Kingsport News, January 12, 1946

 

Book Review

 

by United Press

The Evening Post, January 18, 1946

 

“Books for Thought,” by Sam Hall Mitchell

 

Gee, but I Want to Go Home

The Asheville Trumpet, February 3, 1946

 

Asheville Writer Is Story of the Year

 

by Carl Nicholas

The New York Weekly Review, February 2, 1946

 

Vassals of Majesty, BY HARRISON W. SHEPHERD
Stratford and Sons, New York

 

Never Far from Home

 

by Michael Reed

The Echo, February 28, 1946

The Asheville Trumpet, April 28, 1946

 

Woman’s Club Sponsors Book Review Night

 

by Edwina Boudreaux

May 27

Mother’s soul can rest: here is a woman in my life. Mrs. Brown in a pearl-gray snood, age forty-six, sensible as pancake flour. Like characters in a story, our lives were star-crossed but came together. She will rescue the hero, answer his telephone, file the mountains of mail, maybe shake a broom at the laundry thieves. And he can keep his monk’s life, the holes in his underwear. Mrs. Brown doesn’t care.

At the first interview she laid her failings at my feet, or would have except she hasn’t any. Does not smoke cigarettes, take strong drink, go to church or gamble. Has worked for the city, the army, and most daunting of all, the Asheville Woman’s Club. Thirty years a widow. She doubts being married would have been much different.

It was strange to speak forthrightly, after living at Mrs. Bittle’s those years: exiting the bathroom with downcast eyes, sitting at supper while old Mr. Judd piped up with his yellowed news extras. Now it seems we shared a kindred silence, restraining our smiles on hearing that Limburger has flown across the Atlantic. But maybe I contrive this, as lovers reconfigure the days before, with every glance leading ultimately to union.

In any event here she is, installed in my dining room. I hated to show her the mail, stored in bushel baskets in the empty spare bedroom. She did not flinch. Grasped each bushel by the handles, marched it downstairs, and dumped onto the maple table one mountain for each month. Bravely she dives in, even before we’ve found her a filing cabinet or acceptable typewriter. (Royal or L. C. Smith.) We shall put the bathroom door back on its hinges, as soon as I’ve cleared its surface of all piles and chapters, and found a proper desk myself. For now, when one of us needs the WC, the other steps out the back door, pretending to call the cats. This and more, she suffers with perfect composure.

Mrs. Brown is a force: small, unadorned, unapologetic. Her eyebrows arch like a pair of bridges across her wide forehead. Her blouses button to the top, she wears white cotton gloves even on warm days, and she can still any troubled waters with her austere calm and peculiar antique grammar. Each morning on arrival she taps on the front door, puts in her head and calls out, “Mr. Shepherd, where be ye?”

Her words seem scripted by Chaucer. She says “strip-ed” and “learn-ed,” making an extra syllable of the past tense. A sack is a “poke.” Surveying the piles of letters she declared, “Mr. Shepherd, you get mail by the passel.” She says “nought” and “nary a one,” and the garden greens she brought me were “sallets,” the word Shakespeare used. She says “queasy” to mean worried, as did King Lear. When I noted this, she replied, “Well I expect he had a lot to be queasy about. He was a king, wasn’t he?”

When pressed about her origins she said her people were “Mountain Whites.” She seems reluctant to say more, only that it means Highlanders, people who came through the gap from England ages ago, and reckoned they ought to stay. Remaining on the spot, with idiom intact. She means “reckon” in the British sense, akin to reconnoiter, until knowing a thing for certain, which is to “ken it.”

Most shocking was this pronouncement: “My family be there still, living in a cabin home in the hells.” This is a kind of bush, evidently, a rhododendron. “They grow thick as can be. If you came to be lost in there, you couldn’t push out with a stick. So it’s called hells. Pardon if you’re offended. It isn’t a foul word in that sense.”

No offense taken. Her past can stay where it is, lost in the hells, not my business, as my childhood hells are none of hers. We concern ourselves with the future, which we agreed should begin at once, in my dining room, as soon as she could give proper notice. And today here she is, dispatching the mess with carbon paper and a buttoned-up smile.

