1931-1939<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My mother\u2019s red coat. It\u2019s made of leather, thick, heavy, shiny, a belt across the back. I lay it open on the pale stones of the terrace. Inside, another layer of leather, the color of coffee with milk. In the place we lived in the summer then, I\u2019d seen her in it, coming toward me across a field. Wading through the tall grass, she floated on air. I stood on a black tar road, a stonewall between us, waiting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0My father\u2019s golden watch chain as I kneel between his legs to say my prayers. The fuzz on the deep blue cloth of his vest.\u00a0 At 960 Park Avenue the green awning stretched across the sidewalk from the stone front of the building to a taxicab, yellow against the black tar of the street.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We bent our heads back to look up at the dinosaur skeletons in the huge, dark, red building. \u201cLook!\u201d my older brother Henry who is dead now said. \u201cYou can see right through them!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nelly the cook. From Ireland, my father said. Pale face, pale lips and she was deaf. Sometimes she was sad. One time she was vacuuming the rug. Even though she was supposed to be the cook. She ran the vacuum over my foot. Lightly so it didn\u2019t hurt. And laughed. \u201cOh, I thought you were the furniture,\u201d she said. I loved her very much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My father at one end of the table in a blue suit at breakfast, reading The Times in the morning before he went to his job. My mother read the Trib. A maid\u2019s waiting on us. She\u2019s not Nelly because Nelly\u2019s in the kitchen because she\u2019s the cook. I didn\u2019t know his job was looking for a job, during the depression. I didn\u2019t know my mother was rich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We didn\u2019t have a dog. Not in the city, my father said, and my mother told how on her birthday, after her mother was dead, her father gave her a little dog. The maid brought it in on a big platter with a cover over it and put it on the table where my mother sat. My mother lifted up the cover, domed, with a knob on the top, and there he was, the little brown dog, and my mother fell in love, and when she was away in boarding school lots of years later, her father who loved the dog too and was caring for him when my mother was away, wrote her a letter saying the dog had died and my mother cried and cried and cried and her teacher said she shouldn\u2019t cry, she was too grown up to cry, which of course she wasn\u2019t and I hated that teacher who I didn\u2019t even know but I could see her scowling and every time my mother told that story I hated her even more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a0My brother Henry was old enough to roller skate to school, but I was not, so I walked behind him, watching him roll smoothly farther and farther away, and get there first. From 960 Park to Allen Stevenson School where I stood at an easel in a yellow room. And two or three or maybe four years later, just before we left the City because my father persuaded my mother the City was not a good place to bring up boys, I put all the numbers in all the wrong places in the addition problems but got the right answers anyway and the teacher told me I was cheating, but I wasn\u2019t cheating, I was trying to put the right answers down and I don\u2019t remember who gave me them, maybe Henry. He was good at adding.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We were walking in the Park. There was a big black road that went right through it. My little brother Sam was born by then. He was in a black carriage with thin wheels. Our governess, who we called a nurse even though she wasn\u2019t because we weren\u2019t sick, in a white dress and a brown coat that was open because it was spring, I know because the leaves were out, was pushing the carriage when we stopped because the light went red but a little black dog kept on running and got run over. His friend, a bigger black dog stopped running and whimpered and all the cars kept on going right past the little black dog who kept trying to get up and couldn\u2019t. And then a taxi driver in a shiny yellow taxi like all the rest stopped in the middle of the road and got out and picked up the little dog so gently and laid him on the brown leather of the back seat. \u201cTo the doggy hospital, where he\u2019ll get well again,\u201d the nurse said, and I can still smell exhaust from all the cars. I never told the story to my parents. It was much too private.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Henry and I and little baby Sam are lying on a bed, Henry and I in just our underpants, Sam must be in diapers and there is a buzzing sound coming from the sunshine lamps above us shining down to give us what the sun can\u2019t because it\u2019s winter, Doctor St Lawrence said, and we are wearing big round goggles \u201clike airplane pilots\u201d Henry said. \u201cExcept you can\u2019t see through them.\u201d Even so, every day the nurse puts a big spoon of oil into our mouths, like the kind that goes in cars except it smells like mud smells when the tide is low, and waits until we swallow, and then I\u2019m lying on a different bed looking straight up at Doctor St. Lawrence in his brown suit and round head, watching his words, \u201cWho\u2019s your surgeon?\u201d arch across like on a bridge from the side he\u2019s standing on to my mother and father beside each other on the other and now I\u2019m in a big white tiled room in Doctors\u2019 Hospital in New York City like the one I know I can\u2019t remember being born in even though I can see the big round shiny mirrors on the doctor\u2019s forehead when I come out , saying \u201cWe are going to take your appendix out,\u201d and then I\u2019m coming home in a yellow taxicab, not an ambulance, then a chair with wheels, pushed out of the 960 Park Avenue elevator into the little hall where there is a table with a vase of flowers on it always and Henry hits me on top of my head with his toy hammer, \u201cbecause he\u2019s jealous,\u201d Nelly said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My mother tells the same story over and over and over. The words are always the same about how Henry got lost. Because if she changes them, he\u2019ll get lost again. One day walking around the reservoir in Central Park. I was in the black carriage with the thin wheels when it happened before I could remember and that\u2019s why she didn\u2019t tell the story before, or maybe I didn\u2019t notice when he turned around and walked the other way and the nurse didn\u2019t either. \u201cHe was lost for ours and ours and ours,\u201d my mother said, but I already knew he was ours. And now I can\u2019t remember how he got found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s lunch time. A Lady Visitor in a white dress and pearls around her neck that hang down to where she\u2019s fat in the front