Seasons (1988)

Published: Potomac Review: Fall-Winter 2003-2004

 

            On Sundays at Papa Verdi's, in the heat of the summer afternoon, my father would sit by the open living room window of that little row house on Roseberry Street listening to the opera on the radio. There's a pool of shade by the steps where I play Jacks with other girls. Boys play half-ball in the street. Grownups carry chairs out onto the tiny front porches where they will sit and talk late into the night and when there is no more to say, they sit in silence, watching the moths and shadows of bats circle under the street lights, the cats patrolling the walks for crickets.

            The street is altogether quiet now, but lying under the dense heat that fills our house, the busy clamor of the afternoon buzzes through my head. I can still hear--entwined with the noises of the day, over the shouts of the boys and the murmuring conversations on the porches--a clear tremulous soprano voice rising up through the dark: it drifts over the street, a sound that stirs the curtains, lifts scraps of paper from the walk, raises little vortexes of dust--the fine, restless debris of time. 

            I can feel him now, his breath, heavy in the air--his summer presence. On nights like this, when seasons overlap and years dissolve, I hold his August self, grown light as air, against my body: Daddy at the window, the glow from the house pouring over his shoulders as he sits, motionless in the humid evening air, still and colorless as an old photo. But each season bears within it the seed of the next, and the life of one is the death of the other. I would have the years become music, the melodic line unbroken, moving from instrument to instrument in endless variation. 

*     *     *

             Mama was pregnant with Jo that summer, the summer Daddy's belly swelled up. At first, the men on the block kidded him. They said he must be drinking a lot of beer. Or maybe, they said, he wanted to make himself look like Mama. It wasn't till fall that they found out about the tumor.

             He didn't live to see the end of winter. I remember how the skies paled to gray, the leaves turned from green to yellow, then vanished one night after a freezing rain; how his eyes, once so dark, seemed to fade with the sky, grew cloudy like pools of ashes and his hair became a wraith of snow. It was then I thought I would sing opera. I wanted to become the voice my father heard at the window and to sing until the color of summer would pour back into his winter face.

             Daddy didn't leave me a voice to match the honor of his name. Still, I had his love of music. I begged and begged my mother to let me take piano lessons, until, on an April morning, when the forsythia at the end of the block was a fountain of gold, she gave in.

             I learned to play on Mama's Baldwin, but it wasn't long before I realized that I didn't have Mama's talent either. My sister Jo told me talent had nothing to do with it. All I needed was confidence. Either way, I knew I would never play in front of an orchestra, but if I worked hard, I told myself, I might be good enough to play in the middle of one. I switched to viola and started taking lessons at the Settlement school. I think of it as luck that I got a scholarship to Curtis, and greater luck, that after graduation I got to audition with the Kansas City Philharmonic. Every concert I look out over the audience and think that I must be in the wrong place; this can't be me up her on this stage.

*     *     *

            It was not yet Thanksgiving--we had been planning on flying to Philadelphia to visit--when I got a call from my sister, Jo. She said that she woke up in a terrible fright. She had been dreaming: a plane was flying over the house, getting louder and louder, and just as it was about to crash through the roof, she heard the sound of a piano.

            She ran down the stairs, and there was Mama, with only the streetlight shining in the living room window to break the darkness. She was playing the Baldwin--with one hand. Her left hand hung at her side, clenched as though holding a traveling bag. She said Mama looked up at her, like nothing was wrong, and told her in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone, her voice just a little slurred, that one of her hands didn't seem to be working right and she thought this must certainly be a sign.

             Mama grew up around 8^th and Marshall, a few blocks from Roseberry Street. The neighborhood was mostly Jewish in those days. Her family had be Russian socialists, and militantly anti-religious. They were members of the NAACP, had a picture of Eugene Debs on the living room wall; they cast their votes for Norman Thomas and their hopes to the dream of a new order.

             When Mama told them she was going to marry an Italian boy form the neighborhood, they stood there, white as ghosts. But principles are principles...

             Mama said that it was so warm for late November that they sat out on the front steps as though it were summer. No one spoke. She felt like time had stopped, like they would go on sitting there in the gritty silence forever. When she couldn't stand it another second, her father, Grandpop Green looked at her and said, "What did you say he's called?"

             "Giuseppe," Mama told him, "Giuseppe. But everyone calls him Joe."

             "No," said Grandpop Green.  "His last name I want to know."      

