Borrowed Finery

At his words, fly to Jericho, my heart jumped into my throat. It was the most extreme thing I ever heard him utter. He was at the end of his rope! It was the absolute limit!

His protests never lasted more than a few minutes, but the pictures that formed in my mind, evoked by the distress I heard in his voice—usually so serene, so playful—frightened me.

The malevolent furnace, as it labored at night with great clankings, would climb the stairs and kill us with fire, and the holes in the roof would be enlarged so drastically we would be exposed to the merciless night sky and its rain and wind and cold.

But more terrible by far was the well in the middle of the meadow.

When the water pressure in the house was so low that only a puff of stale air came from the kitchen faucet when it was turned on, and the toilet in the bathroom wouldn’t flush, Uncle Elwood set out for the well, carrying a bucket.

I watched in dread from the living room window as he lowered the bucket by a rope tied to his hand. He leaned far out over the edge of the well—too far!—to keep the rope straight as it dropped an instant later, to hit the water with a plonk.

He would fall! An enormous jet of well water would lift his drowned body toward the sky, then flood the whole earth!

He hauled on the rope, hand over hand, and at last pulled out the bucket, filled. When I ran out of the house and down the three broad steps of the porch to meet him, he was surprised at the intensity of my relief, as though he had returned safely from a long perilous journey.

Then he recalled what I had told him of my fear when he went to the well. He spoke reassuringly to me, as he did when I was ill. He told me what a fine artesian well it was, how milk snakes kept the water pure. Oh, snakes! Worse!

With his unengaged arm, he clasped me to his side as we walked across the hummocky ground. I was not able to explain to him the extremity of my terror. I couldn’t explain it to myself.

Time was long in those days, without measure. I marched through the mornings as if there were nothing behind me or in front of me, and all I carried, lightly, was the present, a moment without end.

From the living room there were views east and south. A line of maple trees and birches marked the southern boundary of the property, and beyond it stood an abandoned mansion. I had walked along its narrow porch among six towering columns and peered through dusty windows at its empty rooms. The ground sloped gently down to the river less than a mile away. It was the same long slope upon which our house stood.

From the windows that faced east, beyond the line of tall sumacs, rose a monastery whose roofs and towers I could see in late autumn and winter, when the deciduous trees surrounding it shed their leaves. At intervals during the day the monastery bells pealed.

When I sat on the porch in my wicker rocking chair in the twilight of a summer’s day, eating a supper of cold cereal and buttered bread, I would echo the sounds the bells made by tapping my spoon against the side of the china bowl that had held the cereal. I was alone with my thoughts. They drifted through my mind like clouds that change their shapes as you gaze up at them.

To the north where the storms came from, I could view from the windows in the minister’s study a line of tall, thick-trunked evergreen trees and, as though I were on a moving train, catch glimpses of a crumbling wall and some of its fallen stones lying on the pine-needle-strewn ground. Uncle Elwood said the wall had been there when his father bought the property.

Beyond the lawn, which he tended now and then, doggedly and with an air of restrained impatience, pushing a lawn mower with rusty blades, were meadows grown wild. Once or twice a year, a farmer driving a tractor, his wife and their children in a small ramshackle truck behind him, arrived to cut the tall grass and carry it away.

Once the children brought along a sickly puppy and showed it to me. We passed its limp body among us, caressed it, and at last killed it with love. We stared, stricken, at the tiny dog lying dead in the older boy’s hands, saliva foaming and dripping from its muzzle. The younger brother began to grin uneasily.

Later that day, after the farmer and his family had departed, I told the minister I had had a hand in the death of the little animal. Although he tried to comfort me, to give me some sort of absolution, I couldn’t accept it for many years.

Even now, I am haunted from time to time by the image of a small group of children, myself among them, standing silently at the back door of the house, looking down at the corpse.

Every spring, thawing snow and rain washed away soil from the surface of the long driveway, leaving deep muddy furrows and exposed stones. I spent hours cracking the stones open, using one for an anvil, another for a hammer, to find out what was inside them. Most appeared to be composed of the same gray matter, but a few revealed streaks of color and different textures in their depths or glinted with sparks of light.

