Landscape: Memory Page 2

  12 AUGUST 1914

  This from The Call:

  Zelta Davis, seven months old, playing on the porch of her home, 428 Harrison Street, Oakland, today, nearly fell over the edge. Her mother, Mrs. Mary Davis, grabbed her and clutched so hard she paralyzed the child's left side. A cure may be possible.

  I'm looking west down Pacific at fog lying low on the Presidio woods. Mother thinks I'm reading Ruskin, but it's The Call I'm more interested in. I save Ruskin for those cozy moments curled up by the fire. Mother and Father sitting close by to answer questions and tell me what words mean what, and how it is there's a Truth of Clouds and a Truth of the Sky and a Truth of Water. The Call is my private pleasure.

  Father left this poem in my boot:

  "Advice from the Elder," he'd entitled it.

  As a cure for diseases of millet

  I must recommend, take a toad,

  Carried round the wide field on a fig leaf

  in the dusk of the night fore it's hoed.

  One buries the frog in the middle,

  with a pot for a coffin, and prayer,

  Thus preventing the damage of sparrows

  and worms in the black midnight there.

  Now dig up the damn frog with a hatchet,

  before the far fields are sown!

  Lest armies of insects, like Caesar,

  turn foul and enter your home.

  The poem, I suspect, is more for him than me, though it may pertain to my summer garden, which contains no millet, or frogs as of yet.

  28 AUGUST 1914

  Today I messed around with Duncan, mucking about the woods out west of the golf course and returning home around four o'clock for drawing. Mother and I've been working our way through The Elements of Perspective and will soon be on to Williams's The Art of Landscape Painting. Mother said 1I should choose a project to give focus to my studies and I've chosen to paint what I saw in Bolinas, that moment. The memory is still clear, it being just four years ago, and I want to capture it in a painting. I'm still no good at drawing but the Ruskin book is very specific and soon I'll be able to make the proper shapes. Right now my clouds are blobs and my land looks like fat serpents. I won't start with the paints until I get the shapes right.

  Mother can't draw either, but she is working along with me, step by step, attempting a panorama of the fairgrounds. I can't imagine all those details, pillars and domes and thin minarets, each part tiny and perfect. But she seems content, measuring minute ornaments and touching her pinpoint pencil to paper, erasing more, it seems, than she puts down. My picture, being at dusk (crepuscular, Mother says), is not so demanding.

  Running home, past Locust and Laurel, up near the top of our hill, I could hear her confident singing waft out the open window, mixing in with the various booms and bangs of construction from the fairgrounds. I saw her through the window, her thick brown hair pinned up in a messy bun, her jaw and mouth extended. It's that frog face she makes to help "open her throat," as the book instructs. Her voice quivers too.

  I signaled my arrival home with a healthy banging about in the vestibule. She had the drawing kits out, flat wooden boxes with small metal hinges and button snaps to clasp them shut. Mine has charcoal smudges not just because I'm messy but also because I use soft charcoals. She's still sketching lines and will be forever. I'm trying to draw the very air so pinpoint lines won't do.

  "You," she said, all motherly, turning away from the window. "You are a mess." I was. I was smudged and muddy and standing on our best carpet in the big front parlor. Mother stood shaking her head in silence. We both sighed, I with impatience.

  "Up to your room with you now. We're late as it is."

  "Won't we be drawing outside today?" I asked. It seemed silly to clean up for the outdoors.

  "We'll be in the park. People do not enjoy filthy children in public parks."

  "But I enjoy filth." This raised an eyebrow.

  "You'll reserve that pleasure for more private settings. Don't be a pest."

  "Father goes to the park looking like a dirty dog if he wants. No one pays him any mind." It was true. My father cares less about collars and clean shirts than even me.

  "You're not your father, dumpling." She had her hand up to her temple. "Please don't make me tense." I knew it was time to be nice. I smiled and tried to look willing. "You may wear something colorful and light. No need to be fancy," she assured me.

  "Will we picnic?"

  "Of course, pumpkin. We'll feast."

