Refuge Read online

  There was something in the tone of voice, a loneliness and isolation that said way more than the words. Our neighborhood there in Charleston, our stuccoed, porticoed house with its camellia garden and wisteria bower, all the traditional niceties and the restraints and intrigues, all the odd little feelings of separation, of being a fragment forever parted from the whole, that was my father’s Wilderness.

  In that Wilderness he died.

  If there were things about Mackey that nobody knew, they didn’t bother me. I didn’t need to see his people or the place where he was raised; they were as real to me as Moses in the bulrushes or the Water Babies swimming. I knew them. I knew he missed them. There were times when he was so blue he was absolutely silent. That made Mama furious. I would hear her yelling at him, sometimes, when their door would be closed. She would go around days at a time all puffed up pouting and her eyes all red.

  One time, I remember Mackey cried. I was maybe five years old. It was over a letter, I think it was from his mother. He came in from work and got it and went outside, out of Mama’s sight, and sat on a bench under the wisteria and drooped his head down in his hands and sobbed. He stayed to himself a long time after that. He didn’t even fiddle.

  It was the spring after I turned nine that something really happened. He got a letter from Caney Forks, and Mama forgot to tell him. It lay on the secretary with a pile of social mail he’d never look at, till one day I was helping Aunt Mit dust and came across it. That other-worldly return address. When I showed it to him he looked real anxious and sat down and opened it at once. It being from that exotic shore, I hung over the arm of his chair and read it.

  “Mack, I am at the end of my rope,” it said. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do to get us clear. But it looks like we are going to hell at a gallop. Give me advice, soon as you can, please Cousin. Panama sends love.” It was signed “Devotedly, Ben Aaron.”

  Mackey closed his eyes and put his hand to his head and sat there with the letter in his hand. When Aunt Mit called us to supper, he said to go on without him. When he finally did come he didn’t eat, he just sat there messing his dumplings around with his fork. That night I heard him and Mama talking. Or mainly I heard her. She was topping cotton.

  “What do you think there would be in that place for ME?” She was yelling. “How can you be so selfish?” She commenced to wail. “What kind of life would there be for that poor child? What kind of society? Every Saturday a dog fight? Cruel!” she shrieked. “CRUEL!”

  Things were not right with Mackey the next day. Nor after. That was in April, 19-and-9. A couple of days after that put-to, Mama had some ladies in, and he and I went out for a walk. He hardly said a word. We walked along the Battery, holding hands, and I knew he didn’t feel very well, he looked sort of gray. We came back while it was still light. And when we got to the house, he couldn’t get up the steps. He sat down and leaned his head back against a pillar, and closed his eyes. “I’ve got the headache, Mary Sen,” he said. “Go get Mit to give you the camphor.”

  Well, I went back to the kitchen and told Mit, and she got the camphor bottle down and came with me, fast as we could go. When we got out there she put the camphor under his nose, and then he just slumped forward. He sighed a huge sigh and I grabbed at him, and Mit went screaming around the house after Camp, he was hoeing in the back, in the flowers, and he came running, with the hoe in his hand, and Mama came running, with the ladies hurrying behind her, holding up their skirts.

  And Mackey was fallen over, on the step, with his head down, and my arms around him, and he was dead. I remember clinging onto him, and somebody, I guess it was Camp, pulling me away. I remember the horror of my hands being pulled away from him. It was like, if I let go of him, he’s gone.

  I remember Mama lying across the bed, then, with her face down, choking with sobs, beating her head against the mattress, and the doctor sitting by her telling her over and over that apoplexy was nobody’s fault. “An act of God,” he said, “an act of God…” And the ladies sitting around the room stiff as pokers, and their faces sad and helpless, some of them wet with tears.

  The rector came, in his black suit and white collar, and assured Mama that it was not her sin that had cost us Mackey; it was indeed an accident of nature, though the thought was hinted at that Mackey had been a rare communicant and incurably Presbyterian.

  All of Charleston came, it seemed. People would squeeze me, and their tears fell on me, but I shed none at all. My eyes were so dry they were gritty. I couldn’t blink. My nose bled all that night, down the front of my white apron. I had a big smear where I rubbed it on my sleeve.