I saw how Uncle Elwood struggled to hold the steering wheel of the car steady as it heaved and skidded along the rough, wet, torn-up ground. But I thought too of how gratifying it was when I found a stone that stood out from the rest because of what was inside it.

The driveway led up to scraggly, patchy lawn, circled the house, then branched off, ending several feet from the entrance to a cave-like, half-collapsed stable that had been built into the side of the slope. Earth nearly covered its roof.

During storms, the minister would race out to the car and drive it into the stable as far as it would go. Once a horse named Dandy Boy had lived in its one stall.

The minister told me stories that illustrated Dandy Boy’s high spirits and animal nobility. “He had moxie,” he said, and imitated a horse, galloping from the living room where I stood entranced, laughing, into the dining room just as Dandy Boy had galloped into the world.

A while later he took me to a Newburgh soda fountain and ordered a glass of Moxie for me. It had a spiky, electric taste. I imagined Dandy Boy drinking pailfuls of it and afterward rearing up like a cowboy’s horse.

In those days there were two movie theaters in Newburgh. Uncle Elwood only took me to movies he had seen, to make sure there was nothing alarming in them. My knowledge of cowboys was limited. But I had seen a Western in which they figured. I was struck by how they clung with their knees to the saddle when their horses circled in one spot and raised up on their hind legs, pawing the air with their hooves as they did in illustrations of books about knights and kings and queens.

When Uncle Elwood returned from evening church functions, he parked the car on a gravel-covered stretch of the driveway next to the house. Nearby stood a few crab-apple trees, neglected but still bearing wizened fruit in autumn. Every autumn she spent with us, Auntie promised to make crab-apple jelly, but she never did.

On those church nights after I was sent to bed by Auntie, or by a neighbor who had come to the house to watch over Uncle Elwood’s mother and me, I could never fall asleep, even though my eyelids were often as heavy as stones. I listened, it seemed, with my whole self for the sound of tires rolling on gravel, then halting, then the growl of the engine as it was turned off, a minute of silence, a car door opening and shutting, and not a minute later Uncle Elwood’s footsteps on the stairs.

If he came home before dark, I ran to greet him at the front door. If he walked in looking pleased with himself because he had a secret, I would search through his pockets until I found a white paper sack filled with the chocolates he had stopped to buy on his way through Newburgh, and that he and I loved.

One evening he returned from church early. I was still up. There were seven cakes on the back seat of the Packard, each one different, and all made for his birthday by women in the Ladies’ Aid Society of the church.

“How shall we ever eat them, Pauli?” he wondered in the hall, looking at the cakes lined up on a table. One by one, I thought to myself.

In late spring, you pluck a blade of tall grass, place it between your thumbs, align it, and blow. The sound you produce is unmelodious, excruciating—and triumphant.

Four bedrooms on the second floor were grouped about the hall landing. There was a bathroom, and a small study with two windows and a narrow door leading out to a balcony that arching, leaf-heavy branches kept cool in the summer. On the same floor, behind a door usually kept closed, was another part of the house and a fifth bedroom claimed by Auntie when she came for one of her visits. It was unbearably hot there in summer, glacial in winter. From a passageway outside of it, a narrow flight of steps led down to the kitchen and another flight up to the attic.

The dusty stillness of that shut-off part of the house was often broken by me, by the sound of my footsteps as I climbed the stairs to the attic, or by the dull buzz of flies trapped between screen and window in the bedroom, or by spasms of coughing and the muttering-to-herself fussing of Auntie on one of her visits, the one I feared might be without end.

She had chosen the room for herself before I was born and appeared to be gloomily satisfied with its discomforts: extremes of temperature, an iron bedstead with a thin mattress covered with stained ticking, a bare floor, and little else. Were some of the rugs she crocheted meant for the floors of her daughter’s house? How did she dispose of the ones I had seen her make?

Behind the door that closed off that uncanny space, I pictured Auntie lying on her back in her bed, her eyes opened wide and unblinking, smoking cigarettes in the dark.

