Forever Isn't Over Yet

When I was six, and my sister was four, our family lived in a small rented house on the banks of Lake Ponchartrain in Slidell. It was a wild, remote, very beautiful place set in a broad cleared space surrounded by trees and brush. The blazing Louisiana sun made the leaves glitter and the long grass hot against our legs in the daytime. The nights were loud with frogs and insects and the long burp of gators. To step outside at dusk was to walk into a curtain of mosquitoes. I remember the interior of that little house as cool and dim and faintly rustic, with lots of dark wood and a stone floor in the living room. My sister and I shared a room at the back of the house, where, to save space, our twin beds had been pushed together. Mom and Dad’s room adjoined ours.

I liked our parents’ bedroom because it had what I called “secret passages.” It was so completely and totally lined with the dark wood paneling popular in the early ‘60s that it didn’t have proper doors. Both the door to the hall and the door to the master bathroom were little more than man-sized vertical flaps cut into the room’s paneling, with little knobs added on as an afterthought and “locks” that were nothing more than hook and eye arrangements. Once the doors were closed – and they both swung closed completely unless propped open -- they were pretty much invisible to anyone in the room who didn’t know exactly where they were.

One night our parents, who were still in their twenties, had a party. An advantage to being that age and renting a house out in the middle of a Louisiana swamp is that you can throw loud parties without the neighbors complaining. My sister and I were always entertained by our parents’ parties. Even after we’d been sent to bed, we could usually hear and enjoy what was going on.

That night, Crosby had come over. I think every family has a Crosby, the naughty bachelor friend who tells good stories and brings a different girl with him on every visit. Late into the evening, a bit after the music and laughter had peaked but while the liquor was still flowing, Crosby needed to go to the bathroom. There was already a long queue to the little hall toilet, so he decided to use the one that adjoined our parents’ room.

From our bedroom my sister and I heard him announce this intention. We heard several tipsy, ribald “good lucks” to him from the people in the queue to the other bathroom. We heard the “door” to our parents’ room open, then shut behind him. We heard a metallic rattle as Crosby fumbled with the little hook and eye on that first door and managed to latch it.

We listened with great interest.

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One of the writer’s block questions here at Live Journal recently was ,”Have you ever seen a ghost?” No, I haven’t, so I didn’t post an answer. I have, however, experienced a ghost. A few years ago I wrote that experience into a short story entitled “The House on the Bayou” that was published in Space and Time, so there’s the remote chance that someone reading this already knows that version of it. But “The House on the Bayou” was fiction and I swear – the part of this story that I can vouch for is perfectly true.

The house on Bayou Desierd was where my father and uncles grew up. It was a shady, white-painted, single storied home, built in the 1920s as a hunting lodge I think, and it sat high on the bank overlooking Desierd. I still associate that house with all that was romantic and secure about childhood. Mystery permeated it, but it was a pleasant mystery for me as a child, the mystery of fairy tales and my father’s past. The only thing that ever came close to truly frightening me there was the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace in the Sun Room where our grandmother entertained, and after a while I managed to make friends with it (though I could never bring myself to touch the its eyes. I was positive it would blink.)

Whenever we visited, my sister and I would sleep in the room Dad had once shared with his younger brother, and I would always sleep in Dad’s old bed. It was an incredibly heavy sort of metal cot, very comfortable, but next to impossible for a single person, even an adult, to move. It was also very low. My sister and brother and I knew every hiding place in the house and its front, back and side yards, and that cot was no more feasible to hide under than the old chiffarobe in our grandparents’ bedroom. One look at the bed’s dark, low-slung underside and its barrier of metal levers and hinges was enough to send most sensible kids scrambling to find someplace else in a game of hide and seek.

Which as why the behavior of that bed baffled me. Frequently – not every night I slept there, but often enough – it would shake so hard I’d wake up.

