The Art of Living and Other Stories Page 23

  “You loved me!” said the Queen and the box, both at once. “How could you?” Neither of them could say another word, because both of them were sobbing.

  Vlemk, confounded, looked over at the Prince for help.

  The Prince shrugged broadly, grinning. “God help you, Vlemk. For most men one such unpredictable creature would be enough!” He gave the cane a little toss, so that it went gracefully end over end and came down onto his fingertip, where he balanced it as before. “Well,” he said, “since everything seems to be all right again, I’d better hurry home to my wife.” He turned to leave.

  “Wife!” shrieked the Queen and the picture at once.

  The Prince’s face reddened and the cane fell off balance. He grabbed it. “How was I to tell you?” he said. “You were sick—perhaps dying, for all I knew….”

  “You’re married?” asked Vlemk.

  “Two weeks ago,” said the Prince. “Politics, you see. But when I heard that the Queen—”

  “You did the right thing,” said Vlemk at once. Abruptly, he laughed. “I thought you were acting a little strangely!”

  Neither the picture or the Queen even smiled. “Oh yes,” said the Queen, and angrily rolled her head from side to side. “You can laugh. What if I’d gotten better because I thought he loved me and then I’d found out? Say what you like, it’s a cruel, cruel world full of falsehood and trickery and delusions!”

  “It’s true, all too true,” said Vlemk, trying not to smile. “All the same, I notice there’s color in your cheeks. One way or another it seems we have muddled through!”

  In secret, the Queen was noticing the same thing. As a matter of fact she had a feeling that if she put her mind to it, she could jump up out of bed and dance. Nothing could please her more than having the Prince with the moustache as only a good friend—he was a wonderful horseman—and not having to worry about that other business. The difficulty was that any minute now he would leave, and so would Vlemk, and there were important matters not yet decided between Vlemk and herself. The thought of his leaving was like a knife in her heart; she would gladly give up her life, her very bones and flesh, and be nothing but a summery warmth around him, a patch of sunlight on his head, anything at all, but near him. Yet try as she might, she could think of no way to keep him here now except petulance and sulking.

  “Well,” Vlemk was saying now, fiddling with his hat, stealing a glance at the flowers near the door.

  “Oh yes,” said the Queen bitterly, “trickery and delusion are just fine with you. They’re the stock and trade of an artist.”

  Vlemk looked at her, then down at his shoes, and sighed.

  Her eyes became cunning. It crossed her mind that if she knew how to put some kind of curse on him, he’d figure out some way to be near her till the day she lifted it, which would be never.

  “Well, it’s getting late,” the Prince said.

  Vlemk the box-painter nodded.

  All the while the box had been watching them with her lips slightly pursed. Suddenly she said, “Vlemk, why don’t you marry the Queen and come live with us?”

  “Yes, why not?” said the Queen quickly, a little crazily. She felt her face stinging, an enormous blush rushing into her cheeks.

  “Me?” Vlemk said, then hastily added, “I was thinking the same thing myself!”

  “Wonderful!” cried the Prince. “We can visit each other and go riding!”

  Vlemk smiled eagerly. The thought of riding a horse made him faint with terror.

  “You mean we—you and I—” stammered the Queen. Her face went pale green, then red, then white.

  “If you like,” Vlemk said.

  “Oh, Vlemk, Vlemk, I’m sorry about the curse!” the picture wailed. “It was just—I mean …” Now all at once her words came tumbling. “One has to have something to hold back—a woman, that is. If she just gives the man she loves everything, just like that—”

  Vlemk nodded. “I understand.” He was thinking, absurd as it may sound, about box-painting, about the risks one ran, the temptations.

  “But is it possible?” asked the Queen. “You and I, a box-painter and a Queen?”

  “Well, it’s odd of course,” said Vlemk. “No doubt we’ll have our critics.”

  “You won’t go back to sleeping in gutters or anything?” the Queen asked.

  “I don’t think so,” said Vlemk, “though life is always full of surprises.”

  Abruptly forgetting her fears, the Queen reached out her arms to him, smiling joyfully. He bent to her, smiling back, and they embraced, quick and light as children.