I spent rainy afternoons in the attic, treading warily on the rough planks that served as flooring, hopping over the holes in which I could glimpse shadowy crossbeams where the jagged edges met, and where I feared spiders might lurk. There were five or six small rooms whose walls ended halfway up, and I could look through them to their windows that hardly let in light, they were so covered with webs and dust. Boxes were stacked everywhere. There was a huge metal birdcage, a dressmaker’s form, canes, a top hat, and a moth-eaten black dress coat. Books moldered in heaps, and trunks with lids too heavy for me to lift decayed in corners. Except for my footprints, dust covered everything.

On the top steps of a narrow flight of stairs, alongside a collection of faded postcards, were piles of National Geographic magazines. I looked through them again and again. As I turned the glossy pages, I was startled each time by the singularity of everything that lived, whether in seashells, houses, nests, temples, logs, or forests, and in the multitude of ways creatures shelter and sustain themselves.

One early afternoon—I had not yet learned to read—I was sitting on a step below the landing, an open book on my lap, inventing a story to fit the illustrations. It was raining. From the little table on which it sat in a dark corner at the foot of the staircase, I heard the telephone ringing. Uncle Elwood came from his study to answer it. “Mr. Fox?” I heard him ask in a surprised voice.

I flew up the stairs to my room, closed the door, and got under the bedclothes. Soon Uncle Elwood knocked on the door, saying the call had been from my father, Paul, who was in Newburgh, about to take a cab to Balmville. “Won’t you open your door?” he asked me.

The word father was outlandish. It held an ominous note. I was transfixed by it. It was as though I had emerged from a dark wood into the sudden glare of headlights.

Uncle Elwood persuaded me at last to come out of my room. He looked back to make sure I was following him down the stairs. After the alarm set off in me when I heard “Mr. Fox,” I felt flat and dull. In the living room I stared listlessly at a new National Geographic lying on the oak library table next to an issue of the Newburgh News, open to the page where the minister’s weekly column appeared. On top of the big radio with a pinched face formed by various dials, on which we listened to Amos and Andy, there was a bronze grouping, a lion holding its paw, lifted an inch or so above the head of a mouse. I had gazed at it often, wondering if the lion was about to pat the mouse or kill it.

I had not longed for my father. I couldn’t think how he had known where to find me.

I wandered into the hall, pausing before a large painting I had seen a thousand times, a landscape of the Hudson Valley. Dreaming my way into it, I walked among the hills, halted at a waterfall that hung from the lip of a cliff; in the glen below it there was an Indian village, feathery columns of smoke rising straight up from tepees. The painting was bathed in an autumnal light as yellow as butter, the river composed of tiny regular waves that resembled newly combed blue-gray hair, gleaming as though oiled.

I heard loud steps on the porch. My father suddenly burst through the doors carrying a big cardboard box. He didn’t see me in the shadowed hall as he looked around for a place to set down the box.

In those first few seconds, I took in everything about him; his physical awkwardness, his height—he loomed like a flagpole in the dim light—his fair curly hair all tumbled about his head, and his attire, odd to me, consisting of a wool jacket different in fabric and pattern from his trousers. He caught sight of me, dropped the box on the floor, its unsealed flaps parting to reveal a number of books, and exclaimed, “There you are!” as if I’d been missing for such a long time that he’d almost given up searching for me. Then at last!—I’d turned up in this old house.

Not much he said during the afternoon he spent with me had the troubling force of those words, and their joking acknowledgment that much time had elapsed since my birth.

I felt compelled to smile, though I didn’t know why.

I bent toward the books. I guessed by their bright colors that they were meant for me. Eventually Uncle Elwood read them all aloud: Robin Hood, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Tom Sawyer, Water Babies, Aesop’s Fables, A Child’s Garden of Verses, The Jungle Books, and Treasure Island.

At some happy moment, I lost all caution. When my father got down on all fours, I rode him like a pony.

It was twilight when he left. The rain had stopped. As he turned back on the bottom porch step to hold up his arm in a salute that seemed to take in the world, and before he stepped into the taxi he’d ordered to return for him, the sun emerged from a thick cloud cover and cast its reddish glow over his face as though he’d ordered that, too.

