Four
By Tuesday, my grandparents had adjusted themselves enough to the idea of my going to North Carolina to accompany Mother and me to Union Station. She had decided that no one would behave as though I were being sent off to my doom. But when we were on the platform, watching the line of people inch toward the steps of the southbound train, she said, “My God, if these individuals are any indication of the general population down there, maybe the South really is one big asylum.” When I reminded her that Washington was southern, she smiled and said, “We’ve gone over that. It isn’t.”
Grandmother Leslie, recognizing that Washington’s geographical status could be debated until people said they agreed with my mother, pushed the fashion magazines she had just bought down into my satchel and said, “Mary, I know none of us are snappy dressers, but this is the first time in my life that I’ve looked around Union Station and realized what an attractive group we are.”
“You’re exactly right,” Mother said. “We never look this good when the train points in the other direction.”
She watched an intoxicated woman board, and then a man with a grotesquely deformed head. “Mary, I think the time has come for you to move beyond what Daniel did,” she said. “Let me run in there and exchange your ticket. You can go ahead and get your things moved up to where the first-class passengers are waiting.”
I told her I was fine, and promised to buy a better ticket home in January, even though I had been promising to upgrade my accommodations for years. It seemed easier to ride fifteen hours in the middle of a rolling party than be trapped inside the memory of what I had come to think of as my brother’s mortifying transportation demands. From the time he was old enough to be taken anywhere, he always insisted on superior amenities. He seemed to have been born with a fine-honed awareness of class distinctions. Even when we all went to Europe on the Carpathia,when I was nine and Daniel was eight, my father had to drag him out of his berth as he kicked and screamed that things weren’t good enough. Father then made him sit on deck until he understood that going overseas was blessing enough, and money was not going to be wasted so he could travel like a Vanderbilt. It was not a notion Daniel ever accepted, and we never went anywhere, from Maine to California, that he did not make both our parents’ and then my mother’s journey a demented and hellish experience. After his death in 1913, my family sailed to England on the Lusitania to spend the summer with some of Grandmother Leslie’s relatives. Mother took one look at the vast, splendid scene and said, “I am so sorry to say this, but it would kill your brother all over again to know we’re surrounded by this. I’m missing him for all the wrong reasons.”
When we reached Devonshire, we found Grandmother’s relatives were devout Luddites who, on a logic-defying level, invited hardships that my family would not have permitted in their lives for more than this summer. They lived without the simplest modern convenience, packed in a lean-to, cooking in a stone hearth and toting water from a creek. We settled into a nearby inn that featured narrow plank sleeping hammocks, raised off the floor on account of vermin, and a pond for washing clothes and bathing. Grandfather Toby sensed the presence of people in the area who might be friendly to the idea of nudism, and when he did find them, he would come back of an evening and swear he had been with Druids, although when he brought them to dinner once, they seemed more like aged, long-term alcoholics and dope fiends. Mother commented afterward that she had not counted ten teeth in anyone’s head that entire summer in Northumberland, and then she smiled softly and said, “Daniel would have jumped into the ocean and swum home from here.” What amazed me is that my grandparents were unfazed, both by the splendor on the Lusitania and the deprivation of the Luddite relatives. When the nightly domestic disturbances at the inn had my mother and me in the hallways with the local constabulary, pointing out the revolving rounds of villains and victims, my grandparents saw it as free entertainment.
Daniel’s ghost had never appeared in Washington, but my mother was incessantly surrounded by him on this trip. She suffered a plague of insomnia that was brought on by the memory of his scolding. One bleary-eyed morning she told me, “A mother never puts distance between herself and her child. Everything wounds. His grandparents weren’t frightened of him because of the time and space between them. That’s why they can sleep without having Daniel hound them.”
She was right about Daniel’s incapacity to injure his grandparents. They could stand before him, absorb a barrage of complaints and then walk away, saying, “We do not hear you.” When Mother once asked whether it might be convenient for Daniel, who was eleven at the time, to be taken along when Grandfather Leonard attended a conference on hydroelectricity in Chicago, Grandfather told her, “Absolutely not. I would rather walk there and back.”
My grandfather was recalling that Daniel, at the age of ten, caused an elderly family friend of modest means untold embarrassment when he visited her farm and demanded to leave early because he thought her circumstances too mean, her food too plain, and then at the train station he cried until he vomited because she could not afford to furnish him with a first-class ticket home. I knew that if I upgraded my ticket to Elm City, I would ride shoved in with the memory of my mother’s fainting when she heard about the woman’s turning her coin purse inside out in public, frantically searching for enough money to placate this enfant terrible, and feeling coerced into borrowing the difference in price from the station’s attendant, which she evidently did do. Daniel arrived with an invoice from the attendant pinned to one of the shirts in his bag.
