Landscape: Memory Read online

  It somehow seemed a grotesque reminder of the quake, this disassembled scene, a strange ghost hovering there amongst us. Everything was all split up into pieces.

  Teams of men and mules tugged at the various parts, hoisting them on high pulleys to dangerous positions, spilling barrels of travertine plaster into wide, flat molds, fastening this to that and that to another. The low gray sky drifted in amongst the rising skeleton frames and scattered rubble. The steady calls of the workmen continued, muffled in the clouds. Before us, the muddy breadth of the Avenue of Progress opened up onto the bay. Its entire length lay cluttered with stacks of lumber and various carts and cars burdened with barrels and bricks and building parts—finials, capitals, pilasters and balustrades.

  At the very heart of this busy scene, the source and center of all this earnest labor, was the Sculpture Factory. Filling fully three long warehouses, its interior ablaze with electrical lights, the Sculpture Factory was Mr. Taqdir's workplace and the focus of our morning's visit. It fed the furious construction of the Fair with an endless river of finished sculpture rolling out of its northern end. Twin tracks carried car after car of plaster casts: gods and horses, natives, nymphs, and winged women carrying torches, all enlarged to grotesque extremes. More sculpture than has ever been produced in any one place ever, or so The Call had said. We picked our way across the muddy boulevard and followed the railway tracks into the main building.

  Mr. Taqdir was waiting. He kissed Mother's hand, and then he and Duncan kissed, which they do every time they see each other and Duncan says they always do it no matter how old you are, even if it's just family friends and not your father. As if to confirm it, Mr. Taqdir kissed me too. He smushed his thick bristly mustache into my face, talking between kisses, grabbing me with both hands and tousling my hair. He's a very big man.

  The room stretched out forever, filled with strange fragments of bodies blown up to enormous proportions, some apparently made of marble, others covered with a porcupine layer of metal spikes, as if they'd broken out in some horrible iron rash. Dozens of horses with holes where their backs should be, each standing three-score hands high, leaned in long domino rows, stacked up and ready for placement. Mr. Taqdir even looked small here, stamping confidently through the littered remains, pointing and explaining the various stations in the warehouse, the destinations of the finished parts, and the competence or incompetence of his fellow sculptors.

  "You see the smoothness," he said, and he took my mother's hand, passing it over an elephant's leg. "Soon it is gone on top of the Eastern World. The central courts?" He smiled with all his face as if that warm radiance could carry his complete meaning. He stood facing Mother now, apparently inspecting her for artistic detail, his glance passing from feature to feature of her fine face.

  "You will be a beautiful giant soon. Smooth as the elephant," he said, by way of flattery.

  Mother looked at him benignly. She had placed her foot on a tangled wad of gummy paper and was busily pawing at the ground, trying to rid herself of the garbage.

  "Fascinating, Mr. Taqdir," she said breathily, drawing her datebook out from her mammoth handbag. "I'm in awe. We must, however, set a schedule." Mother put her pen to paper, awaiting word from her new employer. But he just smiled.

  "The working begins now," he told her. "We will discuss timetables when it's time. Never hurry to go, I will be saying. One thing and then the next."

  Mother pushed the datebook back deep into the folds of her ruglike purse, giving Mr. Taqdir a brisk smile.

  Men in dirtied white coveralls worked in bunches around one or another mammoth construction, teams of seven or eight at each station, translating life-size clay models into giant sculpture by means of a three-dimensional pantograph. There must have been a dozen such machines all told, swinging this way and that, setting the surface dimensions of each piece, all working in the vast airy expanse of the open warehouse, white walls and plaster dust all around.

  The pantograph has a stiff iron finger maybe three feet long extending out from a mechanical frame. By moving this finger over the surface of the model and touching it down at each important point of relief, the sculptor causes a corresponding part to define the same surface in immensely exaggerated proportions.

  (Mother helped me with this part.)

  At that other end, several men record these positions by pushing nails into a monstrous tangle of wood and steel pipes, railroad ties and chicken mesh, which has been welded, pushed and pounded into roughly the right shape prior to this finishing work. The whole thing is then covered in travertine plaster, the surface barely concealing each nail head. That way it has the same shape as the model.