  I remember somebody saying, “Hadn’t we better notify his people?” But Mama wasn’t hearing anything. “What was that little town he came from?” somebody said. They talked around and nobody could remember. And I couldn’t speak a whisper.

  I remember the casket sitting in the parlor, and there were flowers all over, and people sitting up all night. And we were getting ready to go to the church, for the funeral. Aunt Mit put a white dress on me with a white organdie pinafore, and I was out in the yard, wandering around, when the undertaker drove up with the hearse and a team of black horses. I had picked up a butterfly wing out of the grass. I had seen it glistening blue, in the sun, it was something precious, and I put it in my pocket and went into the house. The grown people were standing around talking. So I went and stood on my tiptoes and leaned over Mackey. I curled his hair around my fingers, I never forgot how it felt stiff, and I slipped that butterfly wing under his hands, on his chest, before they got me away and closed the lid.

  One night that next summer, in a hotel in Paris, I had a horrible nightmare that Mackey had died, and I woke up screaming. Mama got up, she was real puzzled, but she held me all that night, and let me cry.

  Being a widow of fair means, Mama was not exactly doomed to sorrow her life away ragged and hungry, or lonely. There she was at twenty-eight, surrounded by the world of the living. A three-hanky funeral, a week of heart-rending mourning and that was about all she was good for. Mackey had been buried six miserable days when she blew her nose with finality, plastered her eyes with sliced cucumbers to cool away the red, arose and had Mit do up her hair, and in resplendent weeds, commanded Camp to drive her to the steamship ticket office.

  Almost overnight she and Mit put wardrobes together and packed new trunks bought in a frantic round of shopping. She and I sailed first for New York and then for Europe. We spent the rest of that spring and all that summer in Italy and Germany and France. Mainly we spent it in opera houses, watching large ladies sing themselves to death. Sometimes I would go to sleep before the mortal cough and thud.

  But it was not all bad; in Paris I saw where Madame Alexandra had sort of got her idea. Pavlova and Karsavina and Nijinsky were there, dancing with the Diaghilev company. We saw them dance in Les Sylphides. I kept that program under my pillow, and then in my suitcase, till I could get it home to the little cedar chest of special things. It was like, ever after, I shared some wondrous secret with those wispy, floating ladies in their painted moonlit woods. I just couldn’t quite figure what it was.

  We went home to spend an empty winter, then, in Charleston. Bleak. I remember mercifully little about it. Dutifully, Mama still wore black dresses all the time. They were real cunning, with bodices that fitted like skin. Paris black dresses.

  We were not far enough away from the churchyard that I couldn’t go down there in the afternoons after school, and sit on the bricks around Mackey’s grave, and watch the beards of moss wave in what I decided was the breath of God. Aunt Mit would make up her mouth and shake her head about that. She’d frown and say, “Miss Nat, Ol’ Plat-Eye gwine git dat chile, hangin’ round all dem dead peoples.” Ol’ Plat-Eye carried off bad and reckless children regularly; they were always from the other side of town, though; nobody whose name would ring a bell.

  And Mama would say, not real concerned, “Stay ’way from down there, Mary Sen, it’ll make you h
ave bad dreams.”

  I did have dreams. That winter I had one, over and over. It didn’t seem to mean anything at all; it certainly wasn’t bad, it was so beautiful I hated to wake up. It was about someplace I was sure I had never been, and it was like I was with somebody, it seemed like it was Mackey, only that was kind of vague. And it was real early morning, and there were mountains on both sides of us, and ahead of us, and it was misty, and the sun was just up and the air sort of shimmered. We were going down the road, into the sunrise, into the morning. Just two ruts, the road was, and there were flowers blooming in the middle and in the fields on either side. You could smell the cool and the fresh. But it was perfectly quiet. There was no sound in this dream. And it was terribly real. It was like I would be there a while, even after I was awake. But I didn’t tell anybody; there was nothing to tell. I mean, nothing happened.