            "Verdi, Daddy, " Mama told him. "Like the man who wrote those operas. Who knows--maybe he's related, his family I mean, from way back." 

            Grandpop Green sat there, Mama said, not a trace of a smile. He looked at Grandmom Ruth, shrugged his shoulders, and said, "Well, Mama, what can we do? I don't know about this composer; I don't know about this Giuseppe Verdi, but if our daughter wants to marry a Joe Green, she should marry a Joe Green. And who knows, maybe he's related to us from way back." 

            That night a sudden, violent wind brought cold and rain over the city. The temperature dropped forty degrees in an hours, and the next morning the walks, the porch roofs, the streets, were white with the first snow of the new season.

                                                                                     *     *     *

            The sky seemed so big when I moved to Kansas City. It almost frightened me. In Philadelphia, the sky stays over your head. You see it rolled out above you between rows of buildings or catch glimpses of it through a canopy of trees, but here, it wraps all around you. You come to the top of a hill and the horizon drops below the edge of the earth, and the land rises like a stag toward the sun.

             In the summer, that Midwestern sun pours down in yellow waves. By mid-July the grass has turned brown, too tired to bother growing. There are grasshoppers everywhere. I sit in the back yard and let them walk across my hand. They hold to my finger with strong, spiky legs, then in an instant--like steel springs shot into the wind--gone! By August even the wind feels hot, doesn't cool you at all, only dries you out, draws the skin tight on your face.

             Dave and I are walking together down the hill behind the apartments on Quincy Drive along U.S. 40, off through an open field under the rock bluffs of an old quarry. The thick, mid-afternoon heat envelops us. I feel the wind burning my skin, my dress brushing against my legs in the tall grass. The air is alive with wasps. Boys are hunting through the lot for ring-neck snakes, and finding them, whole nests of them, by overturning stones in the dry weeds.

             They are beautiful, these snakes, tiny, with orange rings around their necks and eys so black you can look into them and imagine the ancient forests that now lie fallen and broken around us, locked into fragments of sandstone and shale.

             At the mouth of the man-made cave carved in the limestone bluffs, the cool air floods out of the great dark archways; we pick up the yellow rocks and check them for fossils. They're thick with shells, brachiopods and crinoids stems left from the sea that once cover this place. There are dark veins of slate; their split layers reveal fossil ferns pressed like old flowers in an album; before the sea was here, it seems, there was a forest, and before the forest, another sea.

             This is the earth's way of remembering. Even as it all changes, it remains. As we walk through these layers of earth and memory, remnants of  forest and sea cling to us, images and voices fill us. What was once here, goes on, flowing into us and through us, carrying everything in its flood: Grandmom Ruth, the boys playing half-ball, my father at the window, the ancient forests, the seas--all tumbling one over the other, until the beginning overtakes the end, early dissolves into late, before into after. Standing now in these dry fields, we are washed by a stream that flows from the very waters of creation.

             In the darkness, in the sudden current of cool air, I can sense his fragrance, feel it touch my body, cling to my clothes and hair like burrs, burn like nettles in my skin. The heat and smell fo the grass beyond the arch surrounds us in an aura of light.  I see his face shining with sweat, his hair clinging to his forehead in wet, black scallops, and feel his eyes touch my body. I st and here playing with  the button at the collar of my dress. The boys, still hunting ring-necks, are scouting for likely rocks in the grass at the mouth of the cave.

             I reach for Dave's hand and we walk back, past the boys, through the lot, the air--singing, an aria, an operatic chorus of wasps and locusts; we climb the long hill to the cool of my apartment and wrap ourselves, each in the sweat and the smell of the other until the weight of summer presses into our bones and we melt into sheets wet as rain, waking years later, strangers in a different season.

 

*     *     *

             Mama found all those things in Daddy that she had denied in herself. He encouraged her love of music. For their first anniversary he bought her that piano, the beautiful little upright Baldwin I learned to play on. She had such a sure hand. Everything that was apologetic and tentative in her life became strong and confident in her music, and never more than when she played Bach. Mama could make the simplest passages ring with such lyrical clarity! She was twice the musician I could every hope to be--but there was me to care for, and then Jo came, and after Daddy died, she seemed to lose interest in music. She played less and less.

             I remember a family dinner; someone had put on a record. Montverde. Her face grew pale. She left the room. I found her in the bedroom standing at the window in the dark, watching the snow falling through the halo of the street lamp. I never heard her play again.        

