Had a Good Time, page 6
I have filled my fountain pen.
I turn the card over.
I look at it for a long time, its blank, divided back. Finally I take a stamp from the folder in the drawer, a green, one-cent Benjamin Franklin, the image of a man who died when he was eighty-four and who wrote a poem, which I was compelled in school to memorize, that said, “Death is a fisherman, the world we see / his fish-pond is, and we the fishes be.” I lick the stamp and put it on the card, and then I sit for another long time, feeling irritated with this old man, for him to live to such an old age and to say this vapid thing about death. This man our country reveres, an old fool is.
But I no better am. I’ve written nothing yet to my husband. My mind is seizing idly on this and that. The chased hard rubber of my Waterman pen. The ticking of the clock from the front room. The faint snap of the sheets in the breeze. The stirring of the maple tree. We first kissed under a vast maple tree, Carl and I. Decoration Day, 1904. We’d met in a late March snow that year. I came out of the general store and I had my shopping bag clutched to my chest. The air was unexpectedly full of snow and I was dazzled by this. I lifted my face as I stepped out and turned and I even closed my eyes to let the flakes fall on my eyelids and I ran into Carl Peterson, a great tall oak of a man whose arms went around me even before I had looked into his face, though he was a perfect gentleman, Carl was always a gentleman and his arms were there simply to keep me from falling. As soon as I was steady on my feet he withdrew and we looked into each other’s face and he did not seem particularly handsome to me in those first moments. I am an overly critical sort, I think. It is my nature. His eyes were rather too close together and his face too round and too ruddy and though he was clearly a young man, he had deep-shadowed furrows across his brow above his nose and defining his cheeks from nose to lips. I would come to love these places on his face. I would run my fingertip in these soft grooves of his face. Even when I had long prayed for that ruddiness to return, and when his face had begun to go gaunt, I would lie beside him and run my fingertip in these places and he would close his eyes and perhaps dream of how we met.
He suddenly bent forward and I took a step back, startled. Then he rose up with the tinned milk that had fallen from my bag. “I make these,” he said.
“Yes?” I said, not comprehending at first, though the new Pet Milk factory was a source of civic pride in our town. Flakes of snow were clinging to his kersey cap.
“Well, so to speak,” he said, lifting the can and considering it, his lower lip pushing up thoughtfully. Too thoughtfully to be serious.
“I’d say cows made those,” I said, surprised at myself that I’d suddenly banter with a strange man.
The deep furrow across his brow dipped down sharply, but not for a moment did I think I’d made a mistake. We knew at once, both of us, what we were doing. He said, “Well now, miss, do you think the cows run all the kettles and vacuum pans and heating chambers and cooling tanks to make this stuff pure and safe?”
“So the cows work for you?”
“And then there’s the canning.” He lifted the tinned milk high. “No cow can do a double seam on a tin can.”
“All right,” I said. “I’m prepared to give you credit. . . . You own the company, do you?”
He drew up to full height and he laid the can in the center of his chest. “Please,” he said. “I’m a proud member of the working class, which does the real work. Neither cow nor tycoon can usurp our importance.” He paused to let that sink in for a moment and I duly stood there looking up at him, agape. Then he winked at me and said, “I am a foreman, however.”
And that was how we met, Carl Peterson and I. And we kissed under a maple tree up along a creek where we lingered, sitting on a log, and we talked, and there were daisies all around and then we kissed under the big tree, and this was on Decora-tion Day, 1904, the Pet Milk factory picnic, and all the workingmen tipped their hats to Carl and he was dressed in coat and collar and tie and I wore my lingerie dress and I carried a parasol, and without a fuss we walked away from all the others, and on the log, before we got to the maple tree, we sat silent for a long while, a few daisies drooping in his large hand that rested on his knee, and he was unaware of them, he had picked them thinking, I’m sure, to give them to me, but something else had come to his mind and he’d forgotten. I was feeling very tender about this absentmindedness in him and I was watching that hand, its stillness, the yellow flower faces leaning there. He was thinking hard. And then he said, with no preamble, no clearing of his throat or shuffling around, without that hand and the daisies stirring even a little bit, he said just straight out, having quietly worked up the courage, “I love you.”