May 28

Mrs. Brown’s advice about the schoolgirls: they won’t bite. I took her word on that, and left the house for the first time in a while to wander up to the cemetery. A belated outing for Mother’s birthday; it always seems important to go somewhere for her sake. But she is nowhere any longer, least of all the Riverside Cemetery. Even the writer O. Henry might have “up and gone” from here, as Mrs. Brown would say. Tom Wolfe is still in situ, though the town is evidently still put out with him. Many graves bore jars of wilting peonies today, but nary a posy for poor Tom, a man so recently gone, dramatically and in his prime, reeling from the fracas of fame. Maybe Mrs. Brown could have saved him.

July 8, 1946

The manuscript sailed off today. Mrs. Brown took it to the post office. Before going out the door she turned back and held out the bulky brown-paper package of it, resting flat on her white-gloved hands. “Look here, Mr. Shepherd, a little raft with all your hopes upon it, sailing for New York. Ye know not how light it feels in my hands.”

This afternoon she discovered my birth date had just passed. She is filing old documents, the birth certificate applications and so forth, now that the flurry of typing is done. She seemed hurt. “A man turns thirty years, that’s important,” she scolded, “and to think I sat here and knew nought of it, all the day long.”

I didn’t say what Frida would have. That you can’t really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece: the birthday like an invisible piñata hanging great and silent over his head, as he stands in his slippers boiling the water for coffee. The scarred, shrunken leg hidden under a green silk dress. A wife and son back in France. Something you never knew. That is the heart of the story.

August 27

Murderous dreams come even in daytime, memories that occlude vision. How can a friend’s blood be willed from the mind? Other men do it. They come home from a war, kiss the ground, and go forward, as easily as taking the Haywood bus to the library. Without meeting this rising panic and humiliation. Running out of the library bookless and hatless, rather than end up crumpled behind the newspaper stacks again, watching blood spread across the maple floor boards.

Last week, on the day itself, even the bedroom was too uncertain a place, its shifting walls and window’s glare, letting in the clouded sky. Mrs. Brown thought it must be the grippe. She brought tea and toast upstairs on a tray.

Today, one hundred ten paces to the corner market, step by counted step. An automobile passed slowly on the street: a Buick. Two women at the newsstand professed themselves as admirers. One had just come from the market and carried a bouquet of gladiolus wrapped in a paper cone. She meant no harm at all, she was only a young wife going home to some celebration. Not Jacson Mornard stalking Frida in Paris, arms loaded with flowers, any fool could know the difference. But anyone who rises, any greatness, attracts those who would cut it down at the root. Any fool knows that also.

Every day it seems possible to walk to the door. This time, step out. But the sidewalk leads to a bridge across a precipice. There is Mother up ahead slipping off her sling-back shoes, stepping out onto the planks above the rushing ravine. Don’t come. You wait here. The red-bellied spider pulls itself into a hole in the plank. Every hole could have something like that inside.

Mrs. Brown might know more than she says. Today she looked up from the table, peering over her glasses to size up her wretched, captive chief, who stands at the door looking out. “They won’t bite,” she said. But it isn’t the girls in saddle oxfords. It is the things that have already begun, proceeding now toward their finish, the supplicant who should have been turned away, and was not. The man at the door with hat in hand and the pickax under his raincoat.

September 2

No word from Frida, still angry. Nor from Diego, not even a curse over his stolen codex, though that’s also to be expected. He couldn’t remember to write letters even as Chairman General of Lev’s Correspondence Committee. The world is a train moving forward, with people like Diego and Frida at the fore and all the rest of us standing back, shuddering at the roar.

Of all those gone away, Frida is the most missed. Not that she ever offered real affection. Only her version of it: a game of cat-and-mouse.

September 3

Well, here is a reason for missing Frida: writing letters. Who else loved my news the way she did? A neighbor named Romulus. Now a sister named Parthenia.

“Don’t trouble yourself over it, that’s my sister Parthenia Goins,” said Mrs. Brown today, hardly even looking up from the page she was typing. “Her husband Ottie is out there too, I see. And some of the nephews.”

I’d just told her a band of gypsies had come to the end of their rope on Montford Avenue and were camped on the front yard. Very chagrined, therefore, to learn it was Mrs. Brown’s family, come down into town from “the hells.” A twice-yearly event, at “Eastertide and the Laboring Day,” for the purchase of dry goods and a checkup on the moral progress of Sister Violet. The trip takes them the better part of a day, even though they live only a few miles up toward Mount Mitchell. But the road is “fearsome hateful.”

