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.
A mile or so away from the tree was the Delano home where we were once invited to tea. It was during the period when a family member, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was governor of New York State. I might have forgotten the grandeur of the house and of the great winding staircase if I had not for the first time glimpsed the possibility of beauty in clothes, watching two little Delano girls hovering like butterflies about the table in white organdy dresses, slipping little cakes into their mouths.
We went to a neigboring town to attend a dinner given for a bishop. He sat at the head of a long table. During a lull in the general conversation, I asked the bishop, “Do you like me?” and he replied, “Don’t you think your question is a little premature?”
I was chagrined. Later, when Uncle Elwood smiled as he told people the story of my question and the bishop’s response, I was confused by the currents of pride and shame running through me and felt a small pinch of estrangement from him.
Uncle Elwood wrote his sermons and newspaper columns on an Underwood typewriter on a table that stood in the middle of his study. It was a large, square, plain room with big windows. On fair days, when the light poured in, it seemed to float. Books lined one wall. Against another was an immensely tall desk that suggested a Chinese temple I had seen in an issue of the National Geographic. It had many tiny doors, which opened to dusty secret passages. In little drawers, mostly empty, there were piles of foreign coins, mementos of trips to Europe, and a piece of yellowed hardtack that Uncle Elwood told me dated from the Civil War. I would surprise myself with it, the last thing I examined before I got down from a high desk chair. I had to fight off an impulse to eat it.
On the wall beside the desk there hung a photograph of Edwin Markham, the poet, and he had written a few lines from his poem “The Man with the Hoe” in the open space beneath it. He had more beard than face. I invented a story: He was the missing one of the Smith Brothers whose cough drops came in a box illustrated with sketches of themselves, bearded and disembodied, that Uncle Elwood brought home for me when I had a sore throat or a cold.
Except for an occasional clatter of typewriter keys, there was a companionable silence between us. He asked me once, “What shall I preach about next Sunday, Pauli?”
“A waterfall,” I replied at once. I had just been thinking about a recent picnic we had on the shore of a stream fed by a small cascade whose spray dampened our sandwiches and us.
I can still recall the startled pleasure I felt that Sunday in church when I realized his sermon was indeed about a waterfall. I grasped consciously for an instant what had been implicit in every aspect of daily life with Uncle Elwood—that everything counted and that a word spoken as meant contained a mysterious energy that could awaken thought and feeling in both speaker and listener.
An ancient parishioner, “old as the hills,” Uncle Elwood observed, died in her sleep. He was named executor in her will. A few days after her funeral service in the church, we went to the Washingtonville boardinghouse where she had lived for many years. Her room had not been touched. The unmade bed, a half-pulled-out drawer in a small bureau, gave the place a disheveled look. Uncle Elwood walked across the dusty floor to a window, threw it open, and dusted his hands in a finicky way.
There was a hard-hearted aspect to his nature. Perhaps he had grown too accustomed to the dying, to death. We spent less than fifteen minutes in the room. He collected a few papers from a table and plucked, from a tangle of threads and spools in a sewing basket, a small ring with an amethyst stone that he gave me on the spot.
He spoke to the elderly landlady who was fluttering about in the hallway, asking her to pack Miss Hattie’s things, keep whatever she liked, and give the rest to charity.
On our way home that day, he parked the car in front of a large house on the outskirts of Newburgh. Its roof formed steep hills, each one crowned with a chimney. Uncle Elwood sat in silence for a moment, his hands resting on the steering wheel.
Several years earlier, he told me, before he had brought me home to live with him, he had been on what he called a “thinking walk” in a field near Balmville. Suddenly he heard alarmed cries from a neighboring field. He turned to see that an untethered bull was about to heave itself at a young woman who, at that very second, hiked up her skirt and turned to run away from it. He diverted the animal by presenting himself as a target. The woman escaped and so did he. That was how he met Elizabeth, the person we were about to visit in the many-chimneyed house.
After the incident with the bull, they had become friends. A year or so later she fell ill and was now largely confined to her bed. Despite her loss of health, he proposed marriage to her. Regretfully, she refused him. All this was told to me in a tone in his voice I’d not heard before—elegiac, I tell myself now.