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As a child I was addicted to scary stories. My nights were haunted by severed hands skittering around the floor on their fingers, foot long spiders on the ceiling, something called the “Bloody Bones of Hades” and, courtesy of a horror comic I once read, a semi-liquid, man-eating thing called “Mr. Green” that lived in the pattern of the throw-rug between the two beds. (Which was why dangling any of our limbs from our beds after the lights were out was ill-advised. I naturally kept my younger sister apprised of these things.)

One evening, when I was about eight, I called my mother into the bedroom to tell her that there was something in our bedroom closet. While the lights were out, and I couldn’t see it very clearly I could tell, I said in a trembling, almost tearful voice, that the closet door was swaying very slightly from side to side.

“Oh,” Mother said, “That’s just the monster that lives in your closet.”

In the stunned silence that followed, she explained that the closet door was swaying because the monster had a single eye on a large stalk, and it kept pushing against the door – she held up one hand and crooked and uncrooked her index finger to demonstrate – while he watched my sister and me.

Then she cheerfully tucked us in, kissed us goodnight, and left.

I slept soundly that night. Poisonous spiders might still lurk over our heads, Mr. Green might still blub and slurp inside his rug, and the Beast with Five Fingers might be poised to strangle me if I didn’t sleep with the covers pulled right up under my chin. But the question of what was in the closet had been answered. Mom was on top of it, and if it was okay with her, it was okay with me.

Exactly forty years ago today, I became interested in politics. I can remember the exact moment.

It was Sunday night and I was stretched out on the floor in front of the TV, not really watching it because whatever it was involved very important men in suits and ties, seen only from only the chest up. When I was nine this meant “boring,” so my head was down and I was in my usual reading position, lying on my stomach, a Nancy Drew book open on the rug before me. Behind me, Dad was tilted back on his recliner.

Something made me look up at the television and I stared, frozen in shock, my book forgotten. That most grown-up of all grown-ups, our president, was fighting back tears. “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term....” he said, and I was lifted a foot off the floor by a rebel yell Dad gave from behind me on the recliner. When I turned he had kicked the recliner upright and was sitting up straight, grinning, his eyes bright, his arms open in jubilation.

What this meant, he explained later, was that Robert Kennedy would be our next president.

That seemed only right. I could just barely remember President Kennedy. Mostly I remembered the fuzzy footage of the open car in Dallas, the funeral with the riderless horse being led behind the flag-draped coffin, Kennedy’s little son saluting. Evil had triumphed, but just for a while. Now Dad had announced the happy ending.

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Louisiana has the best graveyards. Everybody thinks about New Orleans and its famous cemetery tours, but my favorite funerary monument is in Monroe, up in the Arklamiss, the Northeast corner of the state. The Saunders Tomb was visible from one of the old main streets and I typically saw it framed in a backseat car window as my mother drove us through Monroe’s decaying downtown, which by the 1970s was all red brick and dusty windows and dirty concrete. I remember there being a wall around the old city cemetery, or at any rate some barrier that made it possible to see only the tops of a lot of tombs, but this statue had been deliberately set high up enough so that it was visible from the main street. It’s the life-sized figure of a man with a droopy moustache, facing the city and holding a document.

The story I was told about it went like this: The man’s name was Mr. Saunders, and he had married a northern woman. This sounds like no big deal, but Monroe had and still has the reputation of being one of the most insulated, snobbish cities in Northern Louisiana. As a Yankee, poor Mrs. Saunders was just not popular, and all kinds of nasty things were said about her. One rumor that proved especially durable was that she and Sidney Saunders hadn’t really been married and that their son was illegitimate.

So, when her husband died his wife commissioned the statue. The document he is showing to the city is their marriage certificate.

There were other stories about her. I was told that she managed some of her husband’s properties and conducted transactions from inside his tomb, setting up a desk and an oil lamp and receiving visitors, her husband’s coffin quite visible behind her. Whether this was a morbid refusal to accept his death (In Gumbo Ya-Ya, Lyle Saxon describes her as spending her days in the tomb sobbing at his desk) or a pointed reminder to local business associates that it was her husband who had entrusted her with the properties, I don’t know. I’ve always preferred the second theory. Monroe folklore of course, had it that she was crazy.