  * * *

  I carried the feast: roast beef and French breads, peaches, soft cheese and cress (for minerals). A Nehi, of course, and sparkhng water for Mother. With the sun disappearing and a low fog floating in, we forsook the park and took the steep steps down to Cow Hollow. I was bundled in my best white sweater, woolen socks pulled up to my knickers, the wicker basket held snug to my chest. Mother preceded me, the hem of her gingham dress sweeping the stone steps as she rushed along. The drawing kits and blanket were tucked up under her arm. I was hungry and that made even the air delicious, its salty moistness rolling in around us.

  Cow Hollow marks the "Station Point" of Mother's panorama, the point from which the picture is seen. It's Lesson One in Ruskin: "Sight Point, Sight Line, Station Point, and Station Line." It's no surprise we end up there every third session or so, as her drawing relies on the visual and mine requires only memory. I'll draw anywhere. Her model can be seen only at the Cow Hollow "studio." "We're off to the studio," she'll say, and off we'll go, down the steps, a few hundred yards to the small grassy field. The blanket laid, we set up under our favorite tree, kits on laps, pencils in hand and soon the afternoon is gone.

  Good enough for me. I love the panorama, the closeness and noise of the construction, the bare trace of swamp-smell creeping from out of the landfill when the wind blows in off the bay.

  We spread the blanket out on our spot and placed Ruskin within easy reach (though Mother never consults the text, and I only intermittently). Our primary focus is on the play of charcoal and paper, and on the food.

  "Do try the cress with a smudge of cheese, dearest," Mother implored me, balancing her sketch in one hand while she pushed the cheese about the plate with a knife. I was quaffing my Nehi and so could not reply. The cress and cheese, truth be told, was an innovation of mine from our last lesson, two days earlier.

  I looked to the sky thoughtfully and tried again to imagine the shapes of the formless, insubstantial clouds that washed across that twilight memory from Bolinas. Inevitably I thought of fingers reaching, but when put to paper they proved as wrong as any other reconstruction. Mother's pencil was tick-tacking briskly across her panorama, marking each point with confidence.

  "Do you suppose I could leave it all in darkness?" I asked, seeking instruction. Mother looked up with a bit of beef dangling from her bright smile.

  "Your project must suit your ambitions, dumpling," she began, obviously as a preface. "But I understand your ambitions to be a good sight more than rendering the mere darkness. Don't be daunted so early on." And she gazed at my uncertain sketch with compassion. The fog moved in silence nearby the fairgrounds, tumbling now from the tree tops high on the Presidio's hills.

  "I want my rendering to be true, though. Mummy. What if it was truly darkness?"

  "Well, was it? You've the best judge of that." She was no help at all. I put my soft charcoal back to the paper's face and made intuitive motions with my wrist, hoping the truth would emerge from some less conscious, perhaps muscular source. It was just no good at all.

  "Perhaps you should pay closer attention to Ruskin. I believe this volume is meant to address just such problems as you might be having." She pushed the heavy book past some bits of bread and up against my tired bum.

  Ruskin went on from the basic perpendiculars into ever more complex geometric puzzles, outlining in detail a matrix of simple forms which, if properly executed, would, he promised, guide one to a true rendering. Mother, it seemed, was right. I put aside my dirty she
et and began with Problem One, "To Fix the Position of a Given Point.''

  Our afternoon turned quickly into a cold, foggy dusk and we packed the picnic and returned up the steep stairs to the house and a warm fire (once I'd hauled the wood) in the fireplace. I kept reading Ruskin most of the evening, out of sheer enthusiasm for finally finding a guide who, it was promised, would lead me to fulfill my fine ambition. Father descended from his study to cook a hearty peasant soup and our evening ended with a chapter of Melmoth read by the fireside, mostly by me in my most dramatic voices, and then sleep.

  A letter arrived today, to Father from his brother Maury. It said simply:

  Dear Robert,

  I've joined up. Kitchener, and all that.