They showed up out there at noon, in a Model T that looked older than God and more likely to drop an axle. The man in the driving seat opened the door to stretch his legs, revealing a beard that reached his belt buckle. Clumped in the back, an old-looking woman and shifting herd of oxlike boys. They sat in the car for hours, until the heat drove them out into the shade of the maple in the front yard. They showed no sign of coming to the door. Mrs. Brown said they likely meant to fetch her back to Mrs. Bittle’s, and were waiting for her day’s work to end.

“Shouldn’t we ask them in?”

“They won’t come.”

“Well then, you should go.”

“I’m not done here. It won’t vex them any to wait.”

“For hours?” I peered out through the curtain. “Couldn’t they do some errands and come back, to save their time?”

“Mr. Shepherd, if they had any money or one precious thing, they’d be sure to save it. But time they have aplenty. They like to spend it where they be.”

Realizing they might have come to investigate Sister Violet’s situation, I did insist on asking them in. Elder Sister accepted, eventually, while the males remained outdoors, all of them smoking pipes. Mrs. Brown introduced us but begged a few minutes more to finish the week’s work. The sister, Parthenia! What a strange creature, peering about this living room like Columbus among the red men of Hispaniola. She sat in a parlor chair with feet together, hands folded, a black kerchief covering her hair, a lumpish dress covering everything else down to her boots. Not even Frida could have worked this particular peasant style to much advantage. She declined my offer of tea, fiercely, as if accustomed to being poisoned by strangers. We sat facing one another across the shocking silence.

Finally: “Who mought ye all be?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Who’s yer folks?”

“My parents both passed away. I don’t have any family.”

She took this in slowly, like a snake digesting its catch. Then: “How old be ye?”

“Thirty.”

Many other questions stood in line after these, each patiently waiting its turn, each one finally spitting, rubbing its hands, and stepping up to position.

“Violet says ye be from Mexee-co?”

“I lived there. But I was born outside Washington. My mother was Mexican, her father did business with the government here, so that’s how she and my father came to meet. She was too young, the family disowned her over the marriage.” Stop. Filling up a silence with blather, like a radio man. That cannot be what a Parthenia requires.

“Well.” A pause. “What brung ye up this air way off the branch?”

A good question. Trying to steer the conversation onto her family proved difficult, but ultimately yielded Parthenia’s fascinating diagnosis of Sister Violet’s yen for self-improvement: “Our mother read the books. We believe it made her tubercular.”

A long pause.

“Violet be the same.”

Another pause.

“We was all in our family borned with sense. But Violet be the only one to vex herself on wanting to be learn-ed.” Born-ed, learned, here was the raw version of Violet’s peculiar diction, without the gloss acquired from twenty years of office work. “We was afeared she would turn out like t’other one. The lady doctor that was born-ed here in the town.”

“Elizabeth Blackwell?”

“That one. Violet readen a book on her. Mother was afeared of her going away to be learned for the doctoring.”

“That would have been an interesting career for your sister.”

“Not hardly, sir. T’would of put her in a hazard of hell’s fire.”

“Medical school?”

“To be learn-ed for the science, yessir. Them men casting aspersion on our Lord’s hand in the Creation.”

In the dining room, visible through the archway, Sister Violet’s lip remained buttoned but her eyebrows nearly reached her widow’s peak by the time she finished filing the day’s mail. Parthenia took her away then, evidently satisfied the new employer would not threaten her sister’s virtue or encourage any interest in the sciences. It explains a good deal about Mrs. Brown: her aloneness in the world, as far from home in this town as any boy from Mexico. Probably farther, given the scalding disapproval of anything “learn-ed.” And yet she does carry her origins with her, revealed in the rhythms of speech, the talent for keeping counsel. The unusual respect for silence. Parthenia’s silences outlasted her sentences every time, and carried greater weight. How will their tongue survive in a modern world, where the talkers rush to trample every pause?

September 14

Mr. Lincoln Barnes, my Mr. Lincoln. He means well. A second novel makes me “a novelist,” says he, and therefore duty-bound to meet my editor in New York. He can’t know how entirely it’s out of the question. He should invite me to dance with angels on the head of a pin, I’d sooner try, if I could do it from home. But my failure will mean conceding every battle. Beginning with my title, Where the Eagle Eats the Snake.