The next morning, I woke at first daylight and ran down the staircase to the living room in my nightclothes, knowing—against my wish to find him there—that I wouldn’t.

From the earliest days of my time with him, Uncle Elwood read to me every evening. A few months after my fifth birthday he began to teach me to read. From being a listener—a standing I hadn’t thought about until I had the means to change it—I became a reader.

The bookshelves in the living room held works of poetry, books about national and local history, and, as I recall, stories by Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, among others. I memorized “If,” a poem by Kipling, and in historical sequence the names of the American presidents. I would recite aloud the poem and the presidential roll call, to elicit a look of pride on the minister’s face.

I read a daily children’s story in the Newburgh newspaper. It was accompanied by a drawing of a rabbit wearing a jacket and waistcoat, and the central character was an American version of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, but plumper, far more sanguine, and never exposed to the slightest serious danger. I read the funny papers on Sunday, the Katzenjammer Kids, Moon Mullins, The Gumps, Maggie and Jiggs, and Harold Teen; the last-named I disliked intensely, for reasons I don’t recall.

I was free to read any book in the house, but what comes first to memory is my deciphering of the old postcards that lay in heaps at the top of the attic steps. Most had been mailed from foreign capitals before the Great War and showed vistas of Rome and Paris, Berlin and London. On the writing side, there were messages in the spidery but legible penmanship of those days. As I read them, I thought I could hear the ghostly utterances of the travelers, Uncle Elwood’s long-departed kin.

Around the time I learned to read, a woman named Maria and her three-year-old daughter, Emilia, moved into the house. Uncle Elwood had hired her to cook and clean and to watch over his mother when he and I were out. She and her child settled into Auntie’s bedroom.

When she came, Auntie used my bedroom, and I slept on a cot in the study. I hardly remember Maria. Uncle Elwood told me she had been born in a faraway country, Montenegro. But with no effort of memory Emilia’s face appears instantly in my mind’s eye, perhaps because among the few photographs I have from those years, there is one of the two of us.

In the photograph, she is sitting outdoors in my wicker rocking chair. Her legs, too short to reach the ground, stick straight out; her hands grip the rounded arms of the chair. Her black ringlets are clustered like Concord grapes around her little face. She is fretful. Her mouth forms an O. I am standing beside the chair. My left arm lies possessively along its curved back. I am looking down at her. My expression is troubled, angry.

Uncle Elwood takes the picture. He stands a few feet away from us. She has begun to cry in earnest, noisily. As usual, I tell myself. Her mother comes out of the house and picks her up, murmuring to her. Uncle Elwood joins me where I am standing beneath the branches of a crab-apple tree. He takes my reluctant hand. “Shall we go for a walk, Pauli?” he asks. I nod wordlessly.

Maria stayed with us for less than a year. Then, for reasons not explained to me or that I’ve forgotten, she placed Emilia in a Catholic ophanage and left Newburgh.

Uncle Elwood and I visited Emilia several times. A nun led us down a hall and into a barely furnished room smelling of floor wax, with starched white curtains at both windows. It was around noon. A distinct piercing smell that I recognized as beef broth floated in the air. One of the windows was open a crack, and a breeze kept the curtains waving like banners.

Emilia came into the room and sat down on a wooden bench, smiling uncertainly in our direction. She was dressed in a white blouse and a blue pinafore. Her curls were flattened by hair clips. She was probably four years old at the time. I don’t know what we spoke about or if she spoke at all.

What I felt was the force of my longing to move into the orphanage that very hour. I wanted for myself the aroma of broth, the white starched curtains, the clothes Emilia wore, the nuns with their pale moon faces and black habits.

Emilia looked so calm, so rescued.

I grew aware that Uncle Elwood’s public life consisted of more than preaching sermons. He wrote a weekly column for the Newburgh News called “Little-known Facts about Well-Known People.” He told me that before he’d been called to the ministry, he’d been a journalist working for a newspaper in Portsmouth, Virginia.