  Good God this boot stinks. Our captain's got us marching six or eight hours each day. Rather nice countryside though, Sevenoaks or thereabouts. Could you possibly send me a piano? Oh, yes, the facts of the matter: Fifth Battalion, medical. I chop and sew. Two more weeks in Blighty, then to the front. I'm in for the duration, Christmas or thereabouts. I need (if not a piano) clean stockings. More American cigarettes, please (very valuable for trade). Jeffers, Tolland and Smithy here with me (and they smell worse than even I). Of birds here, many and cacophonous. I could not begin to name them.

  Hymns sung to high heaven each evening at dusk. I'm taken by the wide green hills, though not so crazy in awe as those many east Londoners down with us. The likes of them haven't seen more than brick and coalbins since they came into this world. I'm reminded most of our boyhood summers near Cooperstown—waking with the noisy birds by dawn, the lush green trees waving in the slight winds, the world fresh and dew-covered. And oh, this regimen of marching and mock battles. I'm fit as a horse and dead asleep come every evening. A war at last. Thank God I came across the Atlantic to a civilized nation where they still fight wars. I pity you your neutrality and trust it will not last. More soon.

  30 AUGUST 1914

  Duncan and I slept with the windows wide open and woke to a pair of yellowthroats resting on the windowsill, which aside from being very storybook is rare enough that I got a tingle down my spine and tried quietly to sneak out and up the stairs to tell Father. But when we came back they were gone.

  We used, it seems, to get many more and stranger birds around the house. Of course it might be like Christmas and birthdays in its just seeming to have been more glorious because I used to be little and when you're little everything else is so much more than you, so much bigger and grander and more mysterious. But Father tells me no, it isn't just that, there really were more and stranger birds then, and they've gone because the marshlands have gone.

  Much of the flat stretching east from the Presidio was wetlands just three years ago, swamp and ponds and tidal marsh. Pickle weed, cordgrass. It smelled like a dying sea monster, like something from very deep and long ago slithering in amongst the muck. This was my father's favorite spot for birding, either up on the hill with his spyglasses or crawling about in the marsh. We built a low wooden shelter where we could stay and sometimes he'd be down there overnight to see or hear whatever was to be seen or heard.

  The hut was a low lean-to facing east, covered with reeds and cordgrass for camouflage. It had a small cookstove near the open end. I saw it get buried under a river of mud from the dredging hose, in April two years ago, when they started filling in the wetlands to build the Fair. The dredging machine looked like an overgrown insect, with its metal-boxed body and that hideously long, belching hose jerking about as though with some strange life force. It buried our hut with one spastic blast and swung crazily away, spraying and spewing enough to bury the swamp in a matter of months.

  Though that's forced the birds to nest in more distant parts of the bay, we have gotten, instead, something more and stranger than any exotic animal could ever hope to be. They're building the Jewel City on that foundation of muck pumped up from below the sea. The Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915. P.P.I.E.! "The definitive event of our epoch," as the mayor has called it.

  Already the central courts have the look of a unified city, planned in perfect symmetry and pleasing to the eye in all directions. Jules Guerin, the Color Master, has orchestrated the placement of each panel and ornament, the whole assemblage running the range from tawny earth tones to bright cerulean blue and bursts of orange, with every color chosen to accent the natural features of the bay and surrounding hills. Guerin, it is said, has even worked with the various tones of fog. Mother, who actually met this wizard, says Guerin has found his inspiration in the ancient cities of the Orient, with which he is familiar.

  The grounds are open on Sundays now, despite the Fair's being still unfinished. Thousands come each weekend to see what there is to see and to measure the progress that's been made since the previous Sunday. Lincoln Beachey flies daredevil loops in his aeroplane above the bay. The throngs promenade down the broad avenues and amongst the beautiful gardens of the central courts. We saw Beachey's historic indoor aeroplane ride, the first and longest in history, from one end of the Palace of Machinery to the other. Duncan's dad got us in to see it, as he is an artisan in the Sculpture Factory.

  Father hates the Fair.