“Well,” I said after only a single quick breath, “I love you too.”
I slept in the yard last night in a reclining chair, my body swaddled like Carl’s. I want to share this sanitarium life of his. Yesterday I ate raw eggs and milk and did exercises, moderately, morning and evening, and I lay in that chair under the sky all day long, trying to think of nothing, resting my body and mind, resting completely and activating my body’s own defenses out in the fresh pure air. On the day we found out for sure that our worst fears about his persistent cough, his afternoon flush, his weakness were true—this was still before the blood—on that day, Dr. Gilbert, who has always looked pale and gaunt himself, truth be told, sat behind his massive desk and his glasses hung round his neck on a cord and he told us straight out. “Mr. Peterson, you have tuberculosis of the lungs.”
I was calm, at this. And, of course, Carl was calm. We had known for a while, though the words had never been spoken between us. But Carl, even from the first, would smother his coughs in some bit of cloth or other, and he would rise up abruptly and walk out of the house to a corner of the yard to spit. Carl and I held hands before Dr. Gilbert, who was going on in a voice tainted with sarcasm about “that German germ hunter who has made us imagine the very air full of contagion.” Then Dr. Gilbert shrugged and said, “These bacilli, though they may well exist, must necessarily fall on favorable soil, fertile soil, to grow and live. So we must build up the soil.”
He had used the same metaphor—apparently the only one he knew—when he’d told me the year before that my ovaries were not properly formed and my womb was tilted. So I cannot have children? I said, not really a question. You have no fertile soil, he said. I imagine him bending over a man suffering a heart attack to say, Your heart lacks fertile soil for beating. He is a fool with his words. I held Carl the night we discovered my barrenness and for several nights thereafter. I held him till morning, my arms around him as if to cradle him. We both shed tears, though with no sounds, no words about this turn of events. There would be no children for us. Though so many die young, anyway. When yellow fever and cholera and smallpox aren’t going around, there’s always influenza and pneumonia and typhus and scarlet fever and measles and whooping cough and diphtheria, to name a few, and there is always a bit of poisoned meat or milk or something else that a child can eat and die from, and, of course, there is tuberculosis. Let us die then, Carl and I, but not a child. It’s better for us not to have a child than to bear a child that will die young, is it not?
It is not. But I have no other consolation.
I rise up from my desk. The postcard is still blank, except for my husband’s name and his final address in this world, the Attleboro Sanitarium, Attleboro, Massachusetts. I turn away from the desk. I cross the room and stand in the doorway from the bedroom to the living room. I look at his armchair by the window. I turn and face into the bedroom. I look at our bed. He wrote me a postcard from Attleboro soon after he arrived to say that the nurses all admired him, how he followed procedures. He wrote, I will surely win next month’s Careful Consumptive Award for sputum management I wrote and asked if there was money for that. I knew he would laugh. He knew I had laughed. I will soon lose this house to the savings and loan. I can go to Worcester and live with my mother. Carnegie has put a library there, I’m sure.
I wait for another thought. I wait for words to say to my husband.
We were so careful. He was always a careful consumptive, even at home, and I let him. I regret that. Standing now looking at our bed I understand that I should have kissed him more. I should have turned his face to me when he was coughing so terribly in the night andI should have taken his face in my hands and kissed him in that moment when he needed no one could give. I should have kissed him on the lips.
I move to the desk now. I sit. I pick up my pen. I think to call him sweetheart. I think to say, My darling I love you and always will. I kiss your dear face, your darling lips. But I write none of this. These are foolish words. True, perhaps, in their way. But foolish in their bland abstractedness. They have nothing to do with the life Carl and I now share.
And then I know what to say.
I remove the cap of my pen, and I angle the card just so, and I write: We’ll meet in death.