  There was another dream like that a while later. It was happy, too. All it was—and I could see it exactly, when I closed my eyes in the daytime—it was a man that might have been Mackey, only somehow I didn’t think so. This was a big tall man and he had on a red checkidy flannel shirt, and he was sitting on a barrel, in this big old rough boarded up-and-down room, playing the fiddle. Only you couldn’t hear this either; it was a silent picture. And I didn’t know why it was anything so joyful, but it was.

  Well, it was a couple of years later, it was the winter I stayed in the boarding school in Paris that I had the bad dream. It had nothing to do with ol’ Plat-Eye or the graveyard. It was somewhere I hadn’t been, either. It was in a piney woods. A dreary kind of place. There was not any railroad track there but I could hear the engine coming, coming right toward me, going chug-chug-chug and I couldn’t move. And I could see it then, coming. It was horrible. And all of a sudden fire shot out of it, and the thing rolled over, and there was one man on the ground burning. And there was one hanging in a tree. Years and years after that I could see him dangling in that tree.

  Well, I woke up absolutely terrified, it was so much worse than it sounds. And there was nobody to tell. I had to lie there till morning, stiff as a board. When it got light I knew the cooks would be up so I crept down to the kitchen; I didn’t know how to tell them I was afraid of a bad dream, but I did know how to say I didn’t feel good. So they let me sit on a stool in the corner, they thought I was homesick, and I sat there all that day. It scared me for a long, long time. It was too real. Until many years later when I learned what it meant—and then only partly—I had to pray and take deep breaths before I could get near a train. Piney woods were pure terror, and the sound of a steam engine puffing would set me to shivering. I only tell you these things because of some other odd things that would happen later—when the other shoe would drop.

  That first winter back in our house without Mackey was a lesson in how lonely a child could be. Children in books had families. They had grannies and all that. Even poor little Grandma Twyning had faded and gone, the summer before Mackey died.

  Well, I had Mit and Camp. They were love and law and comfort. I will say, too, that Mama got to be a little bit more interested, if not real motherly. I know now that she was terribly lonely, too. Especially back in that house. We did have all the things we saw that summer, though, to talk about for a long time after. And some things we didn’t talk about at all.

  I remember when a year or so had gone by I asked her if we would ever get to see Mackey’s folks. She was sitting doing up her hair, and she looked very thoughtful, in the mirror. “I don’t know them,” she said. “I think they probably felt they weren’t our kind.” I felt very timid about this, somehow, but I finally asked her if they ever knew that Mackey had died.

  “I wrote them but they didn’t come,” she said. “Here—I hear the veg’table man. Run see if he’s got some nice fresh peaches. We’ll have Aunt Mittie make a pie.”

  I do know—and this was years after Mackey died—one day Mama got a letter from Caney Forks. I got the mail that day and took it to her, just jumping up and down to know what was in it. “Just business,” she said. I fought the devil all that day to keep from sneaking it off her dresser. But righteousness prevailed. When I tipped in to get it she had hidden it, or thrown it away.

  Just a little while after that we went off to Europe again anyway. That was the time we stayed a year and a half, and I went to the boarding school. Mama had made up her mind she was going to be a great, celebrated singer. She set out to find a teacher who could work that miracle, and somebody she met in Paris told her about one who was right then in Bayreuth, coaching a Wagnerian soprano.

  We went to Bayreuth. Oh, my. So many hours a day we sat there being entertained by those big ladies trumpeting from the mountaintops and rattling their spears. Mama had bought this book that had all the goings-on in English. Before we would go to the opera house we would lie on the bed at the hotel and read the day’s installment. Wagner moved a lot faster toward certain doom in print than he did on the stage. But you know, it was fascinating. All those mixed-up kinpeople; it was much worse than Charleston, brother and sister falling in love and the baby coming, and Brunnhilde marrying her own nephew. There was something about it, though. Something grander than life. I felt such a huge, ecstatic sorrow—does that sound right?—when their world burned down, even though they were such a mess.

