time we arrived in London, I was the most unpopular person in my section of the plane. Even my corpulent seatmate, who had snored all the way across the Atlantic, was less despised than I. The Sri Lankan told my son, as we began to disembark, “I peety you, man.” “Goode bye and goode reedins!” an unidentified Indian voice volunteered, as I began to walk off the plane with the England-bound engers. “Terra firma at last!” I thought as I joyfully proceeded down the walkway. We planned to spend our first night in London to fight off jet lag, which for me was quite severe. Owing to the fact that the hotel was located on a one-way street, or, really, a one-way alley, the taxi driver let us off a block from our rather inexpensive but nice and clean domicile, which was really more like an oversized bed-and-breakfast. Yet, before we could even make very much progress toward that residence, a beautiful English tea set in the window of a lovely antique shop caught my eye. “Let’s go in here,” I said. “Mother,” my son replied, “can’t we check into the hotel first and get rid of the bags?” “No,” said I. “Just wait here; I want to go in and look at something I saw in the window.”

There stood my son with all the bags—especially my bags, since of course I had overpacked, having purchased all sorts of “necessities” and clever devices for my trip that my son had to carry. The fact that he was the primary porter of these caused him to feel quite sorry for himself. It did not take me long to decide to buy the entire tea set and matching plates along with the silverware that, though not quite designed for the tea set, complemented it perfectly. All these items the kind saleslady, Silvia by name, packed up neatly and efficiently. This lovely woman, as it turned out, hailed from Sussex, though her mother had been educated in a private school on the fringe of Sherwood Forest, where, she told me, to that day, stood a memorial tribute to one Sir Robin of Loxley, popularly known as Robin Hood. It is amazing how much you can learn in a mere forty-five-minute conversation. While I drank tea and ate biscuits—from a more pedestrian tea set than the lovely one that I was buying—Silvia packed my tea set with its accoutrements in a sizable box, placing two pieces of newspaper between the saucers and wrapping the cups and the teapot carefully. Then, while I continued to enjoy my tea and biscuits, she bubble-wrapped all the delicate pieces, which is to say all but the paper-wrapped saucers, plates, and silver. Out I bounded, bearing this large box, delighted to no end that I had acquired not just a proper English tea set but an antique tea set at that. I could not wait to get back home to invite my neighbors, Marian and Fred, and their neighbors, Joyce and Brooks, over to enjoy a proper British tea, or rather a proper Welsh tea, for the Welsh drink plenty of tea, too, though perhaps a bit less “properly” than the British. “Could you not have waited to buy a tea set until later in the trip?” my son asked, or rather gasped, when he saw the size of the box. “Here,” I said, “now be careful with it.” My son now had all the bags and, in addition, a cumbersome box rife with easily breakable tea objects. Nearly every step he took the rest of the trip, I reminded him about how fragile the contents of the box were. The more I reminded him of his duty to take care not to break the tea set, the more his mood seemed to swing from pathologically unbalanced, out of touch with reality, and virtually ready to kill someone, to forlorn and despondent, then returning to the former state, then returning to the latter, and so on.

That was my first trip, and because I was less than well behaved on the journey, I was flatly surprised when, seven years later, he invited me to come on the same trip again. My son had another conference paper to deliver in Leeds. He said it was to be for him an important lecture because the top scholar in his field, a full professor from Harvard, was to present on the same . He said he would love for me to him, but he hastily added that I would have to behave and “no tea sets this time.” On that second trip, I met in Llanelli, through my son’s agency, the famous professor of literature Byron Harries, with whom I corresponded for the rest of my life, or at least until I was no longer able to write. That correspondence was one of the true highlights of my later years. In our communication, we shared the simple joys of life as well as the more complex joys of literature, culture, and art. In Byron, I had found my way back to the savvy crowd that I had known years ago in the New Hope intelligentsia, but with this twist: Byron actually knew what he was talking about. How I enjoyed the rich exchange of letters, as if I were Atticus to his Tully, or, perhaps better, Elizabeth to his Robert. But to return to the Welsh expedition in question, on which trip God knows I tried to be good—let me simply say that decision making has always been one of my weaker suits. After his lecture, my son came to me and my lovely granddaughter, Katie (who accompanied us), in Shrewsbury, the village very near the Welsh border—though actually in Shropshire, it is only a stone’s throw from the (very Welsh) Welsh town of Welshpool—that she and I had stayed in for three days while he was at Leeds. I it that he had asked me, before he left for Leeds, to decide where I would like to go next after Shrewsbury. On our last trip we had gone through Swansea and then on to the seat of our family’s history, Llanelli, from which we had taken a short walk, less than a mile, to Llwynhendy, where the family plot was situated in the Welsh Calvinist graveyard. There lay great-uncle William Eynon and great-great-grandfather David Hughes; there we saw the graves of the last of the Joneses, too. The Evanses came from another town, now lost to the family memory. Having returned from Leeds, my son met me at my hotel, which was a delightful bed-and-breakfast on the edge of town. He asked gently as the cab transported the three of us toward the train station, “Well, Mother, do you want to go to Swansea or on to Cardiff to see the castle again, or something altogether different this time?” I suppose he added that because we had visited both Swansea and Cardiff in 1991, on my first trip to Wales. “What did you decide?”

“I don’t know; what do you want to do, Katie?” I asked. “I don’t care, Baca,” she said, using not the Welsh word (mam-gu) but rather the Croatian word for “grandmother.” “What would you like?” (Why she called me by the Croatian title, no one ever knew.) I was hoping she would say she wanted to see the castle, for I loved that old castle. “What would you like to do?” I asked my son. But he knew if he said Cardiff I would complain the entire time we were there that we had not gone to Swansea and had missed our only chance to go to the family plot at nearby Llwynhendy with Katie. Perhaps this is the reason that he then said with determination, “You decide, Mother.” Having disembarked from the cab, there we stood outside the ticket booth. “Well,” he said, “what do you want me to say to the woman in the booth?” “I don’t know,” I said, beginning to feel panic descend on me. “Well,” he said laconically, “the train to Cardiff is leaving in five minutes. What do you want to do? You really must decide.” By now I was panicking and beginning to become immobilized, numb around the lips, with profusely sweating armpits and quivering hands as my heart began to flick. That is what panic tended to do to me, rendering me utterly incapable of making a decision. My son kept parroting in myna-bird-ese, “Not making a decision is making a decision. Not making a decision is making a decision. If you don’t say ‘Cardiff,’ the only other train out of here tonight—the only other train, Mother—going to another major city in Wales is the one to Swansea.” “Stop talking like that bird!” I commanded. “I simply cannot decide.” “Then we’re going to Swansea,” he said. “Is that what you want?”

“Mother, I do not care. I’m perfectly happy with whatever you decide.” Now I started to cry, feigning a full-blown heart episode and bawling so loudly that the conductor came over and asked in his charming Welsh-English accent, “Is that man bothering you, mum?” as he glowered at my son threateningly. “Yes,” I said. “He won’t let me make up my mind.” “Do you want to have him escorted out of the station, mum?” “No,” I said, “just tell him to stop pressuring me.” “You heard the lady,” the conductor barked at my son. “It seems you’ve given her a heart attack! Go on, now, leave her alone!” Swansea was lovely. The next day we took a local bus to Mumbles-by-the-Sea, whose name and always lovely description of that old family beach resort had been ed down carefully by every generation of our family, becoming lovelier with each generation’s fresh mental conception of it. I am glad that my son and his daughter were able to see the place in person that they might reinvigorate that tradition; in any case, they were certainly gracious to forgive me for my indecision about getting there. Indeed, as I now reflect on that trip, I can imagine that it must have required a good measure of patience and grace to travel with me. A greater grace came to me as I lay dying. I had watched my life change much in the early years of the millennium. It is our mortal lot to suffer and to raise our voices in praise of the one who judges sin and offers salvation through our trials. Now I was getting sick. It was clear to me only that something was causing me to write very erratically. Letters, which had always been a jumble to me, became far more jumbled than before. I could barely read my own handwriting now, all of which tailed off, sloping downward, toward the end of each line. My doctor, however, was ill equipped to diagnose Lewy body disease accurately, but Marian and Fred recognized that something serious was happening, and they called my son who then lived in Texas. His family, a professional team of movers, and a large moving truck relocated me—taking it all (the old black trunk, the cheese plate, the Welsh flag that flew in front of the Lizzie Ann, and my last cat, Tessie Gumby II)—to Texas to live with them in their house. (It always troubled my son that Tessie Gumby had a roman numeral affixed to her

name. “There was no ‘Tessie Gumby One,’ Mother,” he would grumble from time to time. I pointed out to him that his disapproval was irrational since he never saw the name written anywhere anyhow. One says a cat’s name; how often does one actually write it? There was no sense in his going about aggravated simply because my cat received an extra syllable.)

That same Welsh flag, old as it was, was unfurled proudly over my new home in Texas. It had stood the test of time well, perhaps because I had taken special care of it. At the Lizzie Ann, I had never displayed the Welsh colors in bad weather or when the day was particularly sunny, keeping it, on such days, neatly folded in a box inside of the house. Aunt Jemima gave me the flag just a few months before she died; she had never hoisted that flag over her home, perhaps wishing that the fabric would at least last the length of her life. When she gave it to me, however, she commanded, “Fly it proudly, dear; fly it proudly.” I imagine that old flag had made the long journey over the Atlantic in the same dark coffin-like trunk that had preserved the family cheese plate and serving platter, along with Lucy Hughes Jones’s teapot with its undulating brown wavelike pattern. Jemima Jones was, technically, my great-aunt (i.e., the sister of my grandmother Lizzie Ann); both were the daughters of Lucy Hughes Jones. Jemima was one of the most unorthodox great-aunts that anyone could have, for she was more Welsh than the rest of the family, which means that she was religiously more “orthodox” but, in of visceral emotions, far more gwallgof (“batty”) than non-Welshmen. Her Welshness manifested itself in a variety of ways. First of all, she bore throughout her life the name of the black-trunk-cheese-plate-toting Jones family remnant that had arrived at Ellis Island in 1869. You may that, though previously married in Wales (in 1867) Jemima’s mother, Lucy Hughes Jones, arrived two years after her husband, Daniel, who had left Wales to work in the mines of Pennsylvania. Named after her grandmother Jemima Thomas Jones, Jemima was born in America, as were her two siblings. Nevertheless, her first language—like that of her brother, David, and sister, Elizabeth—was unquestionably Welsh. David grew up and married a certain Emma Rossen, so preordained a Calvinist that she named one of her children Calvin. Lizzie married yet another with the kingly name of David—specifically, David Evans, my grandfather. Jemima, however, was perfectly content to live alone because she constructed in her mind a vision of the world and day-to-day existence with which she could quite well have lived out her life comfortably on her own. I don’t think Jemima got lonely, although it was not a rare event to hear one of the neighbors or parishioners of the Gaylor Avenue Welsh Calvinistic Presbyterian (and thus tautological)