  1 SEPTEMBER 1914

  Today the sky is clouds, pale and bruised on the underside, dropping low into the trees, wrapping round the headlands but not yet in on the bay. The salt air is in my nose and mouth, filling me in deep breaths. 1 fear the Seals are a lost cause, having dropped another series to Venice. Schaller is the only Seal not in a swoon and the pitching has never been capable of hindering even a flea. I've told Duncan that I won't go again until they put together at least a week at .500. "Fat chance you won't," he says. "If I do I'll stay mum in the stands. And no autographs or watching warm-ups." Really I intend to bring my Ruskin and do work while the hapless home-nine flails on field.

  Mother will be Winged Victory, standing fifty-seven feet high where the Avenue of Progress bumps up against the Esplanade. Duncan's father will render her in false marble. He's invited us down to watch.

  2 SEPTEMBER 1914

  Duncan's mother is in Persia, leading an expedition to uncover the secrets of the Borj Rock tombs near Mehyd Salih in the Arabian desert. She's English and an archaeologist. She won't come over till next year, Duncan says. A letter arrived today, only seven months after it was sent.

  "Having, as yet, little facility with the local tongue," she wrote, "I obliged myself to a Bedwin family for passage out of the low reaches and along Doughty's route to the rocks. In the stagnant mid-winter air only loathsome insects and the soft murmurings of Zeyd, my guide, and one of his wives were to be heard. Our desert peace was, most unfortunately, soon interrupted by gunfire ringing from the hills above us."

  That's what Duncan showed me, to impress me with the danger of her adventure.

  Duncan says he'd like to go out into the dry golden hills stretching east from the bay, just with me and a donkey and a small pack of provisions. We'd find mysteries greater even than the Borj Rock tombs or Bolinas, he says. Ancient places, older than the bristly-cone pines, hidden caves masked by volcanic steam and canyons dropping deep into the earth, peopled by mummies and exotic, sure-footed animals. We'd leave it all be and I'd sketch each detail in my drawing kit. We'd remember the stories the people tell and befriend all the animals, coming back with our little treasure, and never ever saying where.

  At dinner Duncan's father came by unannounced. His English is odd and his bushy mustache kept getting filled with gobs of green caper gravy and little bits of lamb. Father asked about the various Middle Eastern plagues and Mr. Taqdir ignored him, chatting instead about his plans for Mother. Tomorrow Duncan and I go to watch them work.

  Dear Robert,

  Four a.m. and the trains are standing empty and impatient. We've been up and ready since three, no food in our bellies, but plenty of nerves and coffee to keep us jumping. Scores of rail cars have pulled in empty, hitching up in long trains, seven or eight abreast in the yards. We'll be loa
ding up within the hour.

  The sky is full and black above us. Tolland, Jake and Smithy and I've got a small fire in an old rubbish tin and there's plenty more with us crowding in close and singing. We'll sing our way east to Dover soon.

  I should be at the fighting before the next dawn.

  3 SEPTEMBER 1914

  This drizzly gray morning we accompanied mother to her first day of work at the Fair. She will be modeling, first as Winged Victory, and later in a variety of more minor roles. What a strange and wondrous sight the grizzly workings of the Fair offered. It was like crawling inside some enormous mechanical body and seeing the bare iron wheels that grind secretly inside. It was like attending class in a doctor's surgical theater, watching him lift the unstrung muscle from off the armbone, the skin having been slit neatly from elbow to wrist and turned back like a bedsheet.

  From a distance, you see (and always in the finished sections), the Fair gives the appearance of an ancient and glorious city, longstanding and whole. The heavy marble walls, the dense ornamentation, could only be the product of the centuries, marching ever forward, leaving their traces in accretions on the simple structures of the festival city. The fog-shrouded panorama, seen from the hill's crest on Fillmore, is breathtaking and utterly convincing. Mother compares it to the fabled cities of Khartoum and Damascus, which I have seen only on maps in the atlas.

  But this dreary morning we crept closer, riding the trolley down Fillmore to the main gate, and passing through onto the unfinished grounds. It was all soft dirt and mud. The grounds were crisscrossed by a chaotic network of railway tracks bearing pump cars loaded down with wood and stone and steel. Men labored at the two-ended pumps, propelling their heavy cargo slowly along the makeshift rails and out into the low-lying fog. Rattling and bangs and the shouting of the workmen echoed from out of the fractured ruins.