  Now the servants, having noticed the change in mood around the Queen’s bed, crept in nearer to find out what was happening. The Prince too had noticed that everything had changed entirely. “Well,” he said, “I must go now, as I said.” He made no move to leave.

  “You’re welcome to stay to supper if you like,” the Queen said.

  Vlemk, as if the palace were his own, reached out his hand to the Prince. The Prince looked from Vlemk to the Queen. He stood for a long moment staring into space, puzzling things through; then abruptly his face lit up. “No,” he said, gripping his cane with a sort of easy firmness, “but I’ll come for the wedding. I must go home to my wife.”

  “And I,” said Vlemk, “must go home and make my various preparations.”

  It was now clear to even the least of the servants that everything had changed and all was well. They seized Vlemk’s hands, also the Prince’s, kissing the backs and fronts of them and thanking both Vlemk and the Prince for what they’d done. Vlemk beamed, nodding and bowing and telling them on every side, “It’s nothing! It’s nothing!” moving them along with him to the door as he did so, walking with the Prince, waving his repeated farewells to the picture and the Queen, who’d come out to the bedroom door, the box in the Queen’s left hand. In the high front room the driver of the carriage was waiting, more elegant than ever, and on either side of him stood servants with armloads of flowers for Vlemk and the Prince. “Come back quickly,” cried the Queen and the picture, both at once.

  Vlemk waved his hat.

  “Well,” said the driver, bowing and falling into step beside Vlemk and the Prince, “things have turned out better than I thought they would.”

  “So they have,” said Vlemk. “It’s good to have everything settled at last. It’s good to know exactly where we stand!”

  They came to the high arched door and the driver stepped ahead of Vlemk to seize the door-handle. As he opened the door, a sharp blast of wintery wind swept in, filling out the female servants’ skirts like sails and hurling in fine-ground blizzard snow.

  “Oh!” cried the Queen and the picture on the box, astonished.

  “It’s winter!” cried the Prince, so startled he could hardly believe his eyes. Instantly the flowers in the servants’ arms began to tremble and wilt, and the leaves of the flowers inside the room began to blow around crazily.

  “Winter,” said Vlemk, full of wonder, his voice so quiet that only the carriage driver heard.

  They had to lift their feet high, Vlemk, the Prince, and the carriage driver, to make it through the drifts to the black leather, gold-studded carriage. The carriage of the Prince stood just beyond. In every direction except straight above, the world was white and lovely, as if the light came from inside the snow. Straight above—or so it seemed to Vlemk, standing with one hand on his beard, the other in his pocket—the sky was painfully bright, blinding, as if someone had lifted the cover off the world, so that soon, as usual, everything in it would be transformed.

  COME ON BACK

  Forty-five years ago, when Remsen, New York, was called “Jack” and nearly all the people who lived there were Welsh, my uncle, or, rather, my maternal great-uncle, E. L. Hughes, ran the feedmill. His name is no longer remembered in the village, and the feedmill is in ruins, set back behind houses and trees so that you have to know it’s there to find it. There’s a big sprawling Agway that already looks ancient, tho
ugh it can’t be more than fifteen or twenty years old, on the other side of town.

  I seldom get up to that area anymore, but I used to visit often when I was a child living with my parents on their farm outside Batavia. My grandfather Hughes, whom I never knew except by the wooden chest of carpenter’s tools he left my father and a few small, tattered Welsh hymnbooks he left my mother, had originally settled in the village of Remsen, or just outside it, and for years, even past the time of my uncle Ed’s death, my parents made pilgrimages back to see old friends, attend the Cymanfa Ganu festivals, visit the white wooden church called Capel Ucca, and keep a casual eye on the mill’s decline. At the time my grandfather and his brothers came over, Remsen was generally viewed, back in Wales, as a kind of New Jerusalem, a shining hope, a place of peace and prosperity. There was a story of a Welshman who landed in New York, and looking up bug-eyed at the towering buildings, said, “If this is New York, what must Remsen be!”