Church mutter, “Poor dear, she’s just an old maid.” But this was not true. Jemima was too odd, too Welsh, to have ever married anyone—except possibly Davey Barrow, who was, as far as I knew, the only love of her life. Jemima met Davey Barrow for the first time shortly after he had arrived from Wales. He was two years her junior, the age difference that existed between Blanche and Harry. More than a decade older than her beloved sister, Lizzie Ann, Jemima was born in 1876 and was just a young girl of thirteen when she met and befriended Davey Barrow in a game of Ring a Ring o’ Roses in Ellis Island only a few days after he had arrived with his brother from Llanelli, the mother city for all Welsh colonists named Jones, or at least those of our peculiar branch of the family. Jemima and her mother, Lucy Hughes, had gone to Ellis Island because they had gotten an urgent message from Davey Barrow’s older brother, Byron, who had known Jemima’s parents in Llanelli—more precisely, from the Nazareth Calvinistic Presbyterian (and therefore tautological) Chapel in Llwynhendy, where his parents worshipped in the pew behind the Jones’s pew, which is to say the third pew on the left side of the old chapel. It has always been a point of curiosity to me on which side of the church my family has sat. For example, Joneses and Evanses always worshipped on the left side; Jakeses, on the right, until my son’s generation, which changed it back to the left. So deep do Welsh roots run. I often wondered in the years that I never went to church on which side, if I had been going to church, I would have sat. The message about the boys being left unattended in Ellis Island came via Thomas Burton, a courteous Welsh immigrant who came by horse-drawn coach directly to Scranton—a two-day journey—where Daniel and Lucy Hughes Jones were living at the time. He was concerned that the Barrow boys would soon be deported if no one could claim them in the United States. The only name of Welsh residents in America that the older boy, Byron, could think of was Daniel and Lucy Hughes Jones of 1163 West Locust Street, Scranton. His father had given him this address when he left with his uncle Patrick. Lucy Hughes Jones flew into action. Daniel could not get out of work to go get the boys, but Lucy was a take-charge kind of woman. She bundled up Lizzie and Jemima, and off she went in the same horse-drawn cart that had brought Thomas Burton, the courteous Welsh immigrant, to Scranton. Two days later they arrived in New York, and a flood of memories caused Lucy Hughes Jones to shiver as

she realized that she had nearly been deported herself upon her arrival. The reason for this close call was that she had helped the Rice family smuggle in a baby, the baby sister of Jenna Rice, whom her parents had given to Lucy Hughes to bring into the country—and possibly to keep, if it came to that—if the Rice family should be turned back. Jenna Rice had just gotten over the chicken pox on the boat ride over, and she was concerned, since she had some scarring from the pox, that she might be rejected upon entry for fear these were the marks of the smallpox. So she gave the baby to Lucy, hoping to get it back once they were safely in, but fully aware that that might never happen—so noble was her love for her child and her hope for a new life in America. Lucy was very courageous to undertake this charge, not only because she was traveling alone (for Daniel was awaiting her in Scranton, having arrived previously in America to take up his job in the mines), but also because she could well wind up bringing with her a baby—which might be hard to explain to a husband whom she had not seen for a full two years. In addition to this, she had very little English at her disposal when she arrived. Thus, she had to try her best to explain to the man behind the thick bars of the itting booth on Ellis Island why she had come to America with this child. “Jones,” she said. “Name is Jones.” “Ya, ya, I got ’dat, lady, Jones. What’s in ’da trunk?” My great-grandmother, more worried about the Rice’s baby and the fact that she was smuggling it in for them, was not expecting questions about the old black trunk that she had brought with her from the old country. In any case, she barely had enough English to understand his question about the trunk’s contents, and therefore she just looked at him timidly and confusedly. The man in the booth was now coming outside of his cubicle to make hand gestures to the “ignorant” Welshwoman, as he would have called her. “I’ll have to take a look, lady,” the man said. To this, my great-grandmother, thinking he had said “book,” said, “Ie, ie, we has books.” “No, lady, not books; don’t you know any English at all? Jesus!”

Thinking he had said “cheese,” she became concerned that he would confiscate the old Welsh cheese plate with the lustrous face on its lid. Accordingly, she did what the Welsh are sometimes disposed to do all too quickly and without thinking—namely, lie: “We has no cheeses,” by which she meant, “We have no cheese plate.” She grinned nervously, worrying about the cheese plate to such a degree that she forgot completely about the Rice baby that she was smuggling. He broke off his search of the trunk, satisfied that there was no contraband within, disinterestedly ignoring her remark about the cheese and, in fact, not even recognizing her mendacity. She now realized that she had successfully smuggled not only the cheese plate from the old country into America but the Rice baby, as well, the gender of which she did not even know. “Good thing he did not ask about the baby,” she thought later, in Welsh of course. The Rice baby was eventually returned to its proper parents, who, thank God, did make it through customs separately. Yet my great-grandmother Lucy Hughes Jones did not know whether to be proud of her success or ashamed of the means by which she had achieved it. When she reflected upon the ethics of both a smuggled baby and a smuggled cheese plate, she would mutter only slightly contritely, “Anfoddus, hyn yn cael ei wneud yn cael ei wneud” (“Alas, what’s done is done”). This oft-repeated expression was simply the way she felt about that and, I suppose, many other events that occurred in her life. She said something similar about the stock market crash of 1929, and, though she never lived to see the end of the Depression, she would have been very pleased with the Americans’ stick-to-itiveness in a difficult time. With these thoughts in mind, Lucy Hughes Jones and her two daughters, Lizzie Ann and Jemima, strode boldly along the receiving dock to the holding area of Ellis Island. There they found Davey Barrow and his older brother, Byron, within just a very few minutes. Byron and Davey had been waiting there for nearly five days, and they were to be sent back to Wales the next day if no one claimed them. Jemima and Davey played Ring-a-Ring-o-Roses while Lucy Hughes Jones sorted out all the details with the immigration officer. The officer explained what happened as best as he could reconstruct it. The boys had embarked from Wales with their uncle Patrick, who had died en route. Patrick—who had always been regarded as quite un-Welsh because he was such an adventurer—was said by some to have been the bastard son of an Irishman named Patrick O’Flaherty, who had occasionally

visited Llanelli and formed a friendship with the Barrow family (especially Mrs. Barrow, whose husband was a traveling salesman). Scurrilous scuttlebutt started a scintillating scandal. No one ever knew whether Mrs. Barrow really had an affair with the Irishman Patrick O’Flaherty, but the possibility remains on the table, the very piece of furniture on which the affair was said to have ignited. Like his purported father, with whom Mrs. Barrow had supposedly shared a table, Patrick Jr. himself had shown on more than one occasion a predilection for drink, which some also said was further evidence that he was an Irish bastard (more politely, Gwyddel geni tu allan i briodas). Thus, he brought with him not a trunk with a cheese plate carefully stowed away inside but a rucksack with two bottles of Irish whiskey. (Thus did the evidence mount; and then there was the name. Who ever heard of a Welshman named Patrick?) He kept his flask full of a blended whiskey called “Paddy”—quite the Irish name—which was produced in Cork, in Iwerddon, the land of the y Gwyddelig. How would he have procured a bottle of Irish blended in Llanelli, a Welsh beer-drinking town? Nobody knew the answer to this question, but they all knew he took strong drink for he was known to bear the odor of it not merely on his breath but on his clothing and hair, as well. Now, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, he decided to drink a toast to a successful start on a new life in America, even if, he thought, that meant going back to work in the mines. Then he drank a toast to the lads, Byron and Davey, and to their parents, his (probably half-) brother Robert and Robert’s wife, Rose. Then he drank another toast to American women, who, he had heard, were all beautiful, and another to the moon and the stars, which by then he was calling his “friends.” When, after so many drinks, he had gone to the side of the vessel to relieve himself, a large swell seemed to come out of nowhere, causing the ship to lurch unexpectedly. As his right hand was busy directing the spout of his effluence, he reached with his left hand for the nearby square rigging that secured the sail athwart, connected as it was to the hank-on jib. Yet because he had his flask in his left hand, the cable dislodged his precious bottle of Paddy from the grip of his index finger and thumb. As it started to fall, he tried to grab the falling flask with both hands, forgetting the concerns of each. Thus, he fell into the drink seeking his drink, while pissing away that which he drank, and his life, as well. A few days later his body was picked up by another ship whose crew happened to see it bobbing in the distance, nearly perfectly preserved both because of the

chill of the Atlantic’s seawater in autumn and because it was pickled with Paddy. A flask of blended Irish whiskey was safely tucked in the corpse’s belt, giving everyone the impression that this was an Irishman. For this reason Byron and Davey were left alone on the ship on which they had arrived with Thomas Burton, the courteous Welsh immigrant, just a few days prior. Though their father—the (probably only half-) brother of Patrick, Robert (oddly enough, a Scottish name)—planned to come to America within six months, his eventual arrival would not allow for the boys to stay so they were to be repatriated to Wales. Lucy Hughes Jones, a generous and noble woman who knew these boys only from the fourth pew of the Llwynhendy Nazareth Calvinistic Presbyterian Chapel, stated to the customs agent (now in much better English than she had arrived with fifteen years previously) that the Jones family could and would watch over the boys. My great-grandmother’s Welsh generosity, which needed very little encouragement, extended so far that this is precisely what she did to help the lads. “You know these boys?” the man asked. “Yea, verily, we shall take them,” Lucy Hughes Jones responded with an aggressive nod, a confident grin, and perfect Jacobean English, pronounced with an American accent, of course. Byron and Davey accompanied the Jones family from Ellis Island to the terra firma of New York City, where all of them climbed into a cart far less comfortable than that which had brought Thomas Burton, the courteous Welsh immigrant, to Scranton. On the side of this uncomfortable wagon was written MYND I’R PYLLAU GLO PENNSYLVANIA (“To the mines of Pennsylvania”). In the cart, Lizzie sat next to Jemima and across from Byron and my great-grandmother Lucy Hughes Jones. Davey sat square next to Jemima. The two played string games—for Jemima always carried a string for string games when she was a child—such as what is now called “cat’s cradle” but what was, at the time, known as “scratch cradle” because it referred to the making (from scratch) of the manger into the cradle of Christ. She also taught him “cup and saucer” and “witch’s broom,” but my great-grandmother Lucy Hughes Jones had some foreboding about that particular string game. After two long days, the wagon finally arrived at the First Welsh Presbyterian Church of Scranton, which always had a place for the newest refugees to sleep.