It was even rumored that she’d started the fire that, in the late 19th century, burnt down City Hall and much of the rest of the city, destroying countless records and making a lot of Monroe’s history largely a matter of guesswork for 20th century historians. I’m sure her accusers had a more sophisticated idea of exactly how she did this, but I wasn’t shrewd enough to ask about it when I was a kid, so I was left with the image of a woman in a bustle and swept-up hair running up and down Grand Street with a lit torch, laughing wildly and setting fire to buildings. Why nobody stopped her I couldn’t imagine, unless they were still freaked out from their last visit to her office.

Mrs. Saunders, the torch-wielding firebug who spent her workdays in her husband’s tomb, is now incorporated into my memories of Monroe along with riding my bike to the 7/11 on Forsythe, swimming in Bayou Desierd and watching Christmas Eve Fireworks on the levee. The information provided at findagrave.com, that it was her husband who was suspected of arson and that he was a saloon-keeper rather than a real estate baron, hasn’t done much to shake it. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Peter Pan I’m willing to give up, but not Mrs. Saunders. Not at this stage of my life.

I’ve always thought of Easter as one of the more watery, pastel colored holidays. It’s not that I didn’t have fun. It just couldn’t compare with the slightly sinister red and gold richness of the winter holiday season, and there were a lot of “buts,” “stills,” and “howevers,” attached to Easter that were absent when it came to that incomparable Christian trinity, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Easter egg hunts were entertaining, but I usually ended up lumbered with a slightly higher quotient of hard-boiled eggs to malted milk eggs/jelly-beans than I liked. Sometimes all of us would dress up and make one of our rare appearances at church, a sop to our Episcopalian grandmother, but afterwards there would be a party at her house with a baked ham and milk punch and lots of cheerful grownups, so that was some compensation.

It had something to do with the illustration in one of the books at Sunday school showing Jesus trickling in a vapor out of a cave around a boulder, his arms over his head like a cartoon ghost going “boo!” When we talked about this, we children were savvy enough to look serious because, we had been given to understand, that was the TRUE meaning of Easter, but we were really just humoring the grown-ups. Back then it was all about rabbits for me, specifically chocolate rabbits.

Biting the head off the bunny was one of the high points of the day. We had a very brainy cousin who, on one of our Easter visits to his family, confessed to being a chocolate bunny hoarder and proudly showed us his collection, still wrapped in their foil and plastic, from one Easter, two, three, and four Easters ago. Given that he was two years younger than me this was impressive, but I still felt he'd failed to grasp an important point.

And for some reason, it was also about hats. Part of our get-up, when my sister and I were dressed up for Easter, had to include a hat, which was a little baffling, but just enough of a novelty to be entertaining. Then we children would be lined up for pictures. The most famous of these, the one that’s still put on mantels, passed around and chuckled over by the older generation shows my sister and me in our pastel dresses and Easter bonnets, my face a mask of anguish because our little brother had just leaned forward and bitten me.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lamoro/2054745797/

It’s a mysterious picture. He was not known for being a hellion. On the contrary he was and remains one of my quieter, more self-contained siblings. I can’t remember what I did to provoke him, but it must have been pretty bad, perhaps involving the theft of a bunny. Or at least its head.

You don’t see the seasons here so much as sense them in a thousand little details. I believe that if someone had shown me an unlabeled color photograph of Market Street as I left the library yesterday at six, I would be able to identify it on sight as a shot from early spring. It’s something about the shadows of buildings falling against buildings, the top stories still in sunlight, and above them the sky the color soft gray silk with a touch of pink. ..

Live somewhere for a couple of decades and every stroll is fraught with context. South of Market used to be my neighborhood, and the landmarks I pass are always silently, half-consciously ticked off as I go by. I marvel at the longevity of Zain’s Liquor on one side of Third (never been in it, just seen it since 1988) salute Dave’s on the other (Brown little dive. Tim Maroney sitting on a barstool one night telling me about the eternal expansion of the universe…) note Rochester Big and Tall, (Driving Charlie Brown there shortly after moving to the Bay Area and going to work for Locus. The feel of the steering wheel beneath my hands as I waited for him in the car, parked illegally) and then I feel that slight lift of spirits I always get when I see the row of frothy fountains that border the park.