  Mama was thrilled she had got herself in with the singing teacher. His name was August Rehnwissel. He was a little wooden soldier with gray hair that stood up like the bristles on a brush and he had a little pointed gray goatee. He was a wizard. Right off I could tell that. In his presence, for a little while, my mother was quiet and real humble.

  But then one morning he came up to our rooms. I was in the bedroom brushing my hair and I heard him singing to Mama, “Guten Morgen, schöne Müllerin…” He sang on and on, about her little blond head, and blue eyes like flowers, like morning stars. (That is what Mama said it was later, sighing.) His voice was sort of crackly; he was not young. But something about him was terribly touching. It was exquisite. Such was the whole life and substance of Dr. Rehnwissel. Early in September, Mama married him.

  They would move around; he worked with singers who were like butterflies, lighting in one city and then another. So I went to the boarding school and when they would be in Paris, I would see them. There were several English girls at the school; it was not like I would be in total isolation until I learned a little French, Mama said. “Spend your time on cultivated things,” she said. “When you marry a rich man some day you will want him to be proud of you.” Mama’s aspiration for me, from my very birth, was that I grow up worthy of “the best catch in Charleston,” whoever that privileged fellow turned out to be. It never looked like all that broad (or wonderful) a field, to me. I hardly think it ever occurred to her that when this prize was hooked I might have to support him. But, time would tell.

  Another thing was, being immersed in cultivated things didn’t necessarily mean one would absorb much. There were so many things not to be good at. Like painting, and needlework, and “expression.” Oh, that was awful. There was one good thing, and that was going to dancing class; I worked it out with the teacher that I could go every morning. “You are utterly daft,” one of my English friends said. I reckon it did seem odd.

  It was this elderly, really ancient Russian lady that taught us. Madame Wolinskaya. She had regular satchels under her eyes and a long crooked nose. She was ear-to-ear wrinkles and she never cracked a smile. And she held her head back and made a long neck.

  It was the same thing in there every single day. The piano player looked like a mummy. Some people said he was wound up with a key. He played the same thing, the same way, every class. He never read from music and he never took his eyes off us and he never changed his expressionless expression. He and Madame never spoke to each other. Nobody spoke to anybody. She would only croak out orders, and beat on the floor with her stick and he would commence to play and sometimes with no comment at all she would swat one of us about the legs. Wh
en the hour was up we bowed to her and cleared out fast.

  But there was a kind of perfect, higher order in it. Some security. On the last day, when we were leaving to come home, I ran after Madame and threw my arms around her and cried on her neck. I was never so surprised in my life as when she kissed me goodbye, and her wrinkles were full of tears.

  The Turks and the Serbs and the Bulgarians and a bunch of other people were at each other’s throats and in Paris and Vienna and Milan people were talking and worrying about it. Even people like Mama and Dr. Rehnwissel. It distressed him because Germany was wearing its horns and clacking its spears, and when he would be safely in Paris he would wag his finger and expound. “Der Kaiser, der Kaiser! He vants only de verrlt, tank you. Hang der Kaiser, und ve have peace.” The wisest thing Mama ever did was to get homesick for Charleston in the fall of 1913.

  Our homecoming caused some social ripples. We were not unpacked when Mama put on her first Saturday afternoon musicale in the parlor, to show off the trophy from her European hunt to the artier lions of Charleston. She reveled in the flood of invitations. She would have dragged the poor man to a rooster fight if anybody there would have admired him. She called him coyly, “the Doctor.”

  “The Doctor” was not a social creature. He was a refugee. He went along with her in a disoriented daze. Behind the blank look in his eyes lay the catalogue of Brahms lieder, detailed to every breath-mark, every whoop of the Valkyries and all Isolde’s moans and sighs. In his heart he had stored every measure, every nuance of the full gospel of his great god Schubert.

  There he sat, politely, probably thinking of kraut and dumplings, while a lady of “The Muses Club” laboriously rendered a piano selection called “Ben Hur’s Chariot Race,” and another sang “The Palms.” There was a buxom matron—I can see her now but I can’t bring back her name—who treated him to a dramatic recitation called “Oh, Dat Watermillion” at one soiree, and again at the next, by popular request. Though not his.