And I know what to do. I put the pen down and I push my chair back and I bend to the handkerchief on the floor. I hold it with my two hands, Carl’s handkerchief, and I unfold it. I expose the remnants of his tortured breath and I lift it to my face. And I breathe in, deeply. I breathe into myself my husband’s life, and I pray that I am fertile soil.
* * *
FLIES OVER ALL PITTSBURG
30,000 PERSONS SEE GLENN CURTISS SOAR
Comes Down Without Having Been Asphyxiated —600 Persons Wanted to Go Up With Him, of Whom 75 Were Women—Baldwin Hasn’t Any Luck
PITTSBURG, AUG. 6—The wind favored the aviation meet this evening for the first time in three days and 30,000 people on the hills surrounding Brunot’s Island witnessed three successful flights by Glenn Curtiss.
The boss aviator of the Pittsburg exhibition had a narrow escape in his early attempts this afternoon while trying out the machine he used at Reims, France. The machine had been rebuilt and the wires attached to the rudder had become crossed.
Curtiss started for a straightaway flight across the Brunot’s Island grounds and when he was about fifteen feet above the ground the plane ducked downward. Curtiss shut off his motor and landed with a jolt which threw him off his seat. He discovered on examining the Reims machine that the rudder was not working right, so he put it away.
Curtiss made three good flights. The last was at dusk. He sailed over Brunot’s Island twice, then headed out over the north shore of the Ohio River, passing over the smokestacks of the mills in Allegheny, over the Western Penitentiary and across the hills to McKee’s Rocks on the south shore, then over the mills and back to the island. The 5,000 spectators on the grounds cheered him wildly as he grounded in front of the grand stand.
Capt. Baldwin had trouble with his “red devil” and had to quit for the day after making unsuccessful straightaway flights. Mars also made several straightaway flights, but his machine was too light to work against the wind, which was blowing about ten miles an hour at the time.
Curtiss in one flight took a newspaper writer up with him. He had 600 applicants, among them seventy-five from women, who wanted to accompany him.
from page 4 of The Sun, New York Sunday, August 7,1910
* * *
THIS IS EARL SANDT
This is Earl Sandt of Erie Pa in his Aeroplane just before it fell
I’ve seen a man die, but not like this. There was silence I suddenly around us when he disappeared beyond the JL trees, silence after terrible sounds, that hammering of his engine, the engine of his aeroplane, and the other sound, after.
He had climbed miraculously up and he had circled the field and we all took off our hats as one, the men among us. Mine as well. Hooray, we cried. My son cried out, too. Hooray. This was why we’d come to this meadow. We would peek into the future and cheer it on.
And Earl Sandt hammered overhead and down to the far edge of the pasture, defying the trees, defying the earth. The propeller of his engine spun behind him and he sat in a rattan chair, as if he was on his front porch smoking a cigar. Then he came back from the tree line, heading our way.
I reached down and touched my son on the shoulder. I had never seen an aeroplane and something was changing in me as it approached. I suppose it scared me some. I had no premonition, but I needed to touch my son at that moment. The plane came toward us and there was a stiff wind blowing—the plane bucked a little, like a nervous horse, but Earl Sandt kept him steady, kept him coming forward, and I felt us all ready to cheer again.
Then there was a movement on the wing. With no particular sound. Still the engine. But there was a tearing away. If I had been Earl Sandt, if I had been sitting in that rattan chair and flying above these bared heads, I might have heard the sound and been afraid.
I lifted my camera. This had nothing to do with the thing happening on the wing. I was only vaguely aware of it in that moment. I lifted my camera and I tripped the shutter, and here was another amazing thing, it seemed to me. One man was flying above the earth, and with a tiny movement of a hand, another man had captured him.
Earl Sandt was about to die, but he was forever caught there in that box in my hand. I lowered my Kodak and for a moment the plane was before me against the sky and all I felt was a thing that I sometimes had felt as a younger man, riding up into the Alleghenys alone and there would be a turning in the path and suddenly the trees broke apart and there was a great falling away of the land.