The best thing about going to the Metreon is walking through the park. I like the fountains. I like that big glassy half-hull of a boat sticking out of the ground, which I guess is meant to represent all those buried ships holding up the Embarcadero. I like the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the expanse of grass across from it. At sunset only a few people are left. Last night I saw a guy through the curtains of water of the MLK fountain, reading King’s words on the wall in various languages. A young couple was kissing on the patio that fronts the Metreon.

As for the Metreon itself -- too brightly lit, too shiny, too many electronic toys. There may be a bookstore somewhere in there, but it’s apparently camouflaged to blend in with all the high end gaming, jelly-bean, and tsostchke shops. I kept my eyes front and hurried to the escalators up to the theater, where I was waved into the screening by a very cheerful hipster with a soul-patch and a clipboard. In the theater I saw M high up, far back and center in the stadium seating, a small figure in a sparse crowd. He was watching me, his face grave, one arm extended over his head and waving stiffly, with great dignity, from side to side like a metronome as he talked on his cell phone.

“So are you going to get someone to help with your bags when you down the stairs to the taxi?” I heard as I edged into the seat next to him. “Okay, be a shtarker…” He was talking to his mother. After carefully going over with her the logistics of getting downstairs with luggage and assuring her that I’d arrived at last, safe and sound, he signed off and we put our heads together and quietly went over how our respective days went.

A friend on deadline with technical issues came by to use our email. M’s class went well. He showed a film I’d said I wanted to see, the one about those photographers in Chile, remember? How many reservations for tomorrow? Hardly any. Maybe too many people have already seen the movie. Oh well… Our words trailed off as the lights went down. This wasn’t one of those screenings where DJs show up to whip the crowd into a frenzy, which was a good sign. They just lowered the lights, no trailers, no ads, no fuss, and began.

The film was MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY, a romantic comedy starring Frances McDormand as a dowdy Englishwoman adrift in London in 1939. The writing is crisp and witty, the cinematography and acting quite good. On our way home after the film, we talked about why it worked. There are two things that lift this film above the common run of romantic comedies. One is the fact that the real love story, the ADULT love story as opposed to the two pretty young things who inevitably get together at the end, is told in a way that makes you understand why these two people fall in love. You know enough about Miss Pettigrew and the man played by Ciaran Hinds to see what these two wise, slightly battered middle-aged people find appealing about each other.

At the risk of giving entirely the wrong impression about a lively, funny movie that has more than a touch of PG Wodehouse running through it, (Guenivere Pettigrew is plainly a blood relative of Reginald Jeeves) I’ll describe the second thing that truly makes MISS PETTIGREW worthwhile. History.

There’s a moment when, at a party, the sound of fighter planes passing overhead signals the beginning of war. Almost everyone runs out to the balcony to sip drinks and watch and cheer. Miss Pettigrew and one other person stay inside. “They don’t remember the last time, do they?” she observes sadly. The backdrop of this comedy is a world on the brink of changing forever, and the filmmaker understood that conveying this effectively requires a great deal of attention to detail. The soundtrack perfectly reflects the era and what’s unfolding before you, beginning with “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” as Miss Pettigrew walks, bereft and jobless, through depression era London, and “Anything Goes” as she navigates with surprising assurance the world of fashion and show business. Every face in a crowd, every extra is interesting, whether it’s a dark-skinned woman among wealthy bohemian party-goers, or a grim-faced, bespectacled jazz musician stubbing out a cigarette before beginning another set. Every individual prompts speculation about where that person will be a few years from now. Or if they will be.

It’s not something that the filmmaker insisted upon. There are no moments in which what lies ahead for every one of these people is clubbed over the audience’s head. You can, if you’re in the mood, just watch this movie and enjoy the jokes and root for Miss Pettigrew. But there is something else hidden among all that art deco for anyone who cares to notice it. That’s the best kind of story-telling.