            Dave and I hardly speak on the way to the airport. It seems like we're hitting every red light. I know it's not fair of me--he's worried about Mama too, but he can barely suppress his excitement over this move and I hate him for it. All his life, Dave's wanted to leave the Midwest. He was so happy when he got the job, we went to dinner at the Black Angus to celebrate. I smiled, and told him how pleased I was for him, but all along I was thinking--where would I find work? There must be musicians with more raw talent playing for quarters on the street than I could dream of having.  My income from the Philharmonic was so little--he thought of it as a hobby. All along, I was waiting for him to ask me what he thought I was going to do with myself in New York, but he never did. 

            I have the window seat on the plane. I lean my head against the glass and watch the towns that lie gathered in star clusters below me. Each one emerges out of the dark, no more at first than a whisper of light on the edge of the invisible horizon; then slowly, from a pale mist to a tracery of individual lights, they draw into focus, strung out along the radiant webs that mark the streets and highways of a city, a town--real places with real names--then like the movement of the seasons, the way the separate lights of numbered summers and winters merge into the idea of summer, the idea of winter, what had been a radiance of place, of name and time, rejoins the darkness, sinks again below

the edge of the always receding horizon.

                                                                                      *     *     *

            Mama, look who's here!" Jo says, calling ahead as we walk into the hospital room. "It's Emma!"

             I smile at the patient in the bed by the door, a large woman with broad face and powerful shoulders. She smiles back. The curtain is pulled around the window bed and someone is moving on the other side, pulling on the sheets. Ho pushes the curtains aside, greets the nurse's aid and walks over to Mama. I hold my breath, afraid of what I'm going to see.    

            Jo has been coming in every day so there are no surprises for her here. She's already fixed a place in her mind with this room all marked out, its every detail familiar: the green vinyl covered chair in the corner with the extra pillows and neatly folded linens stacked on the seat, the view of the parking lot through the window blinds, the bed-stand with its clutter of medicine cups, plastic water pitcher, accordion bend straws; there's the startling IV stand, pumping, blinking, rationing life.

             She's sitting up as we step through the parted curtain, propped against a pillow, the head of the bed raised behind her; the mouthpiece of a respirator is taped  to her face. Her eyes are open, but she shows no sign of recognition. I want to hug her, to fold myself into her arms, but when I try to reach her, I feel clumsy and inept. It's awkward to bend over the bed rail, and the IV bandaged to her left hand, the bruises that blossom like purple flowers above her wrists, the folds of loose flesh that hang from her arms, all frighten me.

             "Mama?"

             But there is no response.

             Jo leans over from the other side of the bed, kisses Mama on the forehead, matter-factly straightening the sheets as she does. This is my little sister, I tell myself. Now she's the one who knows what to do, and I'm the little girl. I look at Mama and see myself grown old, yet still feel like a little girl. Is that how it is? Is that how she feels now? I imagine my mother, dying before me on this bed, she is an old woman and a child--a little girl in a summer dress covered with snow.

             Later in the house on Roseberry Street, we sit in the old kitchen. Each time I come back, walk into this room again, I am amazed how a place can be at once so strange and so familiar: there's the stove to left as you enter, the yellow walls, the white painted cabinets above the Formica-topped counters, black with flecks of red and silver. Under th back window with its stained draw-shade and pot of basil shaped like a painted Italian vendor's cart, there's a wide, shallow porcelain sink, yellowed and chipped from years of scrubbing. The table with the chrome legs and black enameled top still sits in the center of the room. The three unmatched kitchen chairs that surround it are the only things in the room that are  new to my memory.

             Nothing else has changed. Everything is in its place, yet somehow it's all wrong. It's out of scale. It's too small, to o solid, to sharply focused, at odds with the space this room has come to occupy in memory, as thought memory and the physical reality were in competition. The house that stands at the center of my inner universe, the room that is the center of that house, has become a jealously guarded possession of my mind, and now, confronted with the material reality, the mind does not happily concede its right of ownership.

             We sit at the table in this alien and intimately familiar room and talk far into the morning. A cold rain patters against the window. Jo gets out a bottle of dry vermouth. The hard edges, the lines that protect and separate the  inner and outer worlds begin to soften; the weight I felt over me in the hospital grows lighter.