That church is not to be confused with the Welsh Calvinistic Presbyterian (thus tautological) Church of Plymouth, in which place of grace, on Gaylord Avenue, the Jones family and their heirs would later worship. In Scranton there was a young rector-in-training, something like a vicar, who greeted the cart as it arrived. This vicar would later become the pastor at Gaylord Avenue Welsh Calvinistic Presbyterian (again, tautological) Church. His name was Reverend Hugh Griffith, then only twenty-one years old, with wild ideas about leading services in both Welsh and English. It would be this same Hugh W. Griffith who—in 1920, when the Welsh Presbyterian Church would with the Presbyterian U.S.A.—would be the keynote speaker in Columbus, Ohio. The gist of his address on that occasion, noted even in that year’s May edition of Herald and Presbyter, was encouragement for all Presbyterians “to live out Jesus before the world,” quite a contrast to the debates that go on in the Presbyterian general assembly today. When the then much younger Reverend Griffith learned of Byron and Davey’s situation, he found a good family for them in Plymouth, that of George and Mary Perkins. George was Welsh by descent but retained only a little of the native language, whereas Mary had grown up in a fully Welsh home. Though the Perkinses spoke English around the house, they could understand the boys and help them transition to the new world and new family in which they found themselves. George, although his Welsh was far from perfect, went with Mary to the Welsh church in Plymouth where, within two years, Reverend Griffith would become pastor. George reasoned that the fellowship among the Christian brothers and sisters was so palpable, so real, that no English-speaking church could rival that aspect of the worship. Also, so he thought, his Welsh would get better, which would help them with Mary’s culturally Welsh parents. Finally, he reasoned, he would have to pay maximum attention in church, rather than resting on his English laurels. God deserved his best attention, so that was what he would give. This reasoning was actually quite good, as even one half of any of Reverend Griffith’s sermons was still better than the entirety of most preachers’. The reason for this was simply that Reverend Griffith always sought to preach ras duw or drugaredd duw, commonly called “mercy” and “grace.” Such preaching, done correctly, is truly gracious, and graceful, as well. Furthermore, its tone is grateful as it explains the reason for humankind’s gratitude toward the one who

made salvation truly gratis. So said, at any rate, Reverend Griffith. He did so in Welsh, with occasional asides in English that he embedded into his sermons for the likes of Mr. Perkins, who indeed liked Reverend Griffith very much. The Perkinses had never had any children, as Mrs. Perkins had taken a terrible fall as a child and, as she and everyone else believed, had therefore been unable to conceive. For this reason Reverend Griffith was optimistic that they would give Davey and Byron a good home until their parents, or at least their father, could arrive. In any case, Byron, at age fifteen, was able to help look after the young Davey, whom everyone, both in Wales and in Pennsylvania, said was a good boy. Jemima was delighted, too, as she and Davey became thick as thieves, friends anticipating future roles as boyfriend and girlfriend to be fulfilled when they came to the right age. Yet in those years so near the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, such age simply did not always arrive. Davey came down with tuberculosis two years after coming to America and died that next year. At his funeral, Jemima choked back tears, forcing herself to cry secretly, hiding her fervent love. She loved him with a combination of gentle sympathy and dreamy romance, the same way I loved Bernie Schupp. Byron would grow up to be a coal miner, already working in the mines when his parents arrived a month after Davey’s funeral. Mrs. Perkins, it turned out, was not rendered infertile by the fall she had as a child. She got pregnant about that time and had her own baby boy, George Jr., who, though there was about a thirteen-year age difference, would grow up to become one of my father’s friends in the 1960s. Interestingly enough, they would become next-door neighbors on Rutter Avenue in Kingston, for Harry and Blanche would live their lives in the house that they shared with Jemima while she was still living and that they inherited from her when she ed away in 1958 at the ripe old age of eighty-two. “She died,” some unpleasant people muttered, “an old maid.” They were wrong. Or rather, if they were right, it must have been the case that Jemima decided to become an “old maid” the very day Davey died. She felt, in her Welsh and highly emotional mind, that she had lost the one and only true love of her life. I could completely understand, as I felt the same about losing Bernie Schupp, even though that loss was driven not by death but merely by my own poor judgment. It often happens that one fails to see the obvious and wonderful when

one spends too much time sinfully imagining something hidden and “more wonderful” that does not, in fact, exist.

The home at 414 Rutter Avenue, as I mentioned earlier, was throughout the war and up until the year 1958 the property of my great-aunt Jemima Jones, who generously allowed my parents to live and raise their family and even die there, though that only almost, for Harry died in the intensive care ward of WilkesBarre General Hospital. Wilkes-Barre General was the same hospital in which I and my son and my sister and her two sons were born, the same hospital in which Lizzie Ann ed away. If I am not mistaken, Blythe Sr. and Marian, and Blythe Jr. and Marlette, all died at home, as did I, when I was living in the home of my son. It was to that same hospital that I was hesitant, many years before, to go with a bear in the bed of my father’s truck. I do not mean to sound cavalier in mentioning the bear after listing off death upon death, as the dying time is spiritually deep in our family, as it is for most families. Harry’s funeral was especially difficult. My son, who served as a pallbearer, showed the depth of his emotion on his way down the church’s center aisle, barely able to bear up under his share of the casket. Though he was twenty years old at the time, he wept through the entire service, quite loudly at times, so despairing was he. My father died on Father’s Day, a fact that I have always felt to be an act of God. Amidst his papers, Harry left a Bible in his desk, in English, not Welsh, with certain ages underlined. I did not think to read these ages, but I did spend a good deal of time thinking about why in the world a man as decent and apparently pious as my father would mark up the book that, I knew, he had regarded as the holy book. I had always firmly resisted Harry’s and Blanche’s gracious attempts to speak about their faith, even when they cast it in of the Welsh past, by recalling “what Reverend Griffith used to say” about this or that topic. But to return to deaths, and to births, as well, which were also something special for our family. Lizzie Ann, Jemima’s beloved sister, was a miraculous birth, for both she and my great-grandmother Lucy Hughes Jones nearly died in the course of that event. During the four months in bed that it took Lucy Hughes Jones to recover, she studied an English Bible, carefully collating the words of the verses with the Welsh Bible until she had acquired a strong English vocabulary. Until the day she died, my great-grandmother spoke only Jacobean English, which, though it did not always roll off her tongue gracefully, it did so graciously.

The births of my son and Lee Ann’s first son, Mark, were a cause for great fear and trembling among all the faithful Welsh Presbyterians in the Wyoming Valley. Both boys were born within two weeks of each other. (Later I thanked God that Mark was the first born, for I was still feeling terribly guilty about Lee Ann’s picnic, at which I purposely preempted her pregnancy proclamation by plainly pronouncing my own.) The summer before that disastrous picnic, a great consternation arose in our family when Lizzie Ann, my beloved grandmother, divulged a certain piece of information to Reverend Thomas, the successor to Reverend Griffith, who had ed away at the ripe old age of eighty-seven in 1951, preaching grace in Welsh and English quite literally until he died. That piece of information concerned an angel and two babies. This angel had appeared to Aunt Jemima just a few days before she died in June of 1958. Jemima came down to breakfast that morning to tell a story, one that lasted for a full twenty minutes and was hard to understand because she was very old and spoke too loud, as she was hard of hearing. In addition, perhaps influenced by the practice of Reverend Griffith, half of what she said was in Welsh and the other half in English, a feature of her diction that only increased the difficulty of understanding what she was saying. I just happened to be present that morning because my husband was out of town racing his boat—for he was a boat racer—and I was missing being Welsh, a longing that Aunt Jemima amply satisfied with her story, told in the finest Welsh tradition of storytelling. That Welsh penchant is even mentioned, though often unnoticed, in “Old Land of My Fathers,” the national anthem of Wales, with the phrase “land of poets and bards” (gwlad beirdd a chantorion). Breakfast had already begun when this dear sweet elderly lady graced the room (elegantly as always), sat down, and poured some properly steeped tea from the pot on the table. To this she added just a bit of milk (our family had not used cream in tea or coffee since before the First World War, when cream was more plentiful) and a small ration of sugar, mixed less than carefully, but somewhat more than adequately, and she began to speak—loudly, as always, but in a thoroughly matter-of-fact tone. “An angel appeared to me last night,” she said in a combination of English and Welsh, though I will render the entire exposition here in English, “clad in white raiment” (for she, too, sometimes adopted her mother’s Jacobean parlance)

“gleaming white; just as the angels at the empty tomb. He did not speak with words, but held forth two babies in swaddling, a brown-haired child in his right hand and a blond-haired child in his left. He smiled at me, and, when I woke, he fled, and day brought back my night, for it was not yet dawn. I don’t know why he showed these babies to me. What do you suppose it means?” Lizzie Ann, my beloved grandmother, spoke up decisively, interpreting the oracle. “It means, love, that Lee Ann and Elaine will both have babies very soon, and the angel wanted you to know before you rest from your labor.” The oracle and its interpretation spread through the Welsh Presbyterian community like wildfire. Though Lizzie Ann was certain she was correct about this interpretation, she nevertheless sought confirmation. First, she went to Reverend Griffith’s successor, the good Reverend Thomas, who, for all his sympathetic demeanor, was simply not as firm or as distinguished as his predecessor. The good Reverend Thomas was inclined to accept her understanding of the visitor but, like most pastors, left wiggle room for other possible interpretations. This was not the confirmation Elizabeth Ann sought. So, she convened a tea party of her closest confidants and indulged in what proper Presbyterian women are never to indulge in—namely, the art of reading tea leaves. But everyone knows that the proper Presbyterians are Scottish, not Welsh. The Welsh never hated the Scots the way they did the Irish. But they often found the Scots to be a bit rigid, except when it came to strong drink, of course. The Scots took full Christian liberty in that area, or at least most of them did. But the black arts, or rather the art of reading black tea leaves, was most certainly not something associated with Scots. The Welsh (and Irish, truth be told) were said to find such divination somewhat of a solace. It regularly occurred, of course, at tea parties. And so it was, I suppose, that the Welsh largely regarded tea-leaf reading as good fun; on the other hand, the reason it was good fun was that it proved to be right so often. So, when at the tea party one of the good Welsh women, Mildred Davies, suggested consulting the leaves—doing so with a grin suggesting the frivolity of the act—all the good Welsh (not quite) proper Presbyterian women giggled and went right along, especially since the virtually Scottish ban of tealeaf reading imposed by Reverend Griffith had been lifted by virtue of his ing away in 1951. Yet, for this slender gain, they truly missed the good, half-