“Wrong,” he pronounced yesterday on the telephone. “People hate snakes.”

Well then, wouldn’t they be happy to see an eagle tearing one to pieces, sitting on a cactus plant? The dust-jacket art seems ready made.

He is keen to call it Pilgrims of Chapultepec.

Americans take “pilgrim” to mean the fellow in buckled shoes with hands folded in prayer. And the unpronounceable remainder, as dubious as Brand X soap.

Mrs. Brown suggests that for the next one I ought to turn in the manuscript with a title I despise. That way, she says, they’re apt to change it to something you favor. A trick she learned while working for the U.S. Army.

September 26

The exhibit, Advancing American Art, is advancing at this very moment toward the National Gallery, packed up on the train with Tom Cuddy as its Shipping Shepherd. And still I have no answer for him. Tommy the golden boy, with the good looks of Van Heijenoort and a better idea how to use them—it’s possible he has never been turned down before. On the telephone, he coaxes. Says I have to be there in D.C., he’s desperate for backup, certain there is trouble afoot. Congress has called a special hearing to discuss the exhibit after they’ve had a look at it. And what Tommy said about the Hearst Press is true, Mrs. Brown brought in one of their magazine ads today, a reproduction of one of the “ugly” paintings with the caption “Your Money Bought This!” They suggest a foregone conclusion among soap-buying housewives: your money would be better spent on soap. But with Mrs. Brown their propaganda failed: she is now intently curious about the show.

Paris with Tommy, dear Lord what a vision. (He was dazzling enough in a dim boxcar.) But surely he’ll understand there is too much to do here, revisions and galley proofs still ahead. He’ll be less willing to understand why Washington is out of the question. To have a look at those modernists, have a drink with old Tom, help him ship out the paintings. Patiently Mrs. Brown waits to send an answer: yes or no. Probably she has already drafted both letters and only needs the word. Such is her efficiency.

We discussed it again this afternoon, or rather I talked. Justifying my absurd fear of travel and exposure, despising it all the while. My face must have been the Picture of Dorian Gray. At the end, when he goes to pieces.

She used the quiet voice she seems to draw up from a different time, the childhood in mountain hells, I suppose.

“What do ye fear will happen?”

There was no sound but the clock in the hall: tick, tick.

“Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.”

October 2

The matter is settled, the letter sent. Mrs. Brown provided the solution: herself. She will go along on the trip, make all arrangements, reserve the hotel rooms for both of us in names no one could recognize. No girls in short socks will gather in the halls. We will take the Roadster, she’ll carry the money-purse and purchase the gasoline, no strangers need be addressed on the journey. Only Tom, once we arrive at the gallery.

Indispensable Mrs. Brown. She has known all along the problem is not the grippe. But couldn’t know how her firm hand on my arm could make many things possible, including walking out the door onto that swaying bridge.

“It appeared you needed steadying,” was her diagnosis.

October 12

Poor Tom. And also the forty-odd artists who will suffer from this, but somehow I worry most for Tom. He believed in Advancing American Art, and not just the free ride to Europe. Now he has to hang his head, call Paris and Prague, and explain the show isn’t coming. They will dismantle it, sell off these treasures to the first low bid so the Department of State can recover the taxpayers’ cash. The boss will make Tommy do the worst of it. The O’Keeffe already went for fifty dollars he said, salt in the wound.

Mrs. Brown and I were more than ready to put miles between ourselves and that debacle. But the journey home was long. The mountain parkway is a strange passage from city into wilderness, hundreds of miles of forest and vale without habitation. Occasionally an apple orchard, fenced by a zigzag of split rails, like a piece of green calico cut with pinking shears. Driving along high ridgetops is like being a bird on the wing, with slopes dropping steeply away from the roadsides, and views opening out to rumpled, hazy horizons. The leaves were crimson, auburn, jade, and gold, lying together in patchwork against the mountainsides. “God’s hand bestoweth beauty on the advancing trial of winter,” Mrs. Brown quoted. But it looked as if God had turned over the job to a Mexican muralist.

