Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

The little light blinked out. We were off again (not that we had ever stopped, of course) through the night: unk-etty, unk-etty, unk-etty, doubtless still going through some black hairy forest I had watched out the window before the porter had made the beds. I felt as if I were being kidnapped, even if I wasn’t. My sofa smelled of coal dust and tobacco, and its stiff green velour pricked right through the sheet. The train went into a long curve and tried to bend its stiff joints; my sofa tried to throw me off. The walls creaked. Ee-eee-eee went our whistle, miles ahead, and I held on for dear life. It was awful, but almost a relief, to hear from time to time, above the other noises, my grandfather growling savagely to himself in the pitch dark.

In the morning I was sick, and Grandma rushed me into the strange, solid tin (as I thought) bathroom just in time. I threw up, yellow, into something I referred to — probably thinking of the farm accoutrements I was more familiar with than bathrooms — as a “hopper.” Grandpa, who was brushing his white hair with two brushes, like a trick, laughed loudly, displaying his many gold teeth. Grandma produced soda crackers from somewhere for me to chew. I got better. We went on with our complicated, embarrassing dressing and the porter arrived to do his tricks with our beds.

Yesterday’s white socks were very dirty. “And she only has one pair, John,” said Grandma. More embarrassment. Grandpa stopped buffeting his head. I soon learned that he had a way of suggesting an immediate and practical solution to almost any problem, after just a moment’s thought, like (one gathers) the Duke of Wellington. “Turn them inside out,” he commanded. This was done, but then white threads hung at my heels. However, they would be concealed, more or less, my grandparents agreed, by my black patent-leather slippers. Putting his watch in his vest pocket, Grandpa finally left us to get his breakfast. Grandma and I sat opposite each other on the two green seats, nibbling soda crackers for ours, and studying each other in the strong dust-filled sunlight.

Outside there were more woods, but no longer firs, and among the greens there were some yellows because it was September. We clanked over several bridges above little blue brooks. There were some birches. Three crows flew wildly off, sideways, cawing silently. I was beginning to enjoy this trip, a little.

Grandma was dressed in gray silk, with her hat on and her veil pushed up. She was very neat and tight and fitted. The neck of the dress was filled in with fine white net, and a small structure of the net stretched on little bones, around her neck, like a miniature fish weir. On the left of her bosom was a small round gold case that held a fine gold chain to her pince-nez coiled up tight, on a spring. One could pull it out and it would snap back — not that anyone was allowed to do this, but one was aware of it. She had blue eyes and a small, rather snub, nose, and the curling white hair was parted in the middle. She was very pretty, in a doll-like way, and she had already told me that she wore a size 3 shoe. The strongest exclamation I had heard her use was “Pshaw,” and occasionally, “Drat.”

Yes, I was beginning to enjoy myself a little, if only Grandma hadn’t had such a confusing way of talking. It was almost as if we were playing house. She would speak of “grandma” and “little girls” and “fathers” and “being good”—things I had never before considered in the abstract, or rarely in the third person. In particular, there seemed to be much, much more to being a “little girl” than I had realized: the prospect was beginning to depress me. And now she said, “Where’s your doll? Where’s Drusilla? ”

Oh dear. I had dolls, back home in Nova Scotia; I was even quite fond of one or two of them. But Grandma had found them all in no condition to go traveling in Pullmans. She had bought me the best our country store could provide, and made her a checked dress herself. And when I had been reluctant to name her, she had even given her that unappealing name. The doll (I couldn’t say that name) was totally uninteresting, with embossed yellow-brown hair that smelled like stale biscuits, bright blue eyes, and pink cheeks, and I could scarcely conceal my real feelings about her. But that seemed to be one of Grandma’s ideas: a “little girl” should carry a doll when she went traveling. I meekly dug out the horror from under a pillow and held her on my knee until we got to Boston.

It was 1917. When the chauffeur, Ronald, met us at North Station in his dark uniform, black leather puttees, and cap with a black visor, I thought at first he was a new kind of soldier. But he was too old to be a soldier; he was married and had four grown children. (Later we were to become good friends and I would ride in front with him in the Cadillac limousine, and he would tell me about his son in the army and, inevitably, how much his back ached.) Now Grandma and I were immediately driven to Stern’s to buy me some decent clothes. Everything we bought was brown: a brown tweed coat, a brown beaver hat with streamers, two pairs of brown laced boots, long brown stockings. I hated them all but tactfully said nothing. Then we met Grandpa at the Touraine for lunch and I ate creamed chicken and was given an ice cream like nothing I had ever seen on earth— meringue glacée, it must have been.

After lunch we drove to Worcester. I think I must have fallen asleep, but I do remember arriving at a driveway lined with huge maple trees. To my slight resentment (after all, hadn’t I been singing “O maple leaf, our emblem dear” for years?), they were pointed out and named to me. The front of the house looked fairly familiar, very much the same kind of white clapboards and green shutters that I was accustomed to, only this house was on a much larger scale, twice as large, with two windows for each of the Nova Scotia ones and a higher roof. As we drove up and around it, wings stuck out here and there; at one side was a quite incongruous curved porch, and at the other a glass-enclosed box on another porch, the “conservatory.” Grandma and I went into the house through this.

I had been brought back unconsulted and against my wishes to the house my father had been born in, to be saved from a life of poverty and provincialism, bare feet, suet puddings, unsanitary school slates, perhaps even from the inverted r ’s of my mother’s family. With this surprising extra set of grandparents, until a few weeks ago no more than names, a new life was about to begin. It was a day that seemed to include months in it, or even years, a whole unknown past I was made to feel I should have known about, and a strange, unpredictable future.

* * *

The house was gloomy, there was no denying it, and everyone seemed nervous and unsettled. There was something ominous, threatening, lowering in the air. My father had been the oldest of eight children. All of them were dead, except for three — Aunt Marian, who was married and lived in Providence; Aunt Jenny, unmarried and the next-to-oldest after my father; and Uncle Neddy, the youngest. The latter two and my grandparents made up the family, though Aunt Jenny and Uncle Neddy were away a good deal of the nine months I lived there.

The old white house had long ago been a farmhouse out in the country. The city had crept out and past it; now there were houses all around and a trolley line went past the front lawn with its white picket fence. There was no doubt but what the neighborhood, compared to the old days, was deteriorating. The Catholics had been trying to buy the house for years; they wanted to build a church there. All the time I was there the subject was under debate — to sell or not to sell. However, there were still fifteen acres of land, an old apple orchard behind the house, and tall chestnut trees up on the hill. The life my grandparents still led was partly country, partly city. There were hens and two cows, and a large barn also up on the hill. They had their own cottage cheese and sometimes butter. There was a large vegetable garden, the greater part of which was planted in celery and asparagus. There were a Bartlett pear tree, a crab-apple tree, a dark green “summer house” with old robins’ nests in it, and two tremendous horse-chestnut trees and under them two wonderful swings with broad seats and thick ropes. The trees had been cared for and cemented and propped up, very old and spreading. We could easily climb into many of them and hang on by bars rather than branches. They were preserved at all costs, like Grandpa’s teeth.