  It takes days for each piece, weeks for a whole sculpture. When they get it all set, the same machine is used to check the finished piece for accuracy. Actually molding the original model is the least of it.

  That first day Mr. Taqdir finished the work in clay and got his assistants started on the lumber-and-steel monster with the afternoon not half done. Before we left we could see the posture and frame of my mother emerging from the chaos of railroad ties and bent pipes, wadded masses of chicken mesh stuffed in amongst beams to fill out her figure, her spine and limbs defined by the crude lines of thick timber and scrap iron left over from the construction of the buildings. Soon it will be "smooth as the elephant," as Mr. Taqdir says, the twists and ties of metal tucked in and hidden beneath its thin plaster shell. And then it will be ready, rolled out along the railway and positioned atop its pillar facing the bay. Winged Victory.

  6 SEPTEMBER 1914

  Dear Robert,

  The weather is glorious here. Odd, isn't it? I'd been told a war was on. I've dug a fine ditch and may lie quite calm in the dusk watching the ocean of stars wash across this black night sky. I see in the paper the Queen's stepped down from the Palace to take a tour of a small handful of model trenches. Nothing so posh here, though we've the option of adding any rooms we care to dig out from the dirt. Which reminds me to ask, again, after that piano I requested not so many weeks ago. Where is it? I've built a music room in the second trench, carved from the mud and lit by a simple skylight (I pray it doesn't rain), and all I've been able to do is sing.

  We're under some lovely strafing now. Probably I've given us away with my noisy pen scratches. That spit of orange fire from the machine gunners is a wondrous sight. It fairly jumps out into the black. Provided one's not hit, it's worth the poke of the head just to catch a glimpse.

  Six hours at the cutting table today, a brutal sight. I don't fancy much more of that on the morrow.

  On bright busy days, watching Mother work, say, at our late-afternoon drawing lesson, me sitting on our blanket in Cow Hollow, I will see her standing just so, staring toward the Fair, perhaps, the shroud of fog not yet hiding every detail. And I can't help but see the rough metal structure, the broken beams and welded rails there, in her posture, just below the surface. If I ripped her flesh away, there it would be, pounded, pushed and welded, the nails driven in to pinpoints by Mr. Taqdir and his team of sculptors. It's a horrible thought, but it's irresistible.

  Watching Birds

  _______________________________________________

  1 JANUARY 1915

  Each year begins with an outing to the dunes, and this year Mother insisted we bring her golf clubs. It's a little fad Mr. Taqdir has introduced us to. Father says it's all very silly.

  We five went together, Duncan and Father and Mother and Mr. Taqdir and I, wrapped and muffled against the thick chilly fog, burdened by the puzzling array of clubs and a bucket of balls. I had no concerns, really, save the giddy feeling of the New Year and the doggy smell of my woolen sweater, wet from sweat on the inside and the salty ocean mists on the outside. The trolley dropped us off along the western edge of Sunset and disappeared into the mist, clang-clanging its impatient bell.

  This morning there was no wind, just the thick cold clouds settled down onto the sands turning the landscape gray and leaving the dunes
silent and still and damp. We marched west into the long wet reach of sand. Father leading without a word. Duncan and I caddied the clubs. Mother and Mr. Taqdir followed close behind discussing war, which Mr. Taqdir held to be a beautiful, though tragic, achievement of the human spirit. Mother's pointy shoes kept digging uncomfortably deep into the mucky sand and she was soon panting like a poodle, prompting Mr. Taqdir's speculations with nothing more than an occasional grunt or nod of the head. Duncan looked at me with a determined grin. We were Swiss soldiers in the Alps now, or Eskimos on a pilgrimage across the barren tundra.

  I watched Father's sturdy back advancing farther and farther ahead into the high-shouldered dunes. His spyglasses swung to and fro as he pushed on, easily mounting a steep ridge and disappearing down the other side. We were somewhere in the middle. Sunset gone from sight, gulls wheeling high above, calling into the thick clouds. Father appeared, small and steady, mounting a more distant dune, and disappeared again down its far face.