  In those days it was a sleepy little hamlet beside a creek. Though the Depression was on in the rest of the country, you saw no signs of it in Remsen. On the tree-lined streets with tall houses set back from them, each with its roses, small vegetable garden, and grape arbor, there were shined-up square cars, mostly Model A Fords, and occasional buggies. (My uncle Ed, one of the richest men in town, had a black-and-green Buick.) Milk was still delivered in squarish glass bottles by an orange horse-drawn cart; coal for people’s furnaces came on a huge, horse-drawn wagon, black with white lettering: W. B. PRICE & SONS, COAL & LUMBER. The horses were chestnut-colored Belgians, I remember, so immense and so beautiful they didn’t seem real. At the end of almost every driveway, back behind the house, there was a two-storey garage with chickenwire on the upstairs windows. If you shouted from the driveway, one or two of the chickens would look out at you, indignant, like old ladies; but however you shouted, even if you threw pebbles, most of them just went about their business. The people were pretty much the same, unexcitable. There weren’t many houses, maybe twenty or thirty, a couple of churches, a school, Price’s lumberyard, and a combination gas-station and market.

  As we entered, from the south, my uncle Ed’s high gray mill reaching up past the trees into the sunlight was the first thing we’d see. The mill was to the left of the narrow dirt road, a three-towered, barnlike building set back beyond the lawn and flower garden that rose gradually toward the brown-shingled house where Uncle Ed had lived for years with his wife, my great-aunt Kate. I remember her only dimly, as an occasional bright presence, soft-spoken and shy, in my uncle Ed’s kitchen or in his “camp,” as they called it, on Black River. She wore thick glasses that made her eyes look unpleasantly large. They shared the house, or anyway the basement, with Uncle Ed’s younger brother, my great-uncle Charley—Cholly, they called him—who helped out at the mill for room and board and a trifling wage. Across the road from the mill and Uncle Ed’s house stood a blacksmith’s shop, then still in operation, a dark, lively place full of coal smell, iron smell, and horse smell. All day long it rang like a musical instrument with the clanging of iron on iron, just far enough from the house and mill to sound like bells. The creek ran just behind the blacksmith’s shop, a bright, noisy rattle. I used to catch tadpoles and minnows there, though it was deep in places, and if my grandmother found out I’d been playing in the creek I got spanked. The building’s gone now, and the creek’s fallen silent, grown up in weeds. I remember the building as small, made of stone burned black inside, crowded outside with burdocks whose leaves were always wet with the mist from the waterfall that rumbled day and night not far upstream.

  I was five or six, still at that age when a day lasts for weeks and everything you see or hear or smell seems vividly alive, though later you can get only glimpses to serve as memories—or anyway so it seems until you start to write. This much comes at once: the large, grinning figure of my uncle Ed, Uncle Charley next to him, timidly smiling, dwarfed beside his brother, and standing not far from them Aunt Kate with a dishtowel and teapot. I get back, too, a little of the sunlit world they inhabited, seemingly without a care, as if forever. On one kitchen wall they had a large black pendulum clock on which the four was written IIII; I could never decide whether the thing was a mistake (I was already aware that the Welsh were prone to make curious mistakes) or something more mysterious, brought down from the ancient, unimaginable time when, according to Uncle Ed, the Welsh lived in caves and trees and couldn’t talk yet, but had to get along by singing.

  In those days everything was for me—for me more than for most children, perhaps—half real, half ethereal. It was not just the stories Uncle Ed liked to tell. In our farmhouse I slept with my grandmother, and every night before she turned off the bedlamp she would read me something from the Bible or the Christian Herald. I don’t remember what she read, but I remember seeing pictures of bright-winged angels playing harps and singing—beings she insisted were entirely real, as real as trees or hay wagons. She made my world mythic—her own as well. During the day she would sometimes go out in our front yard with a hoe and kill grass-snakes. It made my father, who was a practical man, furious. “Mother,” he would ask, “what harm do they do?” “They bite,” she would say. Sometimes my mother would try to defend her. Grandma Hughes had lived in Missouri for a time, where there were rattlesnakes, and she was too old now to change her ways. “Even a darn fool mule can be reasoned with,” my father would say—he was a breeder and trainer of plough-horses—but he wouldn’t pursue the argument. To me, though, steeped in her Bible and Christian Herald stories, nothing seemed more natural than that my grandmother in her righteousness should be out there in the dappled light below the maple trees, her bright blue eyes narrowed, her hoe-blade poised, every nerve on the look-out for serpents.

