AS far as I knew from personal experience those boring old lady visitors of mine and the children who sometimes came and stared at me were the most disturbing sort of persons the world contained. We had no volcanoes in our family. Consequently there were no eruptions of anger or jealousy or selfishness. I knew from hearsay and from reading that these emotions existed and that they were shocking hideous things, but they never came into our midst to disturb our peace and friendliness toward each other. We gave things back and forth to each other as a matter of course. Brothers and sisters who fought to get things away from each other seemed to us incredibly stupid and vulgar. What fun did they have? We were always so busy and interested making things and doing things together that the passions of ownership and competition never had a chance to grow in us. From this mature sort of childhood we grew up, as may be imagined, very immature and ignorant emotionally, and not very well prepared to understand more violent people when we met them later on.
Our parents had preserved our ignorance by their own dignity and reserve which made them hide their own emotional life away from us completely. I should never have guessed that they had any life different and apart from ours if it had not been for two or three mysterious pieces of evidence that came to me by accident—once, a half-overheard fragment of a strange sentence—once, the terrible sound of a man crying—and once a single cry of despair or grief from my mother in another room, followed by a quickly shut door and then silence. These sounds, suddenly breaking in on my peculiarly protected, tranquil, and impersonal life were as startling as the sudden, unexplained appearance of blood. I shook when I heard them, with sudden emotion aroused by something I did not even know about. I did not want to know what it was. I shrank from it. I was afraid, because whatever it was I had a feeling that it was too big for me to bear, or even to know existed. I had my own cosmic troubles that were too big for me, but they were somehow a part of me. There was a sound, a timbre, in human troubles that I could not endure at all. My world, mostly inanimate, and myself, immovable, were not geared for those troubles and emotions.
There was, however, one poignant emotion to which we had all been awakened by the sensitiveness of our parents, and which we all enjoyed consciously. This was an awareness of something which I cannot describe, because its peculiar quality lay in its being indescribable. I can only call it the ineffable charm of life. We were sensitive to the atmosphere of certain times and places, of certain unpredictable external things, which gave us an acute pleasure which we all seemed to feel and understand in each other. There was not too much stress laid upon this experience. It was felt much more than it was talked about. It was a feeling of ecstasy that was almost distress when it came, because it came so bound up and clogged by our own stupid feeling—the stupid ache of never being able to equal it or match it with anything like itself when it came.
There was one favorite experience which above all others gave us that feeling. That was our annual coming-home—from Stowe. Stowe was the village in northern Vermont where we spent every summer in a little farmhouse that had belonged to our grandparents. When the last day came we said passionate good-bys to everything, and leaving that world of mountain coolness and resinous clear air we traveled all day in the train, arriving at last in the city in the dusk of a hot fall night. Then it began to come, that indescribable feeling, a spirit that moved in us, violently and strangely—a sweet and intense awareness of the drama and wonder of life, produced in us by that change of scene.
We loved Vermont and Stowe with a passionate love, and yet on that evening our new, poignant memory of it made us love the city in no ordinary way. The September mountain air that we had breathed that very morning made our sudden entrance into the evening city strangely thrilling to us, and the September city heat came over us with a wonderful languorousness.
When I traveled, in those days, I had to be carried on my stretcher, and I was brought up from the station laid across the two seats of an old-fashioned cab. It was a short drive up from the station, and it was with that drive that the best of it began, for me at least. The dark swaying plumes of the elm trees overhead in the almost tropical twilight, the clop-clop of the horse’s feet on the city pavement, the queer smell of the inside of the cab, were inexpressibly beautiful to me.
We reached our little Victorian house and saw again in the half-dark the fancy iron fence along the front of our garden, the brick walk going to the side door, and the trellised arch over the walk where the great sumptuous trumpet vine grew. I was carried through the gate and along the brick walk, my fingers clinging tight to the slender iron framework of my stretcher as I went swaying forward to the uneven rhythm of my nurse’s and my father’s footsteps, one at each end of me.
During that brief passage I smelled again the burned, dusty, Septembery smell of the city garden, and heard again how the air was all filled with the mysterious shrill ringing of the September crickets. I went under the dark bower of the trumpet vine that I loved. Its rich, extravagant summer growth, the long sprays that hung out of it and moved with every breath of air, and the burnt orange of the slender tube-shaped flowers made something for me as uncommunicable as a remembered song. It was that great rich trumpet vine, especially the trumpet vine, that gave, to me, at least, the feeling of ineffable mystery and charm that was always and eternally a part of that night when we came home from Stowe.
The boys had of course walked up from the station and got there long before us and would already have explored the garden. And Warren, slipping past me as I was being maneuvered into the house, would perhaps drop a bunch of grapes into the nest between my ear and my shoulder. I could smell them and feel them against my neck, our little dark-blue Salem grapes that grew in the arbor at the very back of our garden. Or perhaps Fergus would drop on my chest a moist and beautiful autumn rose from the rose garden on the terrace. So in ecstasy I went sailing through the side door and up the back stairs, my stretcher hoisted and quivering and almost perpendicular until I arrived at last in my old room and was moored again to my bed beside the tulip tree.
My nurse, unstrapping me from my stretcher and rolling me back and forth to get my arms out of my sleeves, would take off my traveling clothes and put my thinnest nightgown on me for the hot city night. I lay and watched her and listened to her in a kind of delicious hypnotism—her hand reaching up and pulling down the window shades, and the look of her back as she opened bureau drawers, and the rustly sounds she made as she began to put things away. Every little action, every little touch and sound, was different that night, and wonderful.
We lay awake as long as we could manage to stay awake, all four of us, in our different rooms—half conscious, inarticulate, impressionable, stupid children—so that we might enjoy to the full our queer annual rapture of hearing over and over the slow rise and fall of the Salem crickets’ trill, and the strange, familiar sound of people’s feet going up and down on the brick sidewalk in the street, and of staring dreamily at our strange familiar bedroom walls and watching the way the city arc light made great moving shadows of horse-chestnut leaves and branches.
After the first night at home that particular magic began to fade and was soon all gone, locked away somewhere in a cupboard of time, precious and strange, to wait for our little lives to live another enormous year around again. After that night Salem was just Salem, and Stowe became the word that always could evoke for us something marvelous and far away.
For me, that one night was a blessed reprieve, because it drugged me with new sensations strong enough to make me forget for a few hours a secret that weighed on me eternally. For although my daytime life was so delightful and absorbing, when evening came, I left it and descended into hell.