When first I made this drive, the forests were leafless. I told Mrs. Brown about it. Father unexpectedly dead, and then this endless passage into a barren wilderness. I thought I had come to a nation of the interred.

“Then you came to Mrs. Bittle’s,” she said, “and knew it for certain.”

“Old Judd seemed mummified. True enough. But certainly not you or Miss McKellar.”

Each time we stopped for gasoline she insisted we take on coffee and sandwiches as well. “Feed the car, feed the driver,” was her succinct advice. The gray mass of a storm sat on the mountains to the west, waiting like a predator. In the afternoon it pounced, drenching the view and washing the brilliant leaves into matted sop in the road. The rain on the windscreen was blinding. The wiper had to be cranked every few seconds, and it made for difficult, one-handed driving. Mrs. Brown offered to help turn the wiper lever, but its location overhead above the driver makes that awkward.

“Mr. Ford should have thought to put it over here,” she said, “so the passenger could help.”

“He knew better. In life’s dampest passages, the driver often has to go it alone.”

“I ought to know that. Here knitting socks without one child of my own.”

“Is that what you have there? I thought it was an indigo porcupine.”

She had a laugh at that. She has eleven nephews and nieces, I learned, and meant to outfit the tribe on this journey, working through socks from top to toe, all from the same massive hank of blue wool. The coming holiday shall be known as “The Christmas of the Blue Socks from Aunt Violet.” She worked on a little frame of four interlocked needles that poked out in every direction as she passed the yarn through its rounds.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll hurt yourself with that?”

“Mr. Shepherd, if women feared knitting needles as men do, the world would go bare-naked.”

What had happened in Washington was an outrage. Yet life goes forward mostly as an exchange of pleasantries on a narrow bridge that hangs above the chasm of outrage. “There’s Grandfather Mountain. See, the shape of it. An old man lying down.”

“Is it too cold for you? We could stop and get the lap blanket from the back.”

“No. I’m warm-blooded.”

“We’re lucky it’s cold. This Roadster overheats famously on hard inclines.”

“You don’t say.”

Grand white clapboard hotels turned up sparsely along the route, their front porches mostly populated with empty rocking chairs. At dusk they began to be lit by the yellow glow of lamplight. Once, just as we passed an inn, a black-skinned man in a red jacket was lighting the porch lanterns one by one, leaning with difficulty around elegant men who sat idle, smoking cigars. Castes of the nation.

Mrs. Brown finally broached the void. “Indigo Porcupine, that could just as well be the name of one of those paintings we saw at the show.”

“Yes. Indigo Porcupine Leaping into the Void, that might do.”

“Well. I couldn’t make out what all they were meant to be. Truly I’ve never seen the like, Mr. Shepherd. But I’m deeply obliged for it.”

“I wasn’t going to come until you volunteered as escort. So I’m the one obliged.”

“For all, I meant. The paintings and our nation’s capital. Going right straight in the hall where the Congress meets.”

“Had you not been to Washington before?”

“This is my first time out of Buncombe County.”

“Really?”

“Yes sir. I’ve read the Geographics since I was a girl. My sisters could tell you, I strained for travel like a horse fresh to the bit. But never thought it would happen.”

“Mrs. Brown, you make me ashamed. The whole world knocks at my door, and all I want to do is stay home.”

“It’s a wonder,” she said tactfully, working at a tiny sock.

“Well, you’re a worldlier person than most of those congressmen. They want Norman Rockwell and statues of muscular horses and nothing new under the sun.”

“Even still. There was no cause to speak so rudely. What peeved them?”

“Fear, maybe. The foreign element, that’s what Tom thought. They expected to go in the gallery and see old friends, but instead they met strangers. Gashes of color and surrealism. It made them uneasy.”

“They didn’t say ‘uneasy.’ They said ‘un-American.’ I can’t see that. If an American paints it, then it’s American, isn’t it?”

“Not according to Mr. Rankin and the Congress.”

Or Truman: If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot. Others said vulgar, obscene, insane, namby-pamby pacifism. Or Stalinist, a perfect irony, from these congressmen who seem as determined as Stalin to suppress creativity among artists. The show scared them out of their wits. The Special Session was a thrashing.

“We should have taken Tom out of that hearing. It was humiliating.”

“Your poor friend, he’d worked so. He’ll take it hard, will he not?”