When the old woman came to Daniel’s funeral, driven from her home in the automobile Mother sent for the two-hour trip, she hobbled in wearing an odd-fitting striped bustle skirt that she must have borrowed from someone who knew as little as she about what town ladies wear. It resembled a Vaudeville skating costume, but no one looked askance. Everybody knew the story of Daniel’s extortion. Had he been able to speak from the coffin in our front parlor, there is no telling what appraisal he would’ve made of her finery. I remember thinking, without much contrition or even tact, Thank God we are all at last out of his range.
Sad to report, the only time Daniel rode by himself in something less than first class was when his body was brought back from Baltimore. But now, as I waited to board the train south, I could not think about him. After my mother and my grandparents had pulled me aside and secreted pocket money into my hands and made me promise to report any difficulties with Uncle Troop, to seek some outside company, to not spend all my free time with a book, and to let my uncle know right away that his father had torched his wardrobe and was now walking about downtown Washington naked, I left them, waving, watching.
We were all aboard—old, young, halt, hacking, and more than likely insane. Once the train was out of the tunnel, everything became active and loud in the sudden burst of light. I read the first chapter of Anna Karenina three times before I realized that I had no idea what the words said, and this reminded me of a professor who had told me that for one year she had lost her ability to read; “I went without my mind,” she said. Everything in the compartment was distracting. The least of it was the intoxicated woman, who threatened to claw other passengers’ eyes out if they did not stop staring at her. A young father terrified his daughter to the point of hysteria with a handful of Mexican jumping beans, and then she became locked in a long, chugging moan, what a deaf-mute might emit when trying, in vain, to indicate danger or need. A very thin boy came through the car, selling letters from Jesus Christ; he screamed and ran to his seat when the door at one end opened and in came the man with the unusual head whom my family and I had seen in line.
This man wasn’t intentionally trying to terrorize us, but because of a series of congenital misfortunes, he simply could not help it. He was of indefinite age, as though he may have had an alert, youthful look about him until he walked out of his house one ordinary morning, wholly unawares, straight into seven years of sandstorms, locusts, floods, and droughts. He could very well have pressed a grisly and permanent impress upon children’s nightmares. He had a warped, emaciated face, the jaw so deeply sunken that it might have been swallowed and then lodged in his throat. His startlingly wide and disproportionate cranium reminded me of textbook pictures of inmates whose heads were measured with the Bertillon system and who were diagnosed as organically demented or libidinously degenerate, and summed up in captions such as: “Bank Robber—Mental Defect—Murderer—Needs Hanging.” The man was with me for the length of the journey, walking slowly from one end of the train to the other. I heard him speak only twice.
Occasionally I was assaulted with strong, purgatorial waves of something that had the same unmistakable odor of the rotting, composted vegetable matter my grandparents used for fertilizing their kitchen garden. When I reached underneath my seat to look for a book in my satchel, I noticed the man beside me removing his elderly mother’s shoes. He was thinking out loud, contriving the source of money to purchase the rolling chair he had promised her. She became highly disconcerted and seemed to be struggling to kick him in the face. He peeled off the several pairs of thin, pilled wool stockings she had secured at her knees with mismatched ribbon, rolled them into a wad, and pushed them and her cheaply cobbled Congress shoes beneath his seat. Her feet seemed to have lost their quick. They were hardened, ill-formed, knotted, and variously colored, as though she had soaked them in Mercurochrome and then rinsed them with bluing.
Her son tried to calm her. He was telling her that Sears, Roebuck had let her down on her shoes, when the deformed man returned. He stopped in the aisle and looked down at her feet, then spoke.
“Excuse me, but I have to ask: Are those feet real or something they stuck on the end of your legs when you lost yours? Because if they are real, and it was me, I’d hack them off at the ankles.”
He turned around and asked whether I did not agree.
I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have an opinion.”
The son started to speak, but his mother said she was capable of answering this fool. And then she snarled, “Are you a doctor? If you are, bring on the hatchet. If not, toddle on.”
Another woman upbraided her, saying, “Leave him be. He’s probably a veteran and had something blow up in his face.”
“Then if he is a veteran,” the shoeless woman answered, “he ought to behave.”
A general discussion about veterans and the characteristic injuries of different wars developed, and it was agreed that the current barbarism of gas and trenches was a fair indication that the next war would be fought in hell. There were no soldiers who could be consulted in the compartment, as they were all riding together in the back of the train, but the only silent miles that were to be had along that journey came after a woman said, “They buried my son at Belleau Wood. You know nothing about it. Hush and be still.”