The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age Page 4

  Wanted you kids to have the best you could have, but that didn’t happen. We were just too poor. I worked like hell, but it wasn’t enough. Things got better later, but those early years—! The only good thing was, we lived in Millersport. We lived on the old man’s farm. You loved those animals. Remember your pet chicken—Happy Chicken? God, you loved that little red chicken.

  Daddy brushing tears from his eyes. Daddy laughing, he wasn’t the kind to be sentimental, Jesus!

  She was thinking of how they’d found the rooster—not Mr. Rooster then, but just a limp, slain bird—beautiful feathers smudged and broken—out back of the barn where something, possibly a fox, or a neighbor’s dog, had seized him, shaken him and broken his neck, threw him down and left him for dead. Poor Mr. Rooster!

  Seeing the rooster in the dirt, horribly still, the little girl had cried and cried and cried.

  And several hens, limp and bloody, eyes open and sightless. Flung down in the dirt like trash.

  AND THERE CAME THE time, not long after this, or maybe it had been this time, when Happy Chicken disappeared.

  The girl was stunned and disbelieving and did not cry, at first.

  So frightened, the little girl could not cry.

  For it seemed terrifying to her, that Happy Chicken might be—somehow—gone.

  She’d run screaming to her mother who was upstairs in the farmhouse. The Mother who claimed to have no idea where the little chicken might be. Together they searched in the chicken coop, and in the barn, and out in the fields, and in the pear orchard. Calling Happy Chicken! Happy Chicken! Loudly calling Chick-chick-chick-chick-CHICK!

  Other chickens came running, blinking and clucking. Yellow eyes staring.

  And not one of these was me.

  That morning the Mother had taken the little girl into Lockport to visit with the Other Grandmother, who was her father’s mother, who lived upstairs in a gray clapboard house on Grand Street just across the railroad tracks. The highway that was Transit Road that ran past the little girl’s house became Transit Street inside the Lockport city limits and was but a half-block away from the Other Grandmother’s house.

  The Other Grandmother was named Blanche: but she was also called “Grandma”—like the (Hungarian) grandmother. The little girl tried to understand why this would be so. How could the two persons who were so different, be somehow the same—Grandma?

  The Other Grandmother, who lived in Lockport, was much nicer than the (Hungarian) Grandmother who lived in Millersport. This Grandmother did not smell of grease, or chicken gizzards, or wet chicken feathers, or any other nasty thing, but rather of something pale and creamy like lilies—did this Grandmother wear perfume? Were this Grandmother’s hands soft from hand lotion? The little girl was always welcome to explore the Grandmother’s rooms which included the Grandmother’s bedroom that had such nice things in it—a shiny pink satin bedspread with white flowers, a “dressing table” with three mirrors and a mirror-top, many sweet-smelling jars and small bottles, a hairbrush with soft bristles that did not hurt the little girl’s hair when the Grandmother brushed it.

  Most importantly the Grandmother who was Blanche did not speak angry-sounding guttural words in Hungarian, and would never have raised her voice to scream at anyone; you could not imagine—(the little girl could not imagine!)—this nice Grandmother being cruel to any chicken.

  This was the Grandmother whom Daddy loved—for this Grandmother was Daddy’s mother. The little girl had been told this remarkable fact which she could not comprehend because Daddy was so much taller than the Grandmother it seemed to her silly—that her tall strong Daddy who was so forceful would have a mother.

  This was the Grandmother who read books from the Lockport library, never fewer than three books each week. And these books smelling of the library in plastic covers. And these books smartly stamped in dark green ink LOCKPORT PUBLIC LIBRARY. This Grandmother took the little girl hand in hand into the children’s entrance of the library, to secure a library card for the little girl. For here was the surprise, that would be one of the great, happy surprises of the little girl’s life—“Joyce Carol” was old enough for a children’s library card: six. And she was allowed to take out children’s books, picture books, selected by the little girl herself, from shelves in the library—so many shelves! Such beautiful books! The little girl was so excited she could barely speak, to thank the Grandmother. Having her books stamped and discharged by the librarian made the little girl very shy but the Grandmother stood beside her so there was nothing to fear. And the little girl and the Grandmother-who-was-Blanche read these books together sitting on a swing on the front veranda of the gray clapboard house on Grand Street.