“Oh, believe me. Tom Cuddy feels for those paintings about the way you do for your nieces and nephews. He’d knit socks for Winslow Homer, if he knew how. I’ve seen that in him ever since the civilian services. Moving paintings and sculptures to safekeeping, that was America the Beautiful, for Tom. That was patriotism.”

“Bless his heart.”

Bless it indeed. Now he’s had to hear Congress declare the whole Western world threatened by some paint and canvas. Our finest painters, a menace. One was specifically damned for having urged Roosevelt to come to the aid of the Soviet Union and Britain, after Hitler attacked Russia. Which in fact, Roosevelt did.

The click of knitting needles, the shush of tires through leafy muck. The lozenge of space inside the automobile felt surprisingly safe, like a small home moving through a tunnel of darkness. Mrs. Brown finished off a sock before speaking again.

“Not all the pictures were hard to cipher. Some were plain. The ones with cemeteries and tenement houses got people the most riled, if you ask me. More than the ones that looked like dribble-drabble.”

“The Guglielmi and those.”

“Why do you think?”

“Congress has to keep up appearances. The paintings were going around the world. We can’t let them know we have racial strife and tenement houses.”

“My stars, Mr. Shepherd. Europe is lying in a pile. On the news they said Berlin city just dug two thousand graves for the ones that aim to starve to death before spring.”

A car blazed by, two bright eyes in the dark.

“They had to dig the graves before the ground froze,” she added.

“I understand.”

“And London, no better. I read they’re allowed nought but four ounces of knitting wool for the year and two yards of material, to cover each person in a family. They must be about naked. What’s the harm in those folks seeing some of our troubles?”

“Well, five years of wartime censorship. Old habits die hard. We’ve gotten very good at pretending everything is shipshape here. Don’t you feel that way?”

“What way?”

“That it’s a little dangerous to advertise our weak points. Jerry and Tokyo Rose might be listening. Loose lips sink ships.”

“They were listening. But the war’s ended.”

“True. But if it keeps the paintings pretty and all people’s whining buttoned up, maybe they’ll want a new war every five years.”

“Mr. Shepherd, for shame. That is no subject for jest. We can’t keep on forever saying the nation entire is perfect. Because between you and me, sir, it is not.” The needles clicked in the dark. She must have read the pattern with her fingertips.

“Do you remember the first advice you ever gave me?”

She seemed to think it over. “The pot roast at Mrs. Bittle’s?”

“Advice about writing.”

“I never.”

“Oh, you did. In that first letter. You said Tom Wolfe got himself in hot water exposing the scandals of Asheville, and I was wise to keep my story in Mexico. Here was your advice: people love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.”

She considered this. “That’s different from putting sins and errors off the map entire. How can it be un-American to paint a picture of sadness?”

“I don’t know. But they did not want to see any waves on the domestic waters.”

For several minutes she knitted at her sock, evidently struggling not to say any more. At length she lost the battle. “If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink. Those congressmen are saying we have to call it a meadow of buttercups instead of a cesspool. Even the artists have to.”

“Well, but suppose the artist’s job is just to keep everyone amused? Maybe get their minds off the stink, by calling it a meadow. Where’s the harm?”

“Nobody will climb out of the pile. There’s the harm. They’ll keep where they are, deep to the knees in dung, trying to outdo each other remarking on the buttercups.”

“Well, I write historical romance. I’m sorry to let you down, but any time you’re looking for the meadow and buttercups, I’m your man.”

“Fiddlesticks, Mr. Shepherd. Do ye think I ken ye not?”

“Do you know me? I suppose you do. Well enough.”

“Well enough. You are good to children whose parents are not. You take in the straggliest cats. You are dismayed by the treatment of the Negro. You read more newspapers than Mr. Hearst himself, though it aggravates you to no end. Shiffling through all that claptrap hunting a day’s one glory. The rise of the little man somewhere, or the fall of a tyrant.”

“Is that everything?”

“About. I believe you stand on the side of the union of labor.”

“Well done, Mrs. Brown. You can read me like a book.”

Even in the full darkness I could feel her glare, the dangerous force of her. She had those needles.

“Set your photograph on the dustcover, or not, it makes no difference. You are still there, Mr. Shepherd, plain to see. Your first one was about the hatefulness of war, everyone said so. How it fills up the rich men’s pockets and grieves the poor ones.”