  “Did you ever really see an angel?” I once asked her. Since there really were snakes, it seemed to me probable that there were angels.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” she said.

  I thought it over. “Did my dad?”

  “I doubt it,” she said, then bit her lips together, trying not to smile.

  So I knew on my grandmother’s authority, to say nothing of Uncle Ed’s, that there was more to the world than met the eye, or rather, knew that there were two worlds, and it came to seem to me that Remsen, like the valley where Jacob saw the ladder, was one of the places where they connected. Perhaps it was Remsen’s peculiar, clear light, or the sense of peace my whole family seemed to feel there, gathering with relatives and friends to sing hymns in Capel Ucca those bright Sunday mornings; or perhaps it was simply the otherworldliness of a village that spoke Welsh. It was true that time had stopped there, or at very least had paused. We had no blacksmith’s shops in Batavia. Mr. Culver, who shoed my father’s horses, came with his equipment in a panel truck. And the mill where my father took his grain, the G.L.F., was like a factory—freightcars on one side of it, track on track of them, and inside, wherever you looked through the billowing white dust, big iron machines and men in goggles. My uncle Ed, when he worked in the old-fashioned mill in Remsen, wore a suit. It was gray with grain-dust, and it was a little dishevelled; but it was a suit. (Uncle Charley wore striped bib-overalls.) Uncle Ed’s machinery was mostly made of wood and made very little noise, just a low, sweet humming sound, with rhythmical thumps.

  I would sometimes be left over night with the two old men and Aunt Kate while my parents went off with younger relatives to some “sing.” There was always a sing on somewhere around Remsen. “Every time three Welshmen meet,” people said, “it’s a choir.” In those days it was more or less true. Everywhere my parents drove, they sang, almost always in a minor key and always in harmony; and every time relatives got together they sang, in almost as many parts as there were people.

  I’d be alarmed when my parents began dressing for a sing, telling me in falsely sweet voices that I was to stay with my uncles and aunt and be a good boy. My grandmother, if she was there, would insist on going with them. Though she was nearly eighty, she had
a voice like a bird, she claimed. The songfest wouldn’t be the same without her. Uncle Charley would shake his head as if disgusted, though everyone said he’d had a wonderful tenor voice when he was younger. In those days, they said, he wouldn’t have missed a Cymanfa Ganu or an Eisteddfod—the really big sing, where hundreds and hundreds of Welshmen came together—for all the tea in China. Uncle Charley would blush like a girl when they spoke of his singing days. “Well, a body gets old,” he’d mutter. “Pride!” my grandmother would snap. “Sinful pride!”

  She was a woman of temper; she’d been a red-head when she was young. But for all her sternness, she loved Uncle Charley as she loved nobody else—her husband’s youngest brother, just a boy when she first knew him, all his life the one who’d been of no account. “That voice of his was his downfall,” she said once to my mother, wiping dishes while my mother washed. “It gave him ideas.”

  To me, a child, it was a puzzling statement, though my mother, ruefully nodding, apparently understood. I tried to get my grandmother to explain it later, when she was sitting at her darning in our bedroom—more my bedroom than hers, she would say when a certain mood was on her. Another puzzling statement.

  “Grandma,” I asked, “how come Uncle Charley’s voice gave him ideas?”

  “Hush now,” she said. That was always her answer to troublesome questions, and I knew how to deal with it. I just waited, watching her darn, making a nuisance of myself.

  “Well,” she said at last, then stopped to bite a thread. She looked at the end, twirled it between her fingers to make it pointed, then continued: “Singing’s got its place. But a body can get to thinking, when he’s singing with a choir, that that’s how the whole blessed world should be, and then when he comes down out of the clouds it’s a terrible disappointment.”