Welsh-preaching, half-English-preaching pastor, who had united the Welsh Presbyterians with the onition to live out Jesus and who was loved by one and all. The leaves confirmed Lizzie’s interpretation of the angelic portent, and so did both my and Lee Ann’s husbands, who impregnated us both on almost the same night. Two babies were born, one blond and one dark haired, confirming both Lizzie Ann’s interpretation and the accuracy of Mildred Davies’s reading, for it was she who read the leaves at the tea party. Aunt Jemima died in her sleep not a month after I became pregnant, before I even knew that I was. Her last will and testament confirmed that the house was left to Blanche and Harry, and it mentioned that she had been visited by an angel. This she had added in Welsh in her own hand just three days before her death. “Great is the Lord,” she wrote, “and greatly to be praised, for He hath privileged me to see, in the hands of his messenger from on high, the future.” Of course, there was a vast crowd of Welsh Presbyterians at Jemima’s funeral. Yet there were also a good number of Catholics, many of whom had been working with my aunt at the railway, for she had for many years served as what we would now call an executive secretary for the Scranton Traction Company, which operated the local railroad. Her facility with both Welsh and English was an asset to her last boss at the company, Mr. Thomas Aquinas O’Meary, a wonderfully generous and kind employer, who acknowledged the virtue of my aunt’s tendency to keep the Sabbath, even if he had never made an effort to do so himself, save, of course, going to mass religiously every Sunday, which the Irish Catholics of Scranton were, and still are, I believe, wont to do. To get to work, from Kingston, my aunt had to leave the house every day quite early in the morning, roughly at five. The wagon transport, and not too many years later the bus, would leave her in Scranton at eight; as the buses improved, her departure time moved closer to six thirty, but that was only near the end of her career. Jemima was a true pioneer for working and commuting women. For this reason, there were quite a few Catholics at her funeral. Mr. Thomas Aquinas O’Meary brought his entire family. There was, too, a good number of railway workers—at least those who could my aunt, for she had retired from the railway just after V-E Day. She was, Mr. Thomas Aquinas O’Meary always maintained, by far the best secretary anyone could ever have. He told everyone at the funeral this, and he added that it was so because she

actually cared so very much about her job and all with whom she worked. And as he, being Irish Catholic and therefore outside the Welsh Presbyterian gossip chain, had not yet heard the story about the angels—when it was, naturally enough, included in the eulogy of the good Reverend Thomas—Mr. Thomas Aquinas O’Meary did publically what only his wife had ever seen him do in private. He wept effusively tears that he later denied shedding, but which we all knew to be tears of sorrow and joy, for they were the very tears, that day, we had all shed for Jemima.

13 Thanksgiving

Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl I mi, Gwlad beirdd a chantorion … The old land of my fathers is dear unto me, Land of poets and bards … —from the Welsh national anthem

T he strange thing about having a terminal disease is that you start to realize that there are so many things you wish you had done but never did, while there are others you did that you wish you never had done. Going to my granddaughter’s wedding to her handsome husband-to-be, Matthew, was a day that I am grateful I lived to see, and I am delighted to have met Hannah and Hillary, spouses-to-be of my grandchildren. A trip to Vegas, however, was not something I could ever have imagined that I would look back upon wistfully. I had never wanted to go to Las Vegas; it simply held no appeal for me. Nevertheless, my son came to me with the idea of just such an excursion at the onset of my disease, or rather shortly after the disease (which had already settled upon me) was properly diagnosed. The reason that he suggested a trip to Las Vegas was not because he particularly liked that town. Rather, my son had been there a few months before and had hatched the idea when he saw Caesars Palace, the Bellagio, and the Venetian, all of which are large casinos located on a road called the “Strip,” an appropriate enough name for a street populated with so many scantily clad women. While I had always wanted to go to Rome (the city where my son encountered God and where, years before that, my father found peculiar delight during my parents’ European tour), Vegas had never been under consideration for a visit, in no small

part owing to its decadent reputation. I had always viewed it as a poor man’s Monte Carlo, without the view. Italy, by contrast, is a place with more than a few spectacular vistas. Yet, when I say I had always wanted to go there, I really should clarify: I had actually merely relished the idea of going. The same Welsh fear of traveling that had prevented me from enjoying my trips to the United Kingdom and that paralyzed me on the train platform in Shrewsbury never allowed me to travel to Italy, even though my parents had traveled there once on that very golden anniversary trip to Europe that I mentioned just above. Their particular tour stretched from London, where their plane landed, to Paris, to Rome, returning on the Queen Elizabeth 2. While Blanche enjoyed England most, Harry particularly loved Italy, even though he was half-French. I imagine that part of the reason he loved Italy so was because of his warm memories of his old boyhood friend Giovanni Sciandra, to whom he had taught English when they were working together in the mines. Johnny—my father compelled him to change the spelling of his name—for his part had taught my father a few words of Italian in a strange form of intercultural exchange. Because my parents were on a tour when they made their trip to Europe and England, they never actually had an opportunity to go to Llanelli or see the ancient burial spot of the Hughes family in Llwynhendy. But they did get to see some of the continent, something that made me happy every time I reflected on the self-sacrificial lives that my parents had led. Some of that self-sacrifice of which I speak was quite palpable, for Harry spent years building things for me. With help from my son, he reroofed the Lizzie Ann, where I had lived in the winters since 1975. He also put a complete plumbing system in the house at Crossed Arrows Farm, which Louise had bought a year or so before, and in the development of which I had invested a good deal of my own and my son’s hard work. Before Harry arrived in Virginia in the summer of 1973, the farm had had only an outhouse. All bathing had to be done in the kitchen sink, which harked back to my days with my monkeydaughter Betsy; yet in the case of the farm, by bathing in the sink I was forced to play the hygienic role of Betsy, which made the whole situation rather disturbing. Harry installed a shower, two toilets, and, more importantly, all the plumbing necessary to connect these facilities. Only the septic tank was left to the contractors. My father and mother were the finest people I ever knew. Most prominent

among the regrets that I have regarding my earthly existence is the fact that various choices I made must have worried them. But I know also that they clung to the promises of grace and providence, promises that my actions undoubtedly sometimes obscured. The blessings of those promises came to my son in the strange, roundabout fashion that I described earlier. But they came to me in, I suppose, an even more roundabout fashion, for, after the strange odor of a church and after composing a single now-lost poem, it was in illness that healing came. It was when I lost my independence that I was finally set free, and I could find my way home and, there, my Welsh soul. Accordingly, though I had not always wanted to go to Italy, I had consistently found the idea enticing, even romantic. Yet now, with the onset of my disease, it was clearly too late even to think about such an arduous journey. Indeed, because my health was declining, as I explained earlier, I had to move to Texas to be with my son and his family; oddly enough, I was suddenly at less of a remove from Las Vegas than ever before. In any case, my son’s crazy idea was that if I could ride in a gondola in the Venetian, it would be the second-best thing to riding in one in Venezia herself. He had gotten this idea just at the time when, on his one previous trip to Vegas, he had befriended a certain famous professor from Rome’s La Sapienza (“The Wisdom”) University, Professor Gianni Profita. Gianni, as my son always called him, was at the time one of Italy’s several soprintendenti (which in English, very roughly translated, would mean something like “cabinet minister”). The office of soprintendenza is not one with which those of us who grew up in the Welsh mining region and Pennsylvania are immediately familiar. My limited experience with academics would lead me to believe that in America not only is there no such office but also, if there were, a professor would not be very likely to hold it. Dr. Davies is the best professor anyone ever could hope to have, but I would never have envisioned him holding cabinet posts in the US government. My son and this famous professor struck up a conversation on the Strip, that large and quite long—almost five miles in length—piece of real estate that runs down the center of the most festive part of the city of Las Vegas. This odd circumstance occurred just two months before the trip that he and I took along with two of his children, my grandchildren Katie and Benjamin. Just before his first trip to Vegas, when he met Gianni, my son had received from Benjamin for Christmas a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, the last and perhaps greatest

novel that the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote. I had not enjoyed reading that work with Dr. Davies at Wilkes, though it was the centerpiece of one of the literature courses I had with him; later, however, I did come to love and ire this book. My appreciation for it developed during the mid-1980s, when I lived alone and had ample opportunity to read and reread the novel, ever challenging myself to be, if not quite like Alyosha, at least less like Demetri. Having received the book for Christmas, my son, because he had no interest in gambling and because he had just gotten the book as a gift, took it to Las Vegas to read there. When he met Gianni Profita, he was reading this very book as he walked along the Strip. Many of the grander casinos are located on or near the Strip, which everyone who goes to Las Vegas must contend with in some way or another. Being a social misfit, my son decided to proceed along this street the same way he had on the large street approaching St. Peter’s Basilica (i.e., with a book). This time, however, he was not just carrying a book but reading it as he walked along. Oddly enough, he happened at one point along his plodding journey to be walking precisely next to the charming Italian Profita family, which was excitedly prating away in its native tongue. Most foreigners can, when visiting the States, safely assume that no one within earshot will understand a word of a non-English language. We have, as a nation, become hamstrung by a vicious combination of laziness, which is our own fault, and English’s position as the world’s lingua franca (ironically, in light of what that expression means), which is not our fault. The majority of the world’s speakers of English now are not native speakers, which means that the world’s predominant language is not English but something like pidgin English. At any rate, my son heard the Profita family speaking in Italian and, because he speaks Italian and is an affable-enough fellow, spoke right up and asked il padre della famiglia what he thought—indeed, what they all thought—of Las Vegas, particularly its Italian casinos. “I casini sono molto carini,” was the response (“very charming”). From this point of departure, they struck up a lovely conversation, my son being introduced to the entire bella famiglia: Alessandra (Gianni’s graceful and beautiful wife), sca (their lovely oldest daughter of, at the time, fourteen), and Sofia (la bambina sofisticata, then about nine or so). Sofia and my son spoke a bit, she in perfect English and my son in Italian, until the conversation reverted

