four-by-six whose American domestic career began in Gloria’s father’s grandmother’s Danbury, Connecticut, foyer is a wallow in one’s own death, in funerary spaces as futile as Egypt’s treasure-crammed tombs.
I recognized a black English bicycle that Perdita and the children had given me one Christmas when I, wheezy and overweight, had complained of never getting any exercise. Its bell was rusty and its tires were flat and I had never ridden it much. A bushel basket splinted and stapled together by some artisan from the other end of Massachusetts over sixty years ago held a smattering of my childhood toys which I had come upon in my mother’s attic when she a last died. The toys seemed older than I—some bas-relie Mickey Mouse blocks, a cap pistol with fake-ivory handle, tin Pluto who when wound up would whirr himself to th edges of a table and then, his weight shifting to a sideway wheel near his nose, magically turn back from dange Could these toys have belonged not to me but to my fathe that least playful of worried, work-degraded men? He habeen a child in the Depression, when toys were still sturdily fashioned of tin and wood. In the barn I noticed pieces of rusted drainpipe I had saved when we had the house painted too many years ago, and a crude wooden table, covered with dribbled shellac, that little Henry had proudly built, with my grudging help, when there had been three of us living here. All these uselessly preserved pieces of the past were jammed suffocatingly in. In a kind of panic I roughly, angrily rearranged a few things so I could fit in the old carpet, a tarnished brass ship’s lamp, a faded needlepoint footstool, and a pallid, washy watercolor portrait of Gloria’s mother that Deirdre had replaced with a soft-focus tinted photograph of herself in her low-necked high-school prom dress. This duty done, I fled, gulping the air outside the barn like a man who had nearly drowned.
Once I did nearly drown in the dismal detritus of time. Perdita and I, in our earliest thirties, lived in a pre-Revolutionary house in the middle of a drowsy coastal town called Coverdale. We had a small but, what with our children and their neighborhood friends, well-used backyard, in a corner of which I would plant each year two rows of lettuce, four feet of parsley, eight tomato plants, and some mounds of zucchini seeds—salad ingredients, all, within a few strides of the kitchen door. Spring that year had thickened around me paralyzingly. In Boston, in the sealed-in fluorescent environment of Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise, I was able to function, but at home on weekends, as the trees budded and our plethora of children—four, and Roberta huddled, head down, in Perdita is tummy—trooped through the house with muddy knees and noisy grievances, a paralysis of depression hit me. I saw everything as if through several thick panes of smeared glass. No air circulated between me and the world. I went out in the late afternoon to dig up mygarden plot and a single earthworm, wriggling blindly to return to its darkness of earth, seemed, from my towering height, an image of myself. Except that I was miserable and terrified and the worm was not.
Our eldest, Mildred, had an eighth birthday coming in May, and I wanted to build her a dollhouse. It wasn’t to be a very elaborate one, just four rooms, two over two, beneath a peaked roof and a triangular attic, with perhaps a flight of corrugated-cardboard stairs connecting the two floors. I had the wood, the half-inch plywood, the six-penny nails, and the cans of white and gray (for the roof) and red (for the door and window frames and two-dimensional shutters) paint, but whenever I went down to the cellar to work on the dollhouse—it had to be when Mildred was off playing—a clammy sense of futility would ooze out from the rough old eighteenth-century foundation stones and try to drown me. Had my workbench been less rudimentary; had there been objects down there more companionable
I recognized a black English bicycle that Perdita and the children had given me one Christmas when I, wheezy and overweight, had complained of never getting any exercise. Its bell was rusty and its tires were flat and I had never ridden it much. A bushel basket splinted and stapled together by some artisan from the other end of Massachusetts over sixty years ago held a smattering of my childhood toys which I had come upon in my mother’s attic when she a last died. The toys seemed older than I—some bas-relie Mickey Mouse blocks, a cap pistol with fake-ivory handle, tin Pluto who when wound up would whirr himself to th edges of a table and then, his weight shifting to a sideway wheel near his nose, magically turn back from dange Could these toys have belonged not to me but to my fathe that least playful of worried, work-degraded men? He habeen a child in the Depression, when toys were still sturdily fashioned of tin and wood. In the barn I noticed pieces of rusted drainpipe I had saved when we had the house painted too many years ago, and a crude wooden table, covered with dribbled shellac, that little Henry had proudly built, with my grudging help, when there had been three of us living here. All these uselessly preserved pieces of the past were jammed suffocatingly in. In a kind of panic I roughly, angrily rearranged a few things so I could fit in the old carpet, a tarnished brass ship’s lamp, a faded needlepoint footstool, and a pallid, washy watercolor portrait of Gloria’s mother that Deirdre had replaced with a soft-focus tinted photograph of herself in her low-necked high-school prom dress. This duty done, I fled, gulping the air outside the barn like a man who had nearly drowned.
Once I did nearly drown in the dismal detritus of time. Perdita and I, in our earliest thirties, lived in a pre-Revolutionary house in the middle of a drowsy coastal town called Coverdale. We had a small but, what with our children and their neighborhood friends, well-used backyard, in a corner of which I would plant each year two rows of lettuce, four feet of parsley, eight tomato plants, and some mounds of zucchini seeds—salad ingredients, all, within a few strides of the kitchen door. Spring that year had thickened around me paralyzingly. In Boston, in the sealed-in fluorescent environment of Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise, I was able to function, but at home on weekends, as the trees budded and our plethora of children—four, and Roberta huddled, head down, in Perdita is tummy—trooped through the house with muddy knees and noisy grievances, a paralysis of depression hit me. I saw everything as if through several thick panes of smeared glass. No air circulated between me and the world. I went out in the late afternoon to dig up mygarden plot and a single earthworm, wriggling blindly to return to its darkness of earth, seemed, from my towering height, an image of myself. Except that I was miserable and terrified and the worm was not.
Our eldest, Mildred, had an eighth birthday coming in May, and I wanted to build her a dollhouse. It wasn’t to be a very elaborate one, just four rooms, two over two, beneath a peaked roof and a triangular attic, with perhaps a flight of corrugated-cardboard stairs connecting the two floors. I had the wood, the half-inch plywood, the six-penny nails, and the cans of white and gray (for the roof) and red (for the door and window frames and two-dimensional shutters) paint, but whenever I went down to the cellar to work on the dollhouse—it had to be when Mildred was off playing—a clammy sense of futility would ooze out from the rough old eighteenth-century foundation stones and try to drown me. Had my workbench been less rudimentary; had there been objects down there more companionable
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