  In all that day, the little girl did not once think of me.

  Those hours, blinking and staring at the beautiful brightly colored illustrations in the books, turning the pages slowly, as the nice Grandmother Blanche read the words on each page, and encouraged the little girl to read too—the little girl did not once think of Happy Chicken.

  But when the Mother took the little girl home again to Millersport, in the late afternoon of that day, and the little girl ran out into the barnyard to call for me, there was no Happy Chicken anywhere.

  The little girl and the Mother would search the chicken coop, the barn, the orchard. . . . Oh where was Happy Chicken? The little girl was crying, sobbing.

  The (Hungarian) Grandmother who was hanging sheets on the clothesline insisted she had not seen Happy Chicken.

  The Grandmother had never really distinguished Happy Chicken from any other chicken—the little girl knew that. How ridiculous, the Grandmother thought, to pretend that one chicken was any different from any other chicken!

  The Grandfather too insisted he hadn’t seen Happy Chicken! Wouldn’t have known what the damned chicken looked like, in fact. Anything that had to do with the chickens—these were the Grandmother’s chores, and of no interest to the Grandfather who was worn-out from the foundry in Tonawanda and couldn’t give a damn, so much fuss over a goddamn chicken.

  When the father returned from his factory work in Lockport in the early evening he was in no mood either to hear of Happy Chicken. He was in no mood to hear his little daughter’s crying, that grated on his nerves. But seeing his little girl’s reddened eyes, and the terror in those eyes, the Father stooped to kiss her cheek.

  Don’t cry, he’ll come back. What’s his name—“Happy Chicken”?

  Sure. “Happy Chicken” will come back.

  SHE IS CALLING HIM-HAPPY Chicken. Her throat is raw with calling him—Happy Chicken!

  She has wakened in a sick cold sweat tangled in bedclothes. The little red chicken is somewhere in the room—is he? But which room is this, and when?

  But here I am—suddenly—crouching at her feet. Eager quivering little red-feathered chicken at the little girl’s feet. The little girl kneels to pet me, and kisses the top of my hard little head, and holds me in her arms, my wings pressed gently against my sides. And the little chicken-head lowered. And the eyelids quivering. Red-burnished feathers stroked gently by a little girl’s fingers.

  Where did I go, Joyce Carol? I flew away.

  One day that summer, my wings were strong enough to lift me. And once my wings began to beat, I rose into the air, astonished and elated; and the air buoyed and buffeted me, and I flew high above the tallest peak of the old clapboard farmhouse on Transit Road.

  So high, once the wind lifted me, I could see the raggedy flock of red-feathered chickens below scratching and pecking in the dirt as always, and I could see the roof of the old hay barn, and I could see the top of the silo; I could see the farthest potato field, and the farthest edge of the pear orchard, and the rutted dirt lane that bordered the orchard leading back to the Weidenbachs’ farm where the big barking dogs lived.

  For it was time, for Happy Chicken to fly away.

  DISCOVERING ALICE: 1947

  THE SINGULAR BOOK THAT changed my life—that made me yearn to be a writer, as
well as inspired me to “write”—is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. This beautiful, slightly oversized book published by Grosset & Dunlap in 1946 was a gift of my (Jewish) grandmother Blanche Morgenstern for my ninth birthday, in 1947. (My book-loving grandmother, my father’s mother, gave me books for birthdays and Christmas and at other times as well, including Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Grandma gave me my first typewriter—a toy typewriter—and she gave me a Remington typewriter at the age of fourteen as if foreseeing how I would need it.) To this day I treasure, and keep prominently on a bookshelf in my study, this gift book with its eerily beautiful quasi-“realistic” illustrations by John Tenniel.