A falling. He fell, Earl Sandt. The aeroplane suddenly reared up on its left side, as if it wanted to turn to the right, but the nose went down and there was so little sky below, so little, and then the aeroplane tried to lift itself, briefly, but the wing was tearing away and the engine hammered loud and Earl Sandt turned sharply right again pointing to the earth and his aeroplane looped, the engine crying out, and he fell, disappearing behind a stand of pine.
There was a heavy thump beyond the trees, and I have nothing in my head to compare it to. Not a barn collapsing, not a horse going down, not the dead sugar maple, forty foot high, I had felled only yesterday in our yard. This sound was new.
And our silence followed. We all of us could not take this in. He had flown, this Earl Sandt, he had raised his goggles to his eyes and stepped into his machine and he had run along the meadow and had lifted into the air, and now I looked into the empty place where he had been, only a moment before. In my head I could see once again the two great wings and the spinning of the propeller and then he was gone.
“Papa?” It was my son’s voice drifting up to me from the silence.I looked into his face.
“It’s all right,” I said, though I knew it was not. I coul feel Matthew’s bones beneath my hand, which still lay on his shoulder.
“He’s gone,” my son said.
I looked to the others. There was a stirring. Some of the women began to cry.
“Mother of God,” one man said and he moved in the direction of the pines. He was right. We had to do something now.
I let go of my son and put the camera in his hand, I turned to the place where Earl Sandt had vanished. “Stay here,” I said.
We ran, perhaps a dozen of us, across the meadow grass and into the pines an I could smell burning and there was smoke up ahead and I could smell a newly familiar thing, a smell of the automobiles that had come to our town, their fuel. Then we broke into a clearing and the aeroplane was crumpled up ahead and beginning to burn.
I was behind several of the men and we were in our Sunday clothes, we had left our churches this morning and had come to see the exhibition of this wonderful thing, and now we were stripping off our coats and winding them around our hands and arms to allow us to reach into the flames, to bring Earl Sandt out. Two men were ahead of me, already bending to the tangle of canvas and wood and metal and smoke. I felt myself slow and stop.
I did not know this man. I had seen him only from afar, only briefly. He had raised his goggles and hidden his eyes and he’d had some intent in his head—to fly, of course, and he did. But he was a man, flesh and blood, and he was lying broken now, ahead of me. There were others to help him. The ones ahead, and still others now, rushing past me. I continued to hesitate, and then I turned away.
Matthew had followed me. He was standing a few yards behind, in the trees. I lifted my hand to acknowledge him, and I found it swathed in my suit coat, expecting the fire.
I moved to my son, unwrapping my arm.
“The others are helping,” I said to him, so he would understand why I had turned away.
“I want to see,” he said.
“No.”
“Pa.”
“No,” I said, firm. I turned him around and we stepped out of the trees. I looked once more into the sky where Earl Sandt had been.
Matthew and I walked from the meadow and through the center of town, passing the Merchants Bank, where I had an office, where I was vice president, and we moved beneath the maples of our street, old trees, dense above us, and we were quiet, my son and I. The meadow, the open sky, all of that, was left behind. Then we reached the place along the road where I could see my house ahead.
The maple was gone from the front edge of my property, dead from blight and felled by my own hand. I looked away, not wanting to, but I felt suddenly bereft of this tree. I was sorry for its passing, this tree. Matthew broke away from me now, began to run. I looked.
His mother was coming down the porch steps. My son ran hard to her, not calling out. She turned her face toward us, saw him approaching, sensing, I think, that something had happened.
I stopped, still separate from them. My daughter, a tall gangly girl, my sweet Naomi, emerged from the house, and for a moment they all three were before me, and the house itself, a fine house, a house we’d lived in for four years now, a solid house with its hipped roof and double-windowed dormer and its clapboard siding the color of sunlight in the brightness of noon.