again to the father of the family. “Say, Gianni, can I ask you a question? What do you think of the idea of me bringing my mother to Vegas?” My son then explained his reasoning: “You see, Mom always wanted to go to Italy, but now she’s too ill to go all the way across the Atlantic. But as I walk around here, I have been thinking to myself, ‘What if I were to bring her to Vegas?’ ” “Fantastico!” exclaimed Gianni. “A brilliant idea! She will love it. It is like Italy in so many ways, but even cleaner. By all means, bring her!” Thus affirmed by Gianni on every front, my son returned to Texas with this crazy plan, and in a very un-Welsh moment—un-Welsh only because it involved traveling—I assented. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. In a sense, that is true, and I hope it remains true, for it was not the onset of my disease but simply very normal Welsh paranoia that caused me to be quite sure that the elevator operator in the Stratosphere, the tallest hotel in Vegas, was a member of a religious cult that was peculiar to Las Vegas. I think it was the outfit that he had on that caused my imagination to run wild. Because my motor skills were beginning to deteriorate, my son borrowed a wheelchair from the hotel staff. My grandchildren, Benjamin and Katie, wheeled me all around the hotel and its immediate environs, and, except for my encounters with the hotel elevator and its cultic operator, I had a wonderful time. After much cajoling by my son, I rode to the top of the elevator and, over a glass of champagne, relished the spectacular view of the city from the Stratosphere’s stratospheric elevation. Yet the joy of overcoming my phobia of the cultic elevator operator was to be short lived. My son, who had never had Turkish food, decided that we should go to a Turkish restaurant, which sounded to me, at first blush, innocent enough. I had not imagined that there would be a belly dancer in that restaurant—indeed, who would have imagined a dancer in a restaurant?—to perform I don’t know what pelvic twirls between courses. Despite my son’s best attempts to persuade me otherwise, I was utterly convinced that she was a prostitute seeking to seduce young Benjamin, on whose cheeks the down of youth barely was sprouting. Thus did I feel entirely justified when I slapped at her as she danced dangerously near our table, causing her to wiggle abruptly into the path of a briskly ing waiter, who, taken by surprise, dropped his plate of pide, the Turkish flatbread consisting of the curious combination of spinach, onions, pine nuts, and currants,

cast in a tomato and olive oil base with cumin and cinnamon flavors, all swathed in the wonderful aroma of the expensive spice marjoram. The food put to flight by the belly dancer’s unexpected gyration landed adjacent to a blind patron’s guide dog that gladly downed the scraps, for which the kind restaurateur showed no rancor and, to my relief, did not charge us. Thus did we escape that eatery more or less unscathed by both the sparks that sprang from the scintillating performer’s midriff and those of the manager’s temper, which he managed to mute, in no small part because the blind man’s hungry aide-de-pied was not so refined as to up a free plateful of tousled but tasty Middle Eastern cuisine. The kindly blind man, dressed in the manner that smacked of wealth and proper upbringing, indicated in a booming southern accent that he was happy to pick up the tab for the dog scraps. The maître d’, however, charged neither of us, despite the sizable loss of the pricey spice used in the making of Turkish pide. The trip to Vegas would be my last time in an airplane, not nearly as memorable a trip as my Air India flight to London, but memorable nonetheless. Yet it was not my last flight, for I have experienced, in the meantime, a flight of a different kind, a flight beyond any flight in an airplane, on angels’ wings. I now see the symbolism of that last trip, for I have been a vastly lucky person, lifted up and brought to places I never deserved or expected to go. The poetry of the ages began to unfold itself as I drew further from the mathematics of self-redemption toward that “something” of which the bards of old had spoken, something different from the cold science of self-righteousness. I was lucky indeed, if one can call it luck.

“Great art thou, Lord, and greatly to be praised.” I confess that these were not words I would ever have expected myself to affirm, though I had said words of a similar ilk when I was Jewish: “Baruch atah Adonai.” I had, paradoxically, said these words hundreds, even thousands, of times in the 1960s. Still, there was simply something more sterile and holy sounding to the Hebrew (at least as it came out of my then-religious maw) than the English quotation of Psalm 145:3, with which Augustine humbly begins his confessional work. Properly said, the Hebrew prayer has its own luster, rendering thanks and praise to God for his provision of bread. It is thus not unlike the Lord’s prayer, which explains who God is, humbly requesting of him our daily bread. As my health declined, I lived, as I said, with my family in my son and daughterin-law’s somewhat cavernous, most definitely Texas-sized, house. Because I could no longer walk, I saw the upstairs only once. My son’s study seemed to me the best room in the house. In it he kept, I am glad to say, my small writing desk, which he used (appropriately enough) for writing, a fact that delighted me. Just over it and to the right, I saw Leni Fontaine’s painting entitled Rabbi, less frightening to me now than in bygone years. Now it seemed, as I saw it in his study, to be the face of a wise teacher, a hirsute and welcoming face from the past. It was a kindlier version of the cheese plate’s face, whose face had, too, become gentler and more welcoming with age. I lived the last five years of my life in this home with a large family of seven children, some in and others out at any given moment. Thus, the house was filled with a delightful kind of turmoil that had never hitherto delighted me but now strangely did. My last pastor, Jim, who was my son’s rector, would come to visit me in my dying days, many times offering me the sacraments, though I did not always partake. Perhaps my Presbyterian heart simply did not believe that one must receive the sacraments in every service; certainly, my hesitation did not stem from any insecurity about power and meaning of Christ’s sacrifice. On many occasions, I asked my daughter-in-law to see to it that the pastor and I were both served tea (with a bit of Hên Sîr, of course), both of which might be seen, I suppose, as a dim reflection of the Eucharist itself. In any case, I never held back from being blessed. One day, when Pastor Jim came by to pray over me, he put his hands on my head and spoke a blessing, quoting a psalm that reminded me of my days as a mildly spurious Jew.

The problem with being spuriously anything, particularly Jewish, is that everyone regards you as odd. This may not be true as much today as it once was. One would have to consult the very few spurious Jews that exist, at least in the United States, to my assumption. Still, my guess is that very few illegitimate Jews are vilified nowadays or even looked askance at for being artificially Jewish. But I was so treated, though with dark hair and hazel eyes, my looks did not give away my non-Jewishness. In the case of my son, even though his Hebrew was quite good, that he was spurious was amply apparent: his eyes were blue; his hair, blond; his demeanor, even at an early age, that of a naïve Welshman, embracing of many, suspicious of few, and generally gloomy in outlook. Indeed, he never even batted an eye when I took him to Dr. Joe Robinson (whom I always maintained was the world’s finest pediatrician) for psychological testing after the revelation of my son’s relationship with Niney, his kindergarten girlfriend in Philadelphia. I was worried because my son seemed to construct an artificial world about him, a world of escape from his multiple identities: Chinese, Jewish, and Welsh Presbyterian. When, a few months later, he told his teachers that his sister was a monkey, the school principal referred him to a child psychiatrist that was utterly inferior to Dr. Robinson. Both tests, anyhow, turned out close enough to normal that he did not need to be put in any special classes. Accordingly, when both Dr. Robinson and the inferior doctor gave my son an almost-clean bill of mental health, they must have factored in that we were all living in the 1960s. In that age of newly configured living, even my sister was accepting, though perhaps not perfectly so, of my diverse lifestyle. Still, in many ways, I could not have been closer to Lee Ann. Yet, I could not have been more distant, in a sense, either. The distance was not the result of my having double-crossed her at her pregnancy-proclamation party a decade earlier. Rather, what irritated Lee Ann was the simple fact that I was a self-proclaimed “very religious” person and the fact that, on top of it, I was now “Jewish.” If, Lee Ann reasoned, I was going to be “religious,” why in the world did I have to go outside of the parameters already laid down by Welsh Presbyterianism, outlined in great detail so many years ago by Reverend Griffith? Here, oddly enough, she was exactly right, but right for the wrong reasons. For, according to Lee Ann, being religious should have been adequate for God, if he really existed. Though I could not see it then, in 1968 Lee Ann and I were on precisely the same page. We both thought that, if God exists at all (her

emphasis), he likes pious people best (mine). I had moved to New Hope the year before, when my parents and I had just reestablished some healthy lines of communication. This communication had resumed in no small part because I recognized in my son’s eyes how very much he wanted to see his mostly Welsh grandparents again. The Welshness lay heavy upon him, despite my best efforts to shake it off both of us. When that failed, I encouraged my son to write a letter (which I composed for him) to his grandparents. This note provoked them to come to Shermans Dale in the summer of 1967 to help me move back to the Philadelphia area—New Hope, the remarkable town about which I have already spoken. As a part of welcoming me back into the fold, Lee Ann invited Sheila and my son and me to her home in Dallas, Pennsylvania, for Thanksgiving dinner in November of 1968. Dallas, one may recall, is the small town near Harveys Lake, which was the scene of the picnic in the garden, my most heinous crime. Now I was happy to be so received and was overjoyed, too, that my parents would be coming to the feast. This dinner, like many of Lee Ann’s, was a sumptuous affair. Lee Ann had spared no expense, starting with game-day appetizers for Ed and the boys (my beloved nephews, Mark and Eric), along with my son, all of whom were watching the Detroit Lions and Philadelphia Eagles play a game that the boys liked because it was a defensive “battle royal,” as one of Lee Ann’s children proclaimed, displaying a knowledge of seemingly learned parlance that startled even Sheila. How I envied Lee Ann, to have children with such a rich lexicon at their disposal, and at so early an age. Little did I know that the child had been influenced by the television commentator, who had used the expression as a kind of metaphor, undoubtedly mispronouncing it “royale,” which faux Gallicism, it seemed, one of my nephews had merely unwittingly corrected. I was not the only envious person at the feast. My son, too, I could tell, struggled to conceal his own envy, the source of which was not the things that his cousins had that he did not, such as a well-organized collection of Corgi cars or a brandnew drum set and private lessons, or even their sports equipment, though, of course, these amounted to a small body of enviable material. The envy I think I sensed my son had for his cousins was the fact that they had a father with whom to watch football.