  The illustrations of Alice amid her bizarre wonderland world depict her as surprised and sometimes intimidated by that world but never overwhelmed by it. The great illustrator Tenniel gave to Alice a commonsensical gravity and a tender sobriety quite unlike most illustrations of children in American, contemporary children’s books; Alice is recognizably a young girl, but she is not childish. There is something responsibly mature in Alice, an inclination to be skeptical, at times, of the adults who surround her; an unwillingness to be bossed around or frightened into submission. Alice is a girl who “speaks her mind”—as few children are encouraged to do, then or now. When I was nine, I was much too young to comprehend the underlying themes of Alice’s astonishing adventures, which have to do with Darwinian evolutionary theory and the principle of “natural selection through survival of the fittest”—a controversial issue of the Victorian era that represented a challenge to conventional Christian theology, one not entirely resolved in the twenty-first century.

  Like any child enraptured with a favorite book, I wanted to be the book’s heroine—I wanted to be “Alice.” It must have occurred to me that Alice was very unlike any girl of my acquaintance; she seemed to belong to a foreign, upper-class environment with customs (tea-time, crumpets, queens, kings, footmen) utterly alien to the farming society of Millersport, New York. I think that I learned from Alice to be just slightly bolder than I might have been, to question authority—(that is, adults)—and to look upon life as a possibility for adventures. If I’d taken Alice for a model, I was prepared to recognize fear, even terror, without succumbing to it. There are scenes of nightmare illogic in the Alice books—numerous dramatizations of the anxiety of being eaten, for instance—that suggest the essential gravity of the books, yet Alice never becomes panicked or loses her common sense and dignity.

  It did occur to me that Alice is a character in a book—and that Alice was not telling her own story. The author of the book was named in gilt letters on the spine and on the title page: “Lewis Carroll.” Being Lewis Carroll was an aspiration, like being Alice-in-Wonderland, and soon I was drawing stories in the mode of the Tenniel illustrations, not of adults or even children but of cats and red-feathered chickens. These were “novels” on lined tablet paper, that captivated me for long hours as a child. (Decades later I would see facsimiles of the Brontë children’s miniature books, and feel a tug of kinship. The Brontë children may have been lonelier than I was in Reverend Brontë’s remote windswept parsonage in Haworth on the moors of England, though probably they were not more fascinated by storybooks than I was.) Out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have sprung not only much of my enthusiasm for writing but also my sense of the world as an indecipherable, essentially absurd but fascinating spectacle about which it is reasonable to exclaim, with Alice—“Curiouser and curiouser!”

  DISTRICT SCHOOL #7, NIAGARA COUNTY, NEW YORK

  I LOVED MY FIRST school!—so I have often said, and possibly this is true.

  As a child I was filled with excitement, anticipation, apprehension, sometimes dread at the prospect of school. For the schoolhouse on the Tonawanda Creek Road in Niagara County, about a mile from my home, was a magical place to me, a place of profound significance, and yet it was not a place in which, as a young child, I could exert anything approaching what I would not yet have known to call “control.”

  I took for granted then what seems wonderful to me now: that, from first through fifth grades, during the years 1943 to 1948, I attended the same one-room schoolhouse that my mother, Carolina Bush, had attended twenty years before. Apart from the introduction of electricity in the 1940s, and a few minor improvements, not including indoor plumbing, the school had scarcely changed in the intervening years. It was a rough-hewn, weatherworn, uninsulated wood frame building on a crude stone foundation, built around the turn of the century at the approximate time my grandparents’ farmhouse was built, twenty-five miles north of Buffalo and about six miles south of Lockport.

  In late August, in anticipation of school beginning after Labor Day in September, I would walk to the schoolhouse carrying my new pencil box and lunch pail, gifts from my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern, to sit on the front, stone step of the school building. Just to sit there dreamy in anticipation of school starting: possibly to enjoy the solitude and quiet, which would not prevail once school started.

  (Does anyone remember pencil boxes now? They were of about the size of a small lunch pail, with several drawers that, slid out, revealed freshly sharpened yellow “lead” pencils, Crayola crayons, erasers, compasses. The thrill of a compass with its sharp point! The smell of Crayolas! Lunch pails, which perhaps no one recalls either, were usually made of some lightweight metal, with handles; unlike pencil boxes which smelled wonderfully of crayons and erasers, lunch pails quickly came to smell awfully of milk in Thermos bottles, overripe bananas, peanut butter, jam, or baloney sandwiches, and much-used wax paper.)

