Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

I wandered around the house, turning on all the lights and putting up all the window-shades in each of the thirty-nine rooms. “Pardon me if my preparations are rather hasty,” I addressed the approaching three thousand. In the drawing room, father had apparently tried to get the beautiful crystal chandelier off the ceiling. It lay all sprawled out on the floor like a monstrous frozen polyp and the whole surface of the floor glittered with iridescent particles. At the foot of the kitchen stairs I came upon grandpa’s watch and Aunt Lizzie’s miniature, both smashed. In the library a lot of books had been taken off their shelves and piled about on the floor. “A good chance to try out those ‘Books I’d take to a desert island’ lists” I thought. It was about four o’clock. I took a package of cigarettes and some matches out of a box in the library and went out, leaving the front door open.

Down in the meadows it gradually got to be daylight. I kept my back to the west and tried to concentrate on watching the sun come up. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but at least I was glad I’d stayed behind. All those things.… If they did get to Canada what on earth would they do with them? I felt helpless, but not much afraid. The house looked strange up there, all the lights in the top story shining out in the morning twilight. It looked not as if it were separate rooms, separately lighted, but just a sort of perforated shell, enclosing a star or a sun. It was off the highway — maybe the three thousand wouldn’t get to it. But then father was well known, a Big Man, and they would probably want to ransack it — and kill me if they caught me? The sun came up and it got a little warmer. Finally I fell sound asleep.

When I woke up it must have been ten o’clock. Faint cheerings and shoutings were coming from the house. I peered up cautiously and to my surprise there were actually three men standing on the roof of our house, shouting a song for all they were worth. One of their army songs, I suppose; anyway it sounded like the crazy ending of a comic opera. All I could see was the roof tops, but I could hear an uproar of shouts and yells and singing with an occasional crash or thud. No shots, however.

I made my way around and up the hill to the stables without being seen and slipped in. I hunted around and sure enough there were some old pairs of overalls left by the stable-boys; a lot of old clothes in fact. I threw away my coat and pants and put on a pair — I looked messy enough, anyway, after sleeping in the grass down there.

“Well, they’ve found father’s cellar, all right,” I thought, listening.

A wild, magnificent lawn-party was going on. There seemed to be about fifty people: men, women, and children, all rushing around calling to each other, and engaged in preparing a kind of grand breakfast. They’d put all our tables together in a big horse-shoe under the trees, and covered them with our table-linen (stamped here and there with black footprints). There was a great fire of coals, and four men were cooking over it, coffee and bacon and eggs. Apparently they mistrusted our electric range. Women were running in and out of the house with bread, fruit, glasses, boxes of cigars, everything they could find that might be of use to a banquet. Corks were popping out of bottles, peaceful little explosions right and left, and a few men were already lying around drunk. I went up to the men who were doing the cooking.

“Some place, ain’t it, buddy?” one of them said to me. “Been in the house yet?”

I said I hadn’t, but I thought I’d take a look, and strolled in the front door. In the hall two women were fighting over the remains of a roasted chicken, both pulling. The marble floor was greasy and muddy; the red roses were ground to a pulp by now. People were coming and going in excited groups, pointing and grabbing and exclaiming, some of them dressed in fantastic costumes put together from the wardrobes of my departed family. It was an hilarious affair. I felt like the host of a house party whose guests had gone mad, which was, nevertheless, a great success.

From father’s large bathroom came loud laughter, splashings and slappings. I looked in and discovered two naked men jumping in and out of the shower and bath, throwing powder and bathsalts at each other, spitting shining spouts of water out the window into the sunlight and onto their amused friends below.

In the drawing room there was an old lady sitting on the floor in a ring of dirty petticoats. She was carefully unhooking the cut glass pendants from the chandelier. One by one she held them up to the sunlight and admired the rainbows they made on the wall, then hung them on some part of her clothes or person. She was bedecked and a’dazzle from top to toe.

In mother’s French bed, canopied with lime colored satin, someone had put two filthy babies to sleep.…

I went out again to join the breakfast party, toasting each other madly and throwing bottles over trees and chimneys. “What’ll you have, kid?” they yelled at me. I saw a bottle of champagne. “Champagne,” I said, pointing.

“Aw, champagne? That stuff’s no good. Just like pop.… Have some real stuff, buddy. Have a man’s drink. Have some whiskey.”

After a while they began to make preparations for some sort of lot drawing. I couldn’t make out quite what it was all about. Everyone wrote his or her name on a slip of paper and dropped it in our large silver coffee urn. Then one of them, a leader, got up, closed his eyes elaborately and drew some of the slips.

“William Brinker!”

A fat, tow-headed man, about forty, got up and essayed a bow, grinning. Everyone cheered, clapped him on the back, offered him a drink. He made his wife and four tow-headed children stand up, too, all smiling and bowing in a row.

“Minna Schlauss!”

Minna was young but enormous. So stormy was her black, wiry hair and general determinedly uncouth appearance that I thought at once of Beethoven. She had two ancient men in charge, her father and his brother they must have been, and her mother was the old lady whom I’d found decorating herself with crystals from the chandelier.

“Jacob Kaffir!”

And then an amazing little man stood up. He was exactly the color of a well used penny and he wore a small moustache and, of all things, a fez. He received his applause shyly, but with delight, and made a timid, sweeping bow.

Somebody remarked, “But he ain’t got any children.” …

Somebody else said, “What’ll he do with all them rooms?”

It dawned on me what this mysterious drawing of lots meant. They were portioning out our house, and three families, probably more, were to live in it. (For half a second I imagined father and mother and my four brothers and sisters returning, with a sigh, from Canada and being met by William, Minna, and Jacob.…)

“Get somebody else, Jakie,” they were saying, “A couple more single guys like you. That’ll even it up all right.”

I caught Jacob’s eye and smiled as hard as I could, raising my forefinger like a man saying “One, next the wall,” in a restaurant.

“Him!” Jacob shouted. “He live with me. O. K. to you?”

“You bet,” I said. “Well it may be sort of fun for a while,” I thought.

Apparently Jacob had the same idea. “We’ll have fun, huh?” he said, waving an empty bottle at me, and he gave me a wink I could almost hear. “Seems like home already, don’t it.”

1933

One afternoon last fall I was studying very hard, bending over my book with my back to the light of the high double windows. Concentration was so difficult that I had dug myself a sort of little black cave into the subject I was reading, and there I burrowed and scratched, like the Count of Monte Cristo, expecting Heaven knows what sudden revelation. My own thoughts, conflicting with those of the book, were making such a wordy racket that I heard and saw nothing — until the page before my eyes blushed pink. I was startled, then realized that there must be a sunset at my back, and waited a minute trying to guess the color of it from the color of the little reflection. As I waited I heard a multitude of small sounds, and knew simultaneously that I had been hearing them all along, — sounds high in the air, of a faintly rhythmic irregularity, yet resembling the retreat of innumerable small waves, lake-waves, rustling on sand.