I spelled out his name on the spines of several books set apart on the living room bookshelves. Among them were a history of the Blooming Grove church, a collection of his own sonnets, a biography of the twenty-fifth president of the United States, William McKinley, and a slim volume about the winter George Washington spent at his headquarters at Temple Hill, at that time a bare site not far south of Newburgh.

Years later, when a replica of the headquarters was erected, it was partly paid for with funds raised by the minister.

When Auntie visited, or during the months Maria worked for him, Uncle Elwood was free to explore the countryside and chase down clues to Hudson Valley history, many of them given to him by people in his congregation. One time he told me, an expression on his face that somehow combined horror and fastidiousness, how Indians had killed the infants of settlers by grabbing their feet and swinging them against tree trunks. He often quoted Washington’s whispered question on his deathbed—so it had been reported—“Is it well with the child?” Uncle Elwood explained to me that the first president had meant the new country; the new country was the child. I repeated the words silently, not sure whether I meant the country or myself.

“We’ll drive there like blazes!” he would declare, after he’d been told where there might be a foundation of a house built during the American Revolution or a tumbledown ruin that could have been built even earlier.

Once when we were walking in the woods somewhere, we stumbled upon an Indian burial ground, the mounds fallen in and covered with moss, and a light broke over his face. He treated the Hudson Valley and his ministry with the same ardor, as though both historical discovery and biblical allegory were equal manifestations of the divine.

We took trips.

We drove south to Nyack, a town on the western shore of the Hudson, to visit a cousin of Uncle Elwood’s, who had recently had a house built for herself and a woman friend.

The river glinted in shards of light. Light-colored stones formed a promenade next to the house. The rooms were open, without doors; whiteness hung like a great curtain outside vast windows. The cousin’s name was Blanche Frost.

She gave me a doll she told me she had bought in Paris.

“Where is Paris?” I asked the minister in a whisper, awed in the presence of the tall woman with such beautifully arranged white hair.

“Across the sea, in a country called France,” he told me.

The doll’s long yellow hair was held back from its face by a raspberry-colored ribbon, the same color as its startling dress, very short, revealing long light-pink cloth legs. I put it in my bookcase at home. For weeks, it was the last thing I looked at before I fell asleep.

We drove to Elmira, New York, to see Mark Twain’s grave. It was a happy moment afterward, to sit in the sunlight on a nearby slope among the gravestones. The minister had on his high-crowned Panama hat, so it must have been August, the only month he wore it.

We went to Albany. In the governor’s mansion, or the state-house, I forget which, the minister pointed to a deep scar in the banister of the broad staircase, made by a tomahawk hurled by a long-dead Indian.

We descended by elevator to the Howe caverns. The deep shaft down which we traveled looked like a giant’s work; the earth split open just like the stones I had pounded on the long driveway.

One morning we were to go to West Point, where Uncle Elwood was to give an invocation at a military ceremony. We had to take the Storm King mountain road to get there. A snake coiled to strike would not have frightened me more than the snakelike curves of the road. At its highest point, where the rock face soared above and dropped to the river below, a sign warned of a zone of falling rocks. When we came to it, I drew up my legs and shut my eyes tight, expecting to be crushed by a boulder or flung out into space. When the road leveled out, I thought, This time we got away with it.

Uncle Elwood read me stories by Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, out of whose pages a headless horseman pursued me into a dream. I told him I was haunted. Soon after, he took me to Sunnyside, Irving’s estate near Tarrytown on the east side of the Hudson. Perhaps by showing me evidence of the writer’s existence, he thought to exorcise the horseman.

In Balmville, just at the start of the dirt road that led home, there stood a very old Balm of Gilead tree encircled by an iron fence. Uncle Elwood told me that Washington was said to have taken shelter beneath its outstretched boughs during a sudden downpour. I could imagine the general standing there, looking as he did in a large portrait of him that hung in Uncle Elwood’s study: cloaked, pink-cheeked, white-haired, with a marionette’s stiffness of jaw. We often paused at the tree, the car motor idling, when we returned from our travels.