“I see.”

“You needn’t squirm, Mr. Shepherd. Your words are your own wee bairns. You need not leave them orphaned. You should stand up proud and say, ‘Those are mine!’”

Soon we passed through the long tunnel at Little Switzerland, a deeper darkness within the night’s blue darkness, like a cave in the sea. Mrs. Brown’s knitting stayed in her lap, the strange blue bundle with its armature of needles, like a peculiar pet she could no longer bear to touch. When we reached Mrs. Bittle’s she said good-bye, but until then we hardly spoke any more. Both driver and passenger seemed to need all our energies to find the way ahead, staring at the bleakness and the rain.

November 15

A letter from Frida after all this time, opened with trembling hands. Thrill and fear are really the same, inside a body. Her operation a partial success, good news, though she still suffers. The handsome Spaniard she met in New York seems to be good medicine, a sturdy platform from which to forgive. Her grammar was so odd though, barely coherent. The date on the letter was Lev’s birthday and the day of the October Revolution, but no mention of either. No more red carnations on the table for old loves, the viejo and democratic socialism. Diego has gone over completely to the side of the Stalinists now. And she, perhaps to the side of morphine.

December 24

A gift: knitted gloves of soft gray wool. What a remarkable sensation, to slide them on and feel each finger fit perfectly in its allotted space. “I noticed you have none,” she said. “Or wear none. I thought maybe they didn’t use them in Mexico.”

“I’ve bought three pair since I moved here and they’re all too short in the fingers. I wind up with webbed hands like a duck.”

“Well, see, I wondered. Your fingers are about twice what God gave the rest of us.”

I held out both gloved hands, stunned by the sight of perfection. “How did you do this? Did you measure me in my sleep?”

She grinned. “A grease stain on one of your letters. You must have leaned on the table to stand up, after eating a bacon sandwich.”

“Very impressive.”

“I brought in a rule and measured all the fingers.”

I turned my hands over, admiring the row of slant stitches across each thumb gusset. “Not blue, though. I thought you specialized in indigo.”

“Oh, those socks you mean, out of that cheap handspun. Those were for the children. This is pure merino from Belk’s. I can use quality on you, because you’re not planning to outgrow these in a year or run holes in them on purpose.”

“I’ll try not to let you down.”

A memory of snow. A hill striped sideways with blue shadows of trees. Screaming, the thrill of pursuit, some adult lobbing white balls, making the sound of a cannon blast with every volley. Cupping up hard snow that leaves pills of ice clinging to the fuzzy palms. Mittens, red with a snowflake pattern across the knuckles, made by someone. Father’s mother? No contact was allowed later on, it was Mother’s choice to leave everything: grandmothers, snow. All water-ice returns to the breath of the world. But those cast-off mittens might still be somewhere. Evidence of a boy’s existence.

I told Mrs. Brown she’d given me my first Christmas gift in over ten years. In our many days together, she has not betrayed such emotion as that confession invoked. “Ten year! And not one soul to give you a measly giftie?”

“My family is all gone.”

“But people. In Mexico you worked in homes, did ye not?”

“The last ones were Russian, they didn’t pay Christmas any notice. Mr. Trotsky had us work through like any other day.”

“He didn’t hold with our Lord Jesus?”

“He was a good man. But no, he didn’t. He was Jewish, his background.”

“He’s the one that got killed.”

“Yes.”

“And the ones before that, all Jews?”

“No. Mrs. Rivera was crazy for Christmas, she always organized feasts. I was the cook.”

“So you had to work straight through.”

“I did.”

“Mr. Shepherd, it pains me to be gone away next week.”

“Honestly, I’m glad you asked. You need to go see your family, and I need to be reminded what regular people do at holiday times.”

“Well, regular, I wouldn’t know. But you. You’ll have nought here to tell you it’s Christmas. What will you do?”

What will an acorn do when it has lain awhile in the ground and the rain swells its husk? Become a fig? “I have the galley proofs to finish,” I said.

“Now Mr. Shepherd, that is a fib. You finished those, and I know it.”

“I wanted to have one more look. And then I’ll start writing something new.”

The eyebrows soared. “What about?”

“I’m not sure.”