That day, however, my brother-in-law, Ed, would willingly play that paternal role for my son, even as my father quite often did and as, at some point subsequent to that date, a farmer named Sam would. Indeed, that particular Thanksgiving Day my son had in Ed the father he lacked the other days of the year. So envy soon gave way to a surge of delight as he, his cousins, and Ed all munched away on Lee Ann’s wonderful southwestern dip. They employed chips, carrots, and celery to hoist into their mouths, mound by mound, that concoction of cream cheese, finely diced chives, and finely ground red pepper, with a light sprinkling of sweetened ginger—for that is what set Lee Ann’s dip apart from other southwestern-style dips—all surrounded by a double ring of sliced Roma tomatoes, with a garnish of freshly cut celery sprigs mounted in the middle of the mound of dip. There they sat, watching the Eagles in their defensive battle royal against the Lions, a fitting combination of animals for such a skirmish, as both eagles and lions are royal creatures in their own right. Enjoying in the background both the roar of the boys and that of the crowd coming from the television, Lee Ann and I and, a few minutes later, my mother, Blanche (after she and Harry finally arrived), busied ourselves about the dinner preparations in Lee Ann’s not-too-spacious but equipped-with-every-modernappliance kitchen. I always prided myself on my ever-so-slightly-bigger kitchen, which was in fact no bigger at all, were one to measure; it just seemed bigger because it did not have any modern appliances to take up space. We were now merely assembling the last few delectables: mashed sweet potatoes liberally bedecked with marshmallows, and not-too-well-mashed potatoes, with the Welsh touch of nutmeg (although I was told that the Irish did this, too; a true Welshman, however, will always be loath to it as much). Sheila was the odd man out, for Lee Ann’s kitchen did not have the capacity to hold more than three dicing, slicing, chattering, and nattering women at one time, amidst which gaggle Ed would occasionally insert himself to garner another beer from the refrigerator—not that he was a big drinker, but this was Thanksgiving, after all. Sheila simply busied herself about the dining room table, just outside the kitchen. There she made sure that the silverware was placed out perfectly symmetrically, with three exceptions—the three sets of chopsticks that were placed, in honor of my Chinese predilection of just a few years earlier, next to the dessert forks at the top of the plates where Sheila, my son, and I were to sit. My son had become very adept at using chopsticks, and often preferred to make

use of that means of garnering his food. Having finished twice rearranging these implements, Sheila then began folding and refolding the napkins—dainty, square, and British, with a light floral design and a touch of lace on each side. Lee Ann had special ordered them from the catalogue of the “Welsh Souvenir Shop,” from which source she so often ordered various accoutrements for special occasions. Yet they were, alas, made in England, as a small tag on the underside of each revealed. When I noticed this at dinner, I thought to myself, “Perhaps the manufacturer is using England for United Kingdom,” and then I thought, “Cymru Hir fyw!” (“Viva la Wales!”). As soon as the Eagles-Lions football game ended, dinner was served. Possibly to make Sheila feel more welcome or, perhaps, simply to see what she would say, Ed invited her to say the prayer. She wisely demurred, gingerly suggesting that another do so, for which duty my son volunteered immediately. Though I was chary of this, I said nothing, for fear I would be called upon to say the prayer myself. “Sure, why not?” Lee Ann said with a warm smile after a brief pause. “You go right ahead, sweetie.” Lee Ann did not mind a touch of religion at occasions like these; in fact, as I have already hinted, she was an ambivalent atheist at best. In the face of human suffering she was, perhaps understandably, dubious about God’s existence—from time to time, even very dubious. But when it came to the sweetness of life, which is something my sister truly appreciated, she was no atheist, or at least I never believed that she was. She was, then, just the opposite of the proverbial “atheist in a foxhole.” In the foxhole she was a brave, even stoic, nonbeliever; but when she came out of the foxhole, that was when she opened her heart to other possibilities. An example of this could be seen in her peculiar pride over an object, to the authenticity of which any objective observer would have objected. When Jenny and Mable, two of my sister’s closest friends, came back from their one trip to the Holy Land—they were not Welsh, so they liked to travel—they brought for Lee Ann a small chip of very valuable wood in a small box, something like the kind of flip-top box that might contain an lover’s diamond ring, to be opened by the soon-to-be fiancée. The wood chip within that box purported to be—but surely could not have been—a small piece of the cross of Jesus Christ. While Lee Ann never explained why she found this undoubtedly spurious relic so satisfying an article that she invariably would (frequently over a cup of tea) tell

visitors about it, she showed that she was in fact very taken with the wood chip by opening, when she was by herself, the miniature jewelry box’s lid either to inspect or to display what seemed clear to me and others was highly likely to be merely a piece of old wood from the Holy Land. Obviously, then, Lee Ann’s atheism was imperfect, beset as it was with doubts, doubts that, if they lasted even a moment, would have called into question Lee Ann’s status as a proper atheist. For this reason, I suppose, I have always reckoned her more of an agnostic than an atheist, with the “chip of the cross” serving as a fitting representation of the remnant of the faith that she seemed to have secretly retained from the Gaylor Avenue Welsh Calvinistic Presbyterian (tautological) Church of Plymouth. “Let us pray,” my son said, like a little rabbi, pronouncing each of those three words distinctly and with appropriately august diction. He then spoke the Hebrew table prayer:

Baruch atah Adonai eloheynu melech ha-olam ha-mo-tzi lechem min ha-aretz.

Blessed art Thou, O Lord God, King of the Universe who provides us with bread brought forth from the earth.

Then, astutely having noticed wine on the table, after a pause, he added, also in Hebrew, as if all understood, though it was really just Shelia and I who did, and God, of course:

Baruch atah Adonai eloheynu melech ha-olam

Blessed art Thou, O Lord God King of the Universe who provides us with the fruit

bo-ray p’ree ha-gafen. with the fruit of the vine that you created.

“My, my,” I thought to myself, “he might just make a nice little rabbi someday.” Yet then I wondered if that could be possible, given his less than perfect pedigree. I shuddered as I thought of my child’s face imposed upon Leni’s haunting portrait, Rabbi, which itself looked like the Welsh (Bavarian) cheese plate that defined the family. No, he could not be a nice little rabbi, but it was not because he was not Jewish. The dinner itself was sumptuous, rife with Welsh delicacies, chief among them my favorite of all vegetables, rutabagas, boiled and mashed to a delicately soft consistency with butter, salt, and pepper whipped into them. Its bitter flavor, muted by the sweet creamy butter, was for me most certainly the high point of the high feast. Then there were the peas, with flecks of bacon—flecks that Sheila and I, and my son, knew, to keep even somewhat kosher, we had to try to remove, delicately, with our forks. Such expurgation of pork products had been our “somewhat” kosher practice ever since we began our diligent study of Hebrew; we always prayed in that language at dinnertime, even though two of the three of us were only “somewhat” Jewish. Even when we lived in Philadelphia, it was well nigh impossible to find kosher Chinese food—one will recall that a few years before we had been both Chinese and Jewish—so we had learned to compromise by picking the pork out of many a Chinese dish. Besides, we did not want to offend Lee Ann, whose peas with bacon had been spoken well of at many a family picnic since she first introduced the wonderfully crisp, blackened bacon crumbles—always added at the very last minute before serving, which is the trick to keeping them crisp—when she was sixteen years old and helping our mother prepare a lovely Christmas dinner. Yet now I was a Jew, so the crumbled bacon flecks were most certainly to be avoided. Less easy to avoid was the centerpiece of Lee Ann’s Thanksgiving extravaganza: an enormous, succulent, buttery, and pineapple-bedecked ham. “My God,” I thought, “that must have been a mochyn mawr in the truest sense,” for I had never before seen (and never thereafter saw again) a roasted piece of pork of that

magnitude. There it lay, steaming, filling to the brim Lee Ann’s favorite Welsh serving platter, the one that Lucy Hughes Jones had brought over from Wales in the black coffin-like trunk, carefully wrapped in old Welsh winter-warming sweaters to prevent it from crashing into and breaking the lustrous facial features of the spuriously Welsh cheese plate that rarely served cheese but always frightened, with its unwelcoming countenance, the youngest of the family. Sheila, I could tell, felt guilty immediately, not because she might offend Lee Ann by not eating the main course, so meticulously and beautifully prepared, glistening in its honey glaze like a corpulent woman emerging from her bath, who, having doused herself liberally with body oil, stands before her bathroom mirror iring the fullness of her figure. No, Sheila’s guilt, I could tell, was completely olfactory, utterly nose driven: she very much wanted to take a nice, big, succulent piece of it, to wrap her lips around the very thing her nose was clearly telling her was good to eat but about which her upbringing, every last inch of it, was screaming out, “Unclean! Unclean!” I knew, however, that Sheila would resist temptation, for if she had been Eve in the garden, humankind would likely have avoided the fall altogether, at least insofar as that might have involved the capacity to resist culinary temptation. It was not Sheila who really had the problem, for as a true-blue Jew, she could recuse herself and no one would bat an eye. But I and my son had an ethical dilemma placed—quite literally—on our plates as Ed, who always carved all meat dishes in Lee Ann’s home, whacked off a certainly succulent sweet swathe of sauce-bathed swine and plopped it on my platter, followed immediately by another, smack onto my son’s plate, prepared precisely for his lip-smacking palate. I shall never forget his eyes as they cast their line of vision in my direction with a precatory look that said without words, “Please, Mother. May I, just this once?” I was at a loss. Do I eat it? Do I explain for the hundredth time that I am now Jewish, that I am a practicing almost-kosher Jew? What should I say to Lee Ann? Even more importantly, what do I say to my son’s pleading eyes? Sheila had by now already refused the ham, and had done so graciously, of course, giving no offense whatsoever. But I had to think quickly. I decided that if

one of us had to break the ceremonial law, I would be the one to step forward and be counted. I would do it. I whispered to my son, “Take plenty of potatoes and bury it.” “What?” he gasped in response. “You heard me, bury it!” My son struggled to use his fork and knife to bury the vast hunk of pig meat that adorned his plate. This required much of the energy and attention that he could have used to enjoy the Thanksgiving dinner. Twice failing with traditional cutlery, the lad took up his chopsticks and formulated a strategy nearly as clever as hiding rice candy in a Chinese puzzle box. He reasoned that trying to cover it with mashed potatoes alone would call attention to the mound of food. Thus, he used the triple threat of mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes (with their topping of toasted-brown marshmallows), and a piece of lettuce that he had artfully extricated from beneath the Jell-O mold. This verdant but bland blanket he managed to drape across the juicy cut of meat, using a single chopstick to tuck the leafy bloom under the sweet potatoes with a cohort of marshmallows and the cut end under the mashed potatoes, which feat was particularly hard for him to accomplish owing to the fact that the Jell-O mold had been in the refrigerator all night long, and as a result the still-frigid leaf was far less pliable than a piece of wilted warm lettuce might have been. “Clever boy,” I thought to myself, as I witnessed, between mouth-watering bites of perfectly roasted pork, my son’s delicate operation. “I will have to compliment him later on his dexterous use of multicultural cutlery.” I, meanwhile, privately enjoyed, albeit guiltily, my succulent piece of pork, unsuccessfully declining Ed’s offer of a second piece—though, God knows, I did at least try. By eating that pork that day, however, I managed to smooth over some tense family relations, for my father and mother had been, as I explained earlier, upset with me for not a few things—I was divorced, I lived with a woman, and I had become Jewish. “Thank God,” they thought, “she has at least dropped the pretense of being Chinese,” which I was obviously not, though I still sported a bowl-cut hairdo, as was somewhat typical of young Chinese women in those days. Everyone but my son was amply stuffed after the feast, even Sheila, who had