             My courage warmed by the glow of the vermouth, I work my way to the questions I've been rehearsing all week. How are we going to take care of her if--the thought is almost as unwieldy to my mind as the words are to my tongue--if she just stays like this, no better, no worse? A thousand times she told us she wanted to die under her own roof and w swore to one another a thousand times that never, never would we send her away. But how could we care for her like this? And what happens if she still can't breath on her own by next week, or the week after, or next month?

             "We have to think about these things," I tell Jo.

             For the first time, for the first time it really sinks in--I'm going to be alone. With all the other people in my life, the child that still wakes up afraid will be alone.

             "Do you know what's so hard about his Jo" I ask, " ... what makes it so hard to say these things out loud? That we have to make the choice for her. Not being ale to ask... " and suddenly I understand.

             Jo pull my glass over close and pours me another drink.

             "I tried to be a good daughter. How will I know now--who will be there to tell me?"

             I'm a little dizzy from the vermouth and all these things are going through my mind--stars spilled over the earth like seeds, snakes eyes, fossils, my first piano lesson... Papa Verdi's dead and gone, Papa Verdi's dead and gone... and Mama here in this kitchen arguing with Daddy about dinner: You Jews, he'd tell her, you know everything but how to cook!

             "And why didn't she ever come to hear me play,  Jo, why? In all those years at Settlement, at Curtis, when she visited us in K.C., she stayed home; she wouldn't come to hear, even then. Why?"

             Jo reaches out, takes my hand across the table.

             "You'll always be a good daughter, Emma," she says. "And my big sister."

 

            We sit a long time. After a while we let go of Mama and the hospital and we talk about old

times. ask about the neighbors: who's gotten married, had children, grandchildren; who's moved

away,  who's dies? I find myself talking  about Daddy. I tell her how I can hear his love for music,

hear it, like apart of his voice alive in my own bo0dy, and when I play, he comes back to this house,

sits at  that window in the front room and listens at though it were summer again and he had never

died.

            The vermouth is gone. The rain has stopped  and the first morning light is beginning to show

at the window . We've almost run out of words. I pick up an orange from the table and we walk out

together to the front porch to watch the sunrise. The air is damp and chill, and the waking sky shows

light, but no sign of color. the street is luminous with shadows.

            "When you move," she say, "will you quit your job with the Philharmonic?"

            The dullness of the vermouth suddenly lifts. I feel something sharp pricking me from within. A

wakening seed.

            "Will you give it up? Like Mama?"

            "Will you forgive me if I say something?"

"What could you say, that I should have to forgive you for?"

            "It's about Mama."

            Jo waits for me to find the words.

            "She wanted to believe it was for us. Giving up her music, after Daddy died. Do you know

what it really was, Jo? All the way here on the plane I've been going over this. I can't help it. She is

lying there, helpless, and I feel such anger, and such guilt... but Jo, it's as though she died years ago.

She moved between two worlds. One of them, timeless, one filled with the routines of the day,

caring for us, for Daddy."

            "It was Daddy who held them together."

            "And when he died, she vanished into the silence of her own refusal."

             It's getting late," Jo said. "I think we've had too much of this," turning what was left of the ice 

cue in her glass.

            "Why has it been so hard for me? Why do I have this instinct to sink into the crown, to

apologize for everything I'm best at? To hide from my own gifts, small as they might be?"

            "Not so small, Emma," Jo whispers, her voice beginning to grow hoarse, gentle in her

impatience. "That's only what you tell yourself."

             "Yes! I know! That's her voice! That's Mama! How I have to fight it!"

            "But you have," Jo says. "You've done it."

            "Maybe," I tell her. "Maybe I have. Some if it. Dave doesn't understand. He says he does, but

he doesn't."

            "What do you expect:? Emma, what do you want?"

            "He's afraid. Like Mama was afraid."

            "Are you sure? Is it Dave who's afraid?"

            I dig my nails into the rind of the orange--press through to the white, lifting the pale,

delicately veined tissue from the fruit.

            I feel like a child, my face pressed against the window of  time; cities of light are passing

beneath me, falling away like faded notes over the horizon.

            I see my father in the window--this very window, this house, this street. What did I ever want

from Dave, but my father's music?

            As I pull apart the segments of orange in my hand, a rift in the clouds releases the sun and a

plume of juice arcs  into its light, like a solar prominence.

            My fingers are gilded with the sweet juice. The orange is translucent in the morning sun; the

seeds are dark in the heart of its flesh.