  "Perhaps we should tee off," Mother panted. Mr. Taqdir was sniffing the listless air, gazing north or west or east into the indistinct mists, staring through the damp nothing, across that whole hopeless expanse of gray dunes, staring expectantly, as though the bright flagged pins of the real golf course might be out there, somewhere, beckoning.

  He pulled a little square of turf from his canvas fishing creel and laid it neatly on the sand, puncturing its middle with a small wooden tee.

  "Yes," he harrumphed. "It is time." Duncan handed him a hefty driver. Mother was fishing about the bottom of her ample carpet bag, digging for golf balls, while Mr. Taqdir took a few fierce swings at nothing, his bulky driver whistling neatly through the empty air.

  "Pumpkin," Mother called. "We've only a half dozen balls."

  "But I packed the little bucket. Mummy," I assured her. "There were several dozen, at least." Mother's golfing style required an ample supply, particularly out in the dunes, where a well-hit ball was almost invariably lost. Father was a black speck on the farthest horizon, a tiny black nothing standing still atop the final dune, his arms raised, apparently pressing his powerful spyglasses to his face. A little white spot seemed to dangle at his waist.

  "Is that your bucket?" Duncan asked, pointing out there at the distant dot of white. Indeed it was.

  Pelicans were diving out at sea, there beyond Father, wheeling through the sky and turning a sharp pivot down, straight down into the ice-cold waves. I was running strong and steady, running through the deep valleys, up and over the difficult hills, stumbling in the damp sand and running to get the bucket back. Father was, it seemed, a mile distant, stumbling down from off his dune, fixing, I imagined, on a better site from which to watch the marauding birds. I heard Mother's distant cry of "Fore!" and the soft thwack of her wooden driver.

  That exquisite delirium came over me, that feeling when my blood is rushing so swiftly through the muscles of my legs, and my arms and body flexing with each stretching stride and pounding of my feet pushing into the sand, and my lungs stretched full force and aching, drawing the whole salty cold atmosphere through me, desperate for oxygen and hungry, hungry there at the very back of my throat. I ran and I ran like this so hard and long I finally stumbled and fell flat in the sand.

  It all stopped, the quiet as sudden and complete as an earthquake. I lay flat on my back and stared, dizzy, into the sky. The clouds were opening up at sea, but staying thick with chilly fog in above the golfers. Mother's tiny sphere sailed silently off the lip of a far dune, a tiny little whiteness winging away into the drifting mist. And then, after, came the soft thwack.

  I scooted backward up the dune, unching on my behind, to see farther and watch the full progress of the balls. The dunes sat in long rows of ridges, wrapped round in tangled turns and worked over every day by winds or rain. The sky opened up in patches, letting loose shafts of sunlight to shine down into the endless sand. And there was Father, two or three dunes distant, regarding me calmly through the spyglasses. I'd somehow run clear past him, making my way almost to the sea. Occasional wisps of fog would sweep between us, but his watch went uninterrupted. I lay there, staring east beyond him, staring after the silent white specks. They sailed through broad sweeps of blue sky where the clouds had blown suddenly clear. Father stood, caught in the bright sun, watching.

  Amidst this crowded chaos of golf games and shifting weather his attention had fixed, as it always seemed to fix, trained and focused through the powerful glasses. His aspect was calm, his two feet firmly planted in the heavy sands. He stood steady in the slight wind, the dune rising under him like a lifting hump of whale.

  Behind me the pelicans wheeled, tracing wide circles up into the disappearing mists and diving ferociously down into the cold ocean. Those idiot birds, driven through the sky on instincts and hunger, eyes wide open through air and icy salt water. They dove deep into the sea after fish they'd somehow spotted from high above. I wondered at this strange intelligence of theirs. Some queer dumb knowledge of each moment, felt in their tough muscled necks. Father was watching them, watching beyond me, this feston of birds.

  I stretched my arms out and wheeled around the top of the dune, feeling for any intelligence that might emerge from my body, from the flex of muscles across my back. I dipped and danced, not thinking, or rather, thinking to not think, imagining perhaps Indians or mating quail. Itucked and bobbed and still nothing took me, no wave of feeling or intuition swept through me. I got dizzy and fell down.