eaten far too many mashed potatoes and even more sweet potatoes with crispy toasted marshmallows, in addition to mounds of peas from which she had carefully removed all the bacon crumbles—I had eaten mine on the reasoning that I had already broken the ceremonial law by devouring the ham—and dessert. Ah, yes, dessert was wonderful, for Lee Ann offered a choice of plum pudding (my favorite), pumpkin pie, or pecan pie. Sheila had a bit of each, as did I, which only added to my guilt, for now my calorie count probably was verging on three to four thousand at this meal alone. My son requested plum pudding only, and it was the only part of the feast that, I suppose, he could truly enjoy. Plum pudding, a wonderful dessert, is actually made not from plums but from dried dates, some cranberries and raisins, a bit of lemon peel, butter, and, of course, a pinch of finely chopped ginger along with a dash of brandy or rum, if one has one of these in the cupboard. All of this is to be boiled slowly in a large coffee can set in a pan of hot water in the oven at a relatively low heat for about three hours. The moist, bread-like pudding is then drenched in a deliciously sweet sauce (consisting of butter, flour, sugar, milk, corn starch, nutmeg, and a small amount of rum, for flavor) prepared on the stove top; both the pudding, which is really more like a doughy bread, and the sauce are served piping hot. The dessert goes best with tea, not coffee, which is precisely what Lee Ann served, a good English tea, at the drinking of which someone of the Welsh heritage—usually my mother or, in later years, more often Lee Ann—would always comment on the fact that the English were good for tea, if nothing else. Now it was time to clean up, and I immediately realized that there was the potential for disaster unless I did the plates myself—at least the plates—for Ed would ferret out my son’s (deipno-)sophistic ruse of stashing the swine beneath the potatoes. And if he should discover it, I imagined, he might just don his role of temporary father, surely commenting on my son’s “not having eaten his meat.” Such criticizing had become somewhat rarer in those years because, after I had taken on a Chinese persona, my parents’ usual saw (“Don’t you know that there are children starving in China?”) had been viewed as potentially offensive to a Chinese person like myself. For a while they modified it: “Don’t you realize there are children starving in Africa?” Soon, however, they came to fear that doing so could cause me to become African, so they simply said, “Don’t you realize that not everybody has the opportunity to eat as well as us?” which, if it had lost some of its zip, was at least more accurate, save the fact, as Dr. Davies

would have said, “you mean, ‘we,’ not ‘us.’ ” Accordingly, I undertook the cleanup of the plates myself. “Here,” Lee Ann said, “put the leftovers in this bowl.” “Whatever for?” I queried, hopeful that she was not looking too closely as I swiftly dumped my son’s portion of pork into the sizable leftover bowl. “I put them out for the bear,” she said. “Did I mention to you that we have a friendly bear who comes up the slope of the backyard from the woods, and is always happy to have a snack?” “You feed a bear … leftovers?” “Yes, sometimes,” she responded in a matter-of-fact way. “Mostly I just put the uneaten scraps from the plates into the bowl; I do, however, add a few leftovers, as he loves leftovers. He’s almost tame; when he gets his treat, he never asks for more, so it ultimately keeps him from raiding the garbage can and disturbing us.” “Could this be the same bear to which I gave a ride from Bear Mountain a dozen or so years ago?” I wondered to myself. Sheila and I and my son were eager to get on the road back to New Hope, having rendered all proper good-byes and offered appropriate hugs on Lee Ann’s small front porch. My parents probably thought, as I drove away, “Thank God, she is finally getting over that Chinese-Jewish thing.” “Whatever kind of car is she driving?” Mother asked Dad. “The doors on that car open backwards, dear.” “That, my dear Blanche,” Harry said with a certain amount of satisfaction because he always had liked Italians, “is an Italian car. They call it a Cinquecento, which is the Italian word for five hundred.” “Five hundred what, dear?” Blanche retorted. “It is too small to be five hundred of anything.” “I don’t know, dear,” Harry said, shaking his head. “Perhaps she is becoming Italian now.”

On my first trip to Wales—the one that I took in 1991, accompanied only by my son, when I bought the tea set on my first day in the United Kingdom—on that trip, I had an experience that informed the rest of my life symbolically and, in a sense, more than symbolically informed the days approaching my death. On the day in question, our trip had taken us to Cardiff en route back to Heathrow, where we would catch our flight two days hence. Going to Cardiff meant that we would miss Bath, an interesting site in western England where fabulous Roman baths not only have given the name to the town but also draw thousands of visitors each year, for it is, I am told, a beautiful archaeological zone. Yet, I never did see Bath—nor did my son—because I wanted very much to see the castle at Cardiff, which is precisely what we did do. We took the train from Swansea to Cardiff and went to the famous castle, which, I am glad to say, we both enjoyed. I bought my son a Welsh tie as a consolation prize, and he was indeed quite happy with that, as being in Wales had brought out the Welshness in him beyond anything I had seen before. He was Welsh, and now he knew it more fully than he had since he was a child. But it was not the mighty fortress of Cardiff that became associated for me with the symbol of my return to God that had begun in a small Presbyterian church in Stockton, Pennsylvania. Rather, it was my son’s insistence—the day after visiting the castle (we did so on a Saturday, before we made our way back to London, whence we would depart on Monday)—that we go to church. He used the telephone book in the local bed-and-breakfast at which we were staying to discover a good Welsh Presbyterian church—so deeply had this Welsh experience begun to affect him. He found one, but it was quite a remove from the hotel. Despite the distance, we would need to take our bags with us—including, of course, the tea set I had bought on the first day in England and that he had been carefully toting around for me. Now we began a long walk, a long walk up a seemingly endless hill to the Welsh (though the word was not used, because we were in Wales where Welsh is the default assumption) Calvinist Presbyterian (and therefore tautological) church. Although I complained quite a bit about the length of this particular quasi-hike, my son, as if performing an act of self-mortification and tolerance, said little in response. He chiefly listened, from time to time apologizing and offering to hail a cab, should we see one, which we never did. Additionally, he offered some words, perhaps meant to be encouraging.

“Imagine,” he said, “a century ago everyone had to walk just about everywhere.” This was no solace. “And churchgoers, just as we are doing today, had to honor God by taking the long walk to church.” “Wouldn’t that be breaking the Sabbath?” I queried. “Sometimes one has to break the Sabbath to keep the Sabbath,” he retorted. “That sounds clever,” I said, my words dripping with sarcasm, “too clever.” “No, I mean it. If we honor God with our feet, he will make it worth it to us today.” “I doubt God cares that we are ascending this interminable hill.” “On the contrary,” my son responded, “I’m sure he does.” “Why would he care about such a minor detail as my hurting feet?” “Because he cares about all details, all the details of each and every person, their feelings, their perception, their hopes, their joys.” “How do you know he does?” I asked, protracting the conversation, which to me seemed pointless but at least got my mind off my aching feet. “Mind the tea set,” I added chidingly. “It is fragile.” “Yes, Mother, I’m being very careful with it.” “I don’t want it broken—not one cup, not one saucer.” “Yes, Mother,” he said, “I shall be especially careful.” When we finally arrived at the church, a good forty minutes of trekking later, I was exhausted. As we entered the front door, the bells were pealing, and it was clear that the service was about to begin. An older gentleman welcomed us first in Welsh, “Cyfarchion yn yr Arglwydd!” He soon switched over to the English “Greetings in the Lord,” when he realized we were visitors with bags in tow. He showed us a cloakroom where we could leave the tea set and the other bags

before entering the sanctuary. “Are you certain that the box will be safe there?” I quizzed him. “Oh, yea, mum. It’ll be quite safe,” he said. “You see, it’s my tea set, my proper …”—I was about to say English, but then I realized how uncouth that might sound in Wales—“… serving wear which I bought a week ago when arriving in the United Kingdom.” “Now that’s a bit curious,” he said. “Normally the tourists buy the tea set at the end of their stay. But no matter; it will be perfectly safe here, mum.” “Thank you,” I said, only moments later when walking into the sanctuary realizing I could have thanked him in Welsh, and now I had missed my opportunity. So I went back out the door and added, as if an afterthought, “Ddiolch ’ch.” “Iawn eich bod yn croesawu’r,” he responded. “You’re quite welcome.” We took our seat in the very last row, as has always been my practice in church, for I did not feel worthy of being there. The first reading came from the Psalms and was, as I recall it, from the 139th, the first eight verses, read responsively in the Methodist manner, for the Welsh Methodists shared this with Presbyterians, who eventually also adopted the practice:

P: O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me… . C: For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether. P: Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. C: Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. P: Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? C: If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold,

thou art there.

I had always found it awkward when a group of people said “I” instead of “we.” But that day, that particular day, I did not focus on that. Nor did I rummage in my purse in quest of a mint or a bit of candy, as in those days was my wont; instead, I thought about how this particular text resonated with my peculiar life. I thought about how curious my life had been, how God had never turned away from me, though I was unworthy—I who had been the betrayer of my own sister’s pregnancy announcement so many years ago, I who had hurled a wet coat hanger into a fuse box, I who aided and abetted in a false news report about Dr. Davies, I who had … My thoughts were silenced, for in this particular responsive reading I felt that God had, curiously enough, never walked away from the table, even if I had. The sermon, however, was not on this psalm per se. Rather, it was on what became my favorite age in Scripture, one of the few that I committed to memory before I died—namely, Jeremiah 29:11–14, a familiar age here cited from the King James:

¹¹For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end. ¹²Then shall ye call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you. ¹³And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. ¹⁴And I will be found of you, saith the LORD: and I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations, and from all the places whither I have driven you, saith the LORD; and I will bring you again into the place whence I caused you to be carried away captive.

