IN BEGINNING autumn there is a wind which comes on high clear days and grips the trees, drawing them out and shaking them beyond several of their breaths, while their leaves rattle like a wind in themselves and seem like jewels or green water. These winds are chainwinds, never ceasing, and on those days they scourge all the land and water with peace and clarity and sun and coolness. In Atlanta they had come only in the late fall and sometimes in the summer when the heat broke and the clearness seemed to be shimmering in itself. But here south of San Francisco, in mountains where there are redwoods and low high altitudes and abandoned cabins abandoned only recently but never so, and always with damp dark floorboards and a mattress wet on its springs when you enter into the darkness from the dark black stream and its numb moving waters, and the brown pine needles and black pieces of earth that stick on the feet when you step carefully on the porch—here that jeweled chain of air moved way up in the tops of trees, far above the gloom of rays and roots and fallen trees. And when she looked up at the blue through the red wood she saw the clouds moving like ghosts and their horses, making the upper branches shudder and hiss. She often wandered here, and to the south in the valley, and evening found her driving back into San Francisco, ruddy and sad but not sad enough to be unhappy.
She was Mary from Atlanta, who thought in wide circles about porches and the past and small towns in summer—facts and memories of detail which transfixed her at the wheel of her open car and made her arms shake and her back cold, although these things were not remarkable, and neither was her life. Neither was her life, a life of love although she did not know for what, unless it was for small pictures which occurred to her or which she saw in quiet moments alone staring at the whiteness of the castled city or across the Bay to reddened mountains and leonine hills with yellowed brush tumbling from their sides.
The phone was green, the windows wide, the floor waxed and yellowed wood, her dress a print by Marimekko, liquor on a glass cart, cuttingboards in the kitchen, twelve bottles of wine, much Lucite such as blocks with photographs embedded and an end table, a bed high enough off the floor to kill, an old dresser, high rent, magazines and a bookshelf full of women novels which cannot ever be read again because they are gossip, dependent on plot and sequence rather than the static truth, many memories of men, in the beginning at least, who had stayed but none to let her in. All seemed too eager or too serious, too capable, or too hard. Perhaps it was because she herself put them off by speaking hard and being skeptical, as if she assumed they had no memories and could think and act only like modern furniture. And then the liquor would start to flow. Liquor is magic for furniture, but afterwards she could think only of getting them out and jumping into the bath. One morning an especially timid one tiptoed into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of orange juice over ice. While reading her copy of that months Vogue he was startled so by ice shifting in the glass that he jumped back, knocking himself unconscious against a wall. Once there was one so large and dumb that he drew himself a tub of water, stepped in, and displaced it. One was an accountant, one a lobster executive, and one an actor who stood naked.
But furniture, no matter how droll, was furniture, if she could be carried at a mite’s breath to a childhood carnival, the American Legion, hardened women at shooting galleries, soldiers and their wives with angular eyes and almond glasses, late night heat and flashing lights at the gray cotton sky, and the screen door during a carried half sleep shutting until another day and mirages on the sand-colored roads.
Now she was large—not fat, but big-boned with an upturned nose and pores that could be seen too well in the magnifying mirror. She looked like her mother, whom she had never thought pretty, but it seemed unnecessary for her mother to be that way when the little girl Mary had a face which was small and smooth as a chestnut and could be clasped in her father’s hand in riotous fun.
That little fine face was now large, and she imagined that her head alone weighed as much as the little girl she once was. But she was quick enough not to be bound to that, and she was not. It was something, just something. No special state or time or thought but only the occasional gripped her sense of herself.
San Francisco has hills. She lived clean on one of them, and enjoyed good climate. She was lovely but all around her would suffice. She was lovely but she found herself growing out of it, and getting older to where she would have to find for herself a sustaining power. Her dreams were dead, memories not enough, she felt nought for God, and she had no passion. But a deep and beautiful sadness reigned, so that San Francisco moved slowly like a swan, and she drew from everything she saw enough to make her life a deep cool color, a medium beauty, that full wind which made the trees shudder, and draw breath, and seem like green water.