She gathered up her purse and gloves, preparing to go. A light snow had been falling all day. “All work and no play, Mr. Shepherd. Makes the meat go to gristle.”

“Does it? I thought it made Jack a dull boy.”

“It would do that as well.”

“I’ll probably get nothing done at all, thanks to the pile of books you brought from the library. I’ll poke up the fire and have Christmas with Mr. Hardy and Mr. Dickens. What could be better? And Tristram Shandy. The cats are hinting that I should cook a leg of lamb, so maybe I will. And I’m sure Eddie Cantor and Nora Martin will sing some carols for me on Wednesday night.”

“I hate to tell you, but they’re singing for their sponsor. I think it’s Sal Hepatica.”

“You are cruel, Mrs. Brown. Next you’ll tell me all those girls on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade are crooning for Lucky Strike cigarettes, and not me.”

She sat with her hands on her pocketbook, waiting.

“You want to say something. Go ahead.”

“None of my business, Mr. Shepherd. But a man would have a girl usually. Or attachments. That aren’t cats or books.”

I took off the gloves and folded them carefully. “Now this is really a case of the skillet calling the kettle black. Thirty years is a long time to stay a widow.”

“I did have a runny-go at marriage. The one time.”

“Well, don’t worry. I’ve had my runny-goes. Attachments, as you say.”

“If you say so. And no Christmas present for ten years. If you get attached to something, seems like it wouldn’t come all that far loose.”

“No, wait, I forgot. Last Christmas Romulus brought over a jam cake from his mother. Half the cake, actually. He said they’d had enough of it.”

“Blessed are the grateful, Mr. Shepherd, but that is no account as a real present. Half a jam cake showing signs of prior use.”

Chispa slipped into the room, around the edge of the door and along the wall, flattened to it, as if pulled sideways by a separate order of gravity. Slowly she crossed the bottom of the bookcase in similar manner, into the inglenook by the fireplace. I unfolded the gloves. It was tempting to put them on, wear them until Whitsuntide. “I’m not the sort of person who attracts gifts.”

“Mr. Shepherd, do ye think I believe it? I open the mail, with all such things in it as people can let sail. Even little embroidered things.”

“Then I should say I’m not a good recipient. When people are no good at relationships, I’ve noticed they often blame the other people. But I don’t.”

“I’ve never heard you blame a soul for anything, Mr. Shepherd. It’s one of your qualities. To the extent I sometimes wonder if your mother dropped you on your head.”

“No, she probably carried me in a suitcase—she was eternally on the move. Anyone I especially liked was soon gone, household people or friends. It’s been like that. Or they’ve left me on their own initiative. Mostly by dying.”

“Well. I am not a one to argue with mortal demise.”

“Well said, Mrs. Brown.”

“You ought to write it down. About yourself and all those that went away.”

“What, write about my life? Like poor old Tristram Shandy trying to remember his whole story helter-skelter?”

“You’d get further,” she said. “You’ve been keeping good notes all along.”

“Who would want to read such trivial stuff?”

“Well, why write it down in the first place, then? Because you do. I’m not putting my nose into anything, you do it plain in the open, Mr. Shepherd. Seems to me, if you really wanted shed of your own days, you’d not take such care to put them all down on a page. I see you go so deep in it, you forget day or night and have breakfast at supper.”

“I’m just a writer. It’s my way of thinking.”

“It’s your attachments. That’s what it looks like to me. You might do as well to attach to your own self, alongside all these story people you dream up from nowhere.”

“But who would want to read that?”

The light outside had gone dusky, and now the wind raised a low keen against the window. Clumps of snow fell out of the trees, shattering across the yard. “You won’t want to miss your five-fifteen bus,” I said.

She donned a formidable knitted hat and stood to leave, reaching to shake my hand. “I will see you on Monday week. Happy Christmas, Mr. Shepherd.”

“Happy Christmas, Mrs. Brown. I thank you for the gift.”

She closed the door and stepped out toward Haywood, leaving behind a house as silent as an underworld. Chisme slipped into the room, pulled by the same sidelong gravity across the bottom of the wall into the inglenook. Chispa immediately left it then, according to the inscrutable laws of attraction and indifference. The hall clock divided the scene into measured increments: Tick, tick.

Who would want to read all this?