Of course, these words dovetailed nicely with those spoken by the pastor in the responsive reading, “Whither shall I go from thy spirit?” “Whither indeed?” I thought to myself, having walked halfway across Cardiff that very morning; my feet were still aching. Though I had recently begun going to church again in Stockton, New Jersey, I it that I had not yet moved away

from my idea that God takes little of human life in any active, “magical” sense of the word. I wanted, as I had always wanted, religion without God, or if God were involved, God without magic. He is fine, provided he has no magic. Yet the psalm asserted a relentless God, and the prophet proclaimed a magical power. That day I was to experience just a bit of the magic of God. The sermon went on for quite a while, as Presbyterian sermons sometimes do. As the preacher preached and I listened to his homily of grace, my mind began to bend away from cynicism toward I did not quite know what. Yet, I knew whatever it was, it was better, for in those words lay the reminder of God’s unfailing love that hems us in behind and before with a rescue operation that comes for lost souls. This message—preached mostly in English but with bits in Welsh, in a manner that recalled that of the great Reverend Griffith—was the first act of magic, for while I had entered the sanctuary skeptical, cynical, and even thinking in sarcastic , I left it beginning to believe that God had a plan, a plan for me. I felt the stirrings of hunger, not simply for breakfast, which followed, but for God himself. The breakfast, which they called simply “After service” (written Ar ôl yr eglwys in the bulletin), consisted of a lavish display of biscuits, small bits of bread with jam, finger cookies (just the type Aunt Jemima once made, which, when dropped by my fainting sister many years before, had formed the hand of the Presbyterian blessing on my father’s head at the picnic in the garden by Harveys Lake), and cheese. The smell was familiar, so familiar, yet one I might have forgotten had I not smelled something like it quite randomly and inexplicably in the Stockton Presbyterian Church a few years before. The scent was none other than that of the familiar Hên Sîr, the smell of which cheese had marked the similar “after service” of the Gaylord Avenue Welsh Calvinistic Presbyterian Church of Plymouth, Pennsylvania. Indeed, the Hên Sîr’s distinct smell stood out amidst the many dainties on the table, a smell that dominated and made me feel right at home, right at home in church. And, behold, the cheese was served with tea—a practice I had always wondered about since the time I had hosted the tea party in honor of Professor Champ Clark Carney and his fine wife, Bess, so many years before. In Wales, cheese could be served, indeed was served, with tea. And the cheese was, no less, Hên Sîr, the very cheese I had once served to the professor. During the after-service tea party—for that is what it was—one of the old presbyters came over to chat with us. He was the most pessimistic of the group,

a fact that did not surprise me, for it seems to me that wherever I went I always attracted the most pessimistic people, who, once having sought me out, would chat me up, with little attention paid to how long they might do so. “Where are you heading from here?” the old presbyter asked. “We’re going home,” I said. “You know, Christianity is dying here,” he said, with that morbid Welsh gloominess that in the States seemed almost muted compared to this gentleman’s dourness. “Aye, it’s nearly dead already.” “Dead?” my son questioned, always quizzical, often too quizzical at the wrong moments. Yet this time I welcomed his penchant to question, for I was at that very instant privately wondering how Christianity could be dead if such superb sermons were preached week in and week out. Besides, there were quite a few parishioners in this church compared to the number at Stockton Presbyterian, or even the old Gaylord Avenue church of Plymouth, Pennsylvania. “Yes, quite dead, or at least dying.” “I’m surprised,” I said. “You have such a nice little church and a nice little minister.” I immediately realized that neither description as “little” was ive of my declaration of stupefaction at the presbyter’s negative statement. “Impossible,” my son muttered, countering Welsh gloominess with Welsh skepticism. “It’s a fact,” the old presbyter said. “I’ve seen Christianity have some powerful setbacks, and, in some regions of the world, it has been gravely suppressed, as the Christian faithful have been martyred, until the few that survive end up going underground,” my son said. Now I feared we might be late for our train because now I felt a dissertation coming on, though fortunately he added only, “But it never really dies.” “Our culture is killing it,” the presbyter responded hastily. “Kids just think of themselves today. You must have seen them on the trains, with their haircuts, their chains, their ripped pants.”

“Those are just externals,” my son said, “outcries against the injustices of society, or expressions of anarchy, the anarchy of their souls. But such ephemeral trivialities”—why did he always have to use big words at inappropriate moments?—“are not evidence of Christianity’s demise here. Christ’s propitiation was for them, too.” I now recognize the shrewdness in his introduction of the magic word, “propitiation,” into a conversation with a Presbyterian, especially a dour elder. “But we, the church, need to judge ourselves, and reach out to them.” “If they believe,” was the unclear response of the yet still sour-mouthed presbyter. “I mean that propitiation is for them, if they believe.” “Rather, when they do,” my son added optimistically, after a pause, all during which I was feasting on cheese and tea, “and that is in God’s hands. As long as there are faithful believers, thanks be to God, there will be Christ’s Church.” I was helping myself to yet another chunk of Hên Sîr, as I now was beginning to crave it, for it reminded me of my childhood, of church, and of something greater than myself. “Christianity is like this cheese,” I said with less than perfect diction, as my mouth was now nearly filled with the cheese, the smell drifting up my nose—so pungent was this cheese—and sweeping through my nostrils, like the Chinese idea of C’hi, into my body and soul at once. “That is Hên Sîr,” the presbyter said, presumptuously assuming I did not recognize the cheese. “How is Christianity like Hên Sîr?” “Well,” I said, “it, well, it …” I paused, chewing as best I could with so sizable a hunk of that very host’s cheese in my mouth. What did I mean by this? “Well, it seems you find it in the places you least expect to find it.” Then, after swallowing a bit of it with the aid of a sip of tea, I tacked on, after the pause, “And it is something that is cherished from generation to generation.” Another swallow, and another pause. “And it is pungent, and wakes you up; it once woke up my sister when she fainted.” “How odd,” he said. “You know, Mother,” my son quipped, “that’s not a bad analogy.” “Well,” the presbyter chimed in, after he thought about it for a moment, now

half-agreeing, “its name means ‘old shire’ in Welsh. It’s the cheese of the old country.” “Reminds me of the Welsh national anthem,” my son added glibly. “Then that’s how Christianity is like the cheese,” I averred. “It is the faith of the old country. And it will never die.”

Editor’s Afterword

It has been a great pleasure, indeed an honor, variously to transcribe and edit my mother’s memoirs and for one of her granddaughters, Rachel, to have assisted by enhancing or creating some of the book’s illustrations, which are taken from Elaine’s notebooks. It was (and is) her wish to express her love to all her grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, though she will not have known them in this life, not all of whom are mentioned by name in this volume. Her oldest male grandchild, Harry, was purposely left out, to avoid confusion because he shares her father’s name. Her three other beloved grandchildren—Sileshi, Bayush, and Tarikwa, adopted near the end of her life—were not mentioned by name, nor was her great-grandchild. The reader may wonder how it is that she claimed to have penned this volume after death. While I cannot explain this fully here, suffice it to say that her vivacious spirit does manage to defy the tomb—or, in her case, the urn. As for the manuscript itself, soon after she ed away I discovered the bulk of it in a rusty metal box under her bed. Some four or so years before her ing, I had intuited that she had been writing again, but, as her disease progressed, I forgot about it, especially because over time she was slowly losing her ability to write altogether. When, after her death, we removed her bed from the room and stumbled upon the box, I was quite surprised upon opening it to find a handwritten manuscript, arranged in a hodgepodge manner and much of it barely legible, with a note on top written on a single slip of paper in blue felt-tip marker: “It is time for me to fly with the Word. Explain me to my reader.” I took this note to mean that I should edit and transcribe her work, adding only a few tales that she communicated to me verbally, and that perhaps I should try to elucidate some of her richer allusive references. I started to do the latter, but, try as I might, it proved to be an impossible task, as the book is so rich in allusions to many different literary models. The most important question about the document might simply be whether the stories contained herein are true. I can vouch for the veracity of perhaps a bit more than half of them because I was physically present. I have no way of confirming or denying the others, particularly tales of the family’s deeper past,

but I can say that the spirit, if not the specifics, of those s seems to be more or less accurate, for some of these tales were ed down in various forms to other branches of the family, as well. Still, she likely enhances some stories, and thus I cannot say what parts are entirely historical. Various s of her college experiences are, I strongly suspect, at least partly fictitious; yet there may be some truth to them. For example, the story of her being expelled from Wilkes for throwing a coat hanger into a fuse box has long been a part of family lore. That said, my own research has shown that there was no Dr. Evan Davies in the English Department at Wilkes College in the 1960s, but there was a Dr. Frank Davies, an excellent professor with the highest academic standards. That Dr. Davies, however, never taught at Bloomsburg and was never encouraged to leave its faculty. Nor does my research show that there ever was a Dean Laufermund at Bloomsburg or any professor named Keinhoffe at Wilkes, let alone two of them. Still, other details in these same stories may be accurate; there was indeed a Zion Mule Corps, for example, at Gallipoli. Further, Elaine did attend Bloomsburg briefly and was involved in some kind of brouhaha with the student newspaper, or so the story was told. Other curious references in her story seem to be accurate, such as the haunting aura of Lighthouse Street in Bloomsburg. That detail is affirmed by a legend about a house at 351 Lightstreet Road—not Lighthouse Street precisely, but her memory may have faded on this detail. Again, while there is no record of any Barbara Parrot at Bloomsburg, that there was some dissembling about a family member’s racial identity has, again, been a part of family tradition. Thus, while at least some parts of this autobiography are questionable (was there a real Bernie Schupp, for example, or a tearoom called Marco Polo?) or clearly fictional—a fact that for some will no doubt call into question the veracity of the whole—the majority of these events, I believe (and often recall), did take place. The strangest task I had as editor entailed her retelling of my own stories—for example, in St. Croix—about which I have left her version more or less intact, even if my own recollection of the details differs slightly. As for shared tales, suffice it to say that well do I Betsy, the monkey; clearly, too, do I recall the cat Fang jumping from a tall tree and landing squarely on Sheila’s head. Per her instructions I will attempt briefly to “explain Elaine” here. The structural models for this autobiography include, but are not limited to, first, Augustine’s Confessions, though in the opening chapter she denies the connection, and second, in of style, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, albeit she lays greater claim to the Odyssey. Incongruous as the combination may sound, this is unlikely to be the first time that Ovid and Augustine have served as the two primary models for

a literary work. But there is clearly a further influence in play—and this is the surprising piece of the puzzle—Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele. While this may not be the first time that Ovid and Augustine have together provided an author with literary models, it is most certainly the first time that those two and Axel Munthe have done so. Like Axel, Elaine loves animals but struggles with God. Like Ovid, she weaves tale within tale. Like Augustine, she ultimately finds redemption and rest, citing hymns alongside Scripture to evidence as much. Even when she lost the ability to read, she continued to enjoy my reading aloud to her the work of poets such as Richard Wilbur and Dana Gioia. Though Frost was her favorite, she also enjoyed Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Keats, Shelly, Byron, and Wordsworth, to name a few. Among her most ired prose writers were Cervantes, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Stein. But she also loved Jan Karon, Ellis Peters, and Agatha Christie. Her taste was as eclectic as her life was quixotic. Grasping the subtleties of her work—such as her occasional allusions to these and other authors—is not vital, as far as I can tell, for the modern reading audience. Nor is it necessary fully to grasp the numerous cases of paronomasia, as one finds at the opening of chapter 4, for example, where she plays upon the word “peace” and the name of Salem Boulevard. Rather, I believe the chief power of the document lies in its overarching message of homecoming and spiritual renewal, a quest for a greater peace than even the balm of literature can provide. My mother’s personality and her stories have survived the tomb. Healing has come; by God’s grace, she has found her way home. —H.R.J.

About the Author

H.R. Jakes, has been writing all his life and is working on additional books for this series. He and his wife Diana have seven children and one grandchild. They live in Texas.