turns her head to my father while she talks slow like she\u2019s never ever going to be in a hurry all her life then turns to my mother at the other end of the table not stopping on the way to look at Henry and me across the table because we\u2019re not grown-ups Henry said from all the other times we had to eat there instead of with Nelly in the kitchen where we wanted to and tells some more about this place she gives her money to for white woman who have babies and no husbands. But why only<\/em> I start to say, and she looks at me like she\u2019s surprised, and I stop. I know I\u2019m supposed to look away and I think maybe I will and maybe I won\u2019t and then she says They don\u2019t care, that\u2019s why<\/em> and I don\u2019t remember what they talk about next, and we sit there forever and ever and ever until our mother says, Yes, you can be excused<\/em> and afterwards Henry says trying to make our sadness go away She\u2019s from a place called The South, that\u2019s why she talks so funny,<\/em> and if I asked, why my mother didn\u2019t ask her how she knew, maybe she would say Because that would be impolite<\/em> but Henry\u2019s dead, like I said before and I can\u2019t ask him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The engine of the train is black and sleek, it\u2019s front, coming at us, round like a clock, with a light for when its dark in the middle. My mother and Henry and now the new baby John in the black carriage with thin wheels and I stand on the platform in Madison, CT where we live in the summer because it\u2019s too hot in the City in the summer, except my father. He stays in the City from Monday through Friday because he\u2019s found a job with people who make a magic stuff with a magic name Noxema<\/em> in a dark blue jar, for sun burn and itches. Its pure white, like snow, and slippery thick, like cold butter and smells like copper and brown dirt and honey all mixed together. He steps off the train and walks toward us. I want to run toward him, but I don\u2019t, I don\u2019t know why and he comes a little faster and I feel something in the air between my mother and him I know I will understand when I grow up. We drive from the station on the Boston post Road and then on the black tar of Little Neck Road and then on a dirt road through woods and past a swamp with a pool of brown smelly water someone\u2019s put oil on to kill the mosquitoes and out on to a huge lawn with big brown shingled cottages spread wide apart from each other on it and the sea wall, the beach and Long Island Sound just beyond. The rooms of the cottage are bigger than the rooms at 960 Park and smell like pine trees and upstairs there\u2019s a screened in sleeping porch where my brothers and I go to bed looking up at the sky through the branches of the maple tree beside the house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Madison once I watched a school of porpoises swim from right to left just past the line of rocks that stretched out into the Sound like a pier that you could walk on when the tide was low, and once wading near there I got bit by a crab on my big toe, and once when our mother and father were away in England at a wedding, I saw a white balloon floating in the water just yards away. \u201cLook!\u201d I said, \u201ca balloon,\u201d and our nurse jumped up and waded in her white dress and brown stockings to the balloon and yanked it out of the water and I saw it wasn\u2019t a balloon, it was my brother John\u2019s white diapers filled with air. He\u2019d waded out when she wasn\u2019t looking and tipped over, his head below the water, and when the hurricane came, we were all in Hartford visiting my aunt, except John who was too young to travel and stayed home with Nelly. She got frightened and lonely and took John and went to the Welchs\u2019 cottage much nearer to the seawall and when we drove back after the hurricane through all the blown down trees, the Welches\u2019 cottage\u2019s front porch was leaning over the sea wall, but not all the way because the hurricane stopped just in time and John and Nelly and the Welches were still alive, eating supper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m on the back seat of a grey car on the left-hand side beside a little triangular window. Sam\u2019s in the middle, Henry on the right. John must be home with the nurse. We are in the City still, my father\u2019s driving. He turns his head to the right and says something to my mother in a voice too quiet for my brothers and me to hear so I know he\u2019s talking about the war that just got started on the other side of the ocean near where he and our mother went to a wedding. I lean forward to hear and he stops talking and I look to the left through the triangular window and see some big red words above a window of a store. I can read them! I couldn\u2019t before. And now I can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are in the Park again, in some other part from the big black road that goes right through it, at the bottom of a little hill and there\u2019s the smell of leaves again, Henry and me and Sam, out of range from the nurse at last, whose name is now Miss Shiver, from a place called The South, who\u2019s very nice to us, not strict at all, but never smiles and is very sad, like maybe her husband died, or something, I said to Henry, who didn\u2019t think so because I said it, not him. She\u2019s busy with John, who was born with a full head of hair and is not in a carriage anymore, she\u2019s holding his hand while he toddles beside her, and three boys on red bikes with white tires come zooming toward us, standing up pumping the pedals, carrying long bendy thin branches of honeysuckle, like cavalry with swords, Henry said. They catch up and whip our backs while we run straight back to Miss Shiver. She shakes her fingers at the boys, suddenly fierce. They laugh at her and ride away. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Then our parents decide to move out of the City, to a town called Riverside, Ct on Long Island Sound, where because it\u2019s not a city, we won\u2019t need a nurse to coddle us, our father said. My mother\u2019s sad. She likes the City, the museums, the Poetry society, the theater. So be kind to her, my father said, she\u2019s doing it for you, and now he has to commute to where they make Noxzema, and Nelly\u2019s even sadder, away from her church and the other ladies from Ireland, but she comes with us anyway, because she\u2019s deaf and maybe can\u2019t get another job, Henry said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And besides, we love her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 1931-1939 My mother\u2019s red coat. It\u2019s made of leather, thick, heavy, shiny, a belt across the back. I lay it open on the pale stones of the terrace. Inside, another layer of leather, the color of coffee with milk. In the place we lived in the summer then, I\u2019d seen her in it, coming toward […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-323","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}