  10 JANUARY 1915

  Mother went to a suffrage meeting this morning and left me at home with Father and the rain beating on the windows. It was as wet as it gets today, the clouds so full and low and dumping like a mammoth shower let loose. Our road's a river of mud. Lincoln Beachey had said he'd fly come hell or high water and I'd planned with Duncan to watch from Cow Hollow but they wouldn't allow Beachey up, or said that was the reason, and Duncan decided not to leave his house and probably not to leave his bed for that matter. I imagine he'll lie about in his nightshirt all day, bundled in his eiderdown and napping, listening to comical songs on the Victrola and emerging only for food or a toasty fire, if one is made. If I were a bird I'd fly there.

  I'm not so sedentary as he and was up and about by ten, boiling water for breakfast mush and bringing dry wood up from the cellar.

  Today I finished Frankenstein. I fancy the monster's a woman, as he seems to suffer all that women suffer. He's not allowed to speak. He's judged by his appearance only. He must stand by and wait for a rather infantile man to do the necessary work, allowed to help only through threats and cajoling. As it's written by a woman I imagine she intended it as a parable, but Mother tells me my reading is incorrect. It's about Prometheus, she says, and the horrible things that happen when man plays at being God. I don't mind that I'm wrong really, but I like imagining the monster in a dress.

  I'm going to make a parlor play of Frankenstein with a woman as the monster. I'll use costumes from the attic and some from Duncan to give it an exotic flavor. We'll set it in the dining room with curtains hung across the archway so the audience can watch from the parlor. Mother can play the monster.

  Father spent the day in his study, holed away in the very back of the upstairs. At lunchtime I took two bowls of bean soup and some hot bread on a tray up the steep, narrow stairs and down the dusty hallway to his study door. I knocked but he didn't answer so I opened up and went in. The room was bright and warm, its three walls of windows only half blocked by books and letting in all the light the day had to offer. Father was standing by the window, looking out at the wet green wall of trees that marks the edge of the Presidio, and he spoke up as I set the heavy tray down on a pile of papers.

  "Isn't it remarkable," he said, still staring out at the sky. The clouds had lifted enough to see their movement east, the white-gray bottoms rolling like swells on the ocean. "You can fairly see the wind.''

  I sat nearby and looked out. I noticed the DeBardi kids mucking about in the muddy street, sliding full f
orce down the hill, like the water ride at the Chutes. They were all colored a uniform yellow-brown with only the whites of their eyes and the black of their hair showing through the mud.

  The sky was remarkable. I remembered watching the same patterns and movement from Mount Tam, watching from above what we now saw from below. I imagined the confusion of a man looping the loop in his aeroplane, racing through the two-faced clouds above the deep-blue bay.

  "How can birds see in clouds?" I asked, wondering aloud. "What if it's dense fog from top to bottom and they can't find their way?" Really I wasn't worried about the birds. It was myself I was imagining floating lost in the fog.

  "Birds don't get lost," Father said. "Some fly with their eyes closed, usually while in a flock. They're guided by the sounds of the other birds' motions." I felt an immediate kinship with these birds. "Some may best be described as sleeping." Sleeping birds. It seemed at once wonderful and terrifying.

  "What if they all fall asleep?" I asked, pursuing my personal fears. Father seemed intrigued by the possibility.

  "They must just continue forward. I'd be keen to chart their paths. Imagine, the patterns of sleeping birds. Fibonacci's works on the nautilus and pine cone might interest you," he continued, though it seemed obvious they wouldn't. I wanted to know about the birds.

  "Wouldn't they starve? Or run into a hillside or drown or something terrible?"

  "Oh, no, I don't imagine it like that at all. Guided by their own sounds and all of them sleeping? It all seems so beautifully mysterious." And I looked out at the sky and tried to imagine how he must see it. "Their path must be coded somewhere deep in their instincts, some ancestral, primitive knowledge of the winds and the land, blossoming only in their sleep. Don't you think?" And he rustled my hair as fathers do.