  The school, more deeply imprinted in my memory than my own child-face, was set approximately thirty feet back from the pebble-strewn unpaved Tonawanda Creek Road; it had three tall, narrow windows in each of its side walls, and very small windows in its front wall; a steeply slanting shingle board roof that often leaked in heavy rain; and a shadowy, smelly, shed-like structure at the front called the “entry”; nothing so romantic as a cupola with a bell to be rung, to summon students inside. (Our teacher Mrs. Dietz, standing Amazon-like in the entry doorway, rang a handbell. This was a sign of her adult authority; the jarring noise of the bell, the thrusting, hacking gesture of her muscled right hand as she vigorously shook it. In my memory, Mrs. Dietz’s sturdy face was usually flushed.)

  Behind the school, down a slope of briars and jungle-like vegetation, was the “crick”—the wide, often muddy, fast-moving Tonawanda Creek, where pupils were forbidden to play or explore; on both sides of the school were vacant, overgrown fields; “out back” were crudely built wooden outhouses, the boys’ to the left and the girls’ to the right, with drainage, raw sewage, virulently fetid in warm weather, seeping out into the creek. (Elsewhere, off the creek bank, children, mostly older boys, often swam. They dived from the sides of the bridge when the water was high enough. There was not much consciousness of “polluted” waters in those days and even less fastidiousness on the part of energetic farm boys.)

  My memory of the outhouses is a shudder of dread. But lately, I am apt to feel an alarmed sort of sympathy for poor Mrs. Dietz, who had no choice but to use the girls’ outhouse, too.

  At the front of the school, and to the sides, was a rough playground of sorts, where we played such improvised games as “May I?”—which involved “baby-” and “giant-steps”—and “Pom-Pom-Pullaway” which was more raucous, and rougher, where one might be dragged across an expanse of cinders, even thrown into the cinders. And there was Hide-and-Seek, and Tag, which were my favorite games, at which I excelled, at least with children not too much older than I was.

  Joyce runs like a deer! certain of the older boys, chasing me, as they chased other younger children, to bully and terrorize, would say, admiring.

  Inside, the school smelled of varnish, chalk dust, and woodsmoke and ashes from the potbellied stove. On overcast days, not infrequent in western New York in this region sou
th of Lake Ontario and east of Lake Erie, the windows emitted a vague, hazy light, not much reinforced by ceiling lights. We sat in rows of seats, smallest at the front, largest at the rear, attached at their bases by metal runners, like a toboggan; the wood of which these desks were made seemed beautiful to me, smooth and of the red-burnished hue of horse chestnuts. The floor was bare wooden planks. The blackboard stretched across the front of the room. An American flag hung limply at the far left of the blackboard and above the blackboard, running across the front of the room, so positioned to draw our admiring eyes to it, to be instructed, were cardboard squares of the alphabet showing the beautifully shaped script known as Palmer Method.

  All of my life, though my handwriting has changed superficially, it is the original Palmer Method that prevails. In an era in which handwriting scarcely exists, and most signatures are unintelligible, those of us who came of age under the tutelage of the Palmer Method can be relied upon to write not just beautifully, but legibly.

  Perhaps Palmer Method carried with it an (unwitting, unconscious) moral bias? If beauty and clarity and a wish to communicate are your intention in writing, are you not likely to be good?

  Mrs. Dietz, of course, had mastered the art of such penmanship. She wrote our vocabulary and spelling lists on the blackboard, and we learned to imitate her. We learned to “diagram” sentences with the solemn precision of scientists articulating equations. We learned to read by reading out loud, and we learned to spell by spelling out loud. We memorized, and we recited. Our textbooks were rarely new, but belonged to the school district and were passed on, year after year until they wore out entirely. (How I would love to examine those textbooks, now! I have not the vaguest memory of what we were actually being made to read, and what our arithmetic books were like.) Our school “library” was a shelf or two of books including a Webster’s dictionary, which fascinated me: a book comprised of words! A treasure of secrets this seemed to me, available to anyone who cared to look into it.