Against the Ruins Read online

  He continued to laugh. My mother left the room. My speechless fiancé looked horrified at the implied transfer of poor-quality chattel.

  I was too shocked to respond. My father thinks it’s funny that anyone would want to marry me. I walked into the dining room and stared at my mother, tears turning mascara into coal veins down my face. I screamed at her inside my head—For God’s sake, say something.

  She asked what I wanted for supper.

  There was never a china doll I could glue back together. And only one moment when I saw into my mother. As I gaze around her house in this 2004 light, I see us again on the Brantley porch that last day—sometime in the late eighties. The auction is over: the brass bed and mirrored oak armoire are being carried down the brick steps. My grandfather’s armchair, the mantle clock. Mother is standing beside a brick pillar, watching. She’ll be taking her father’s desk, his smoking stand, her mother’s paintings. The house was willed to my mother, with the provision that her stepmother be allowed to remain in it for her lifetime. Now my step-grandmother can no longer live alone and the house must be sold to help pay for her nursing-home care. The house of my mother’s childhood, the things her mother touched, will soon belong to strangers.

  My own memories crowd into the room. I was sent to stay with my grandmother for part of every summer after age seven. Here, playing with antique dolls beneath huge oil paintings, I learned the lesson of pictures. Pictures were magic. Brantley was magic. My father never came here, but every time my mother did, her sad face remained in Columbia. The longer she stayed here, sleeping in the high brass bed with its slippery comforter, the more she laughed. The house and the paintings changed her; when she dusted the paintings, she always said, in a voice she didn’t have anywhere else, I just like to touch them. Art made people feel better than their regular selves.

  “I’d hoped to pass this house on to you,” she says softly, bringing me back to the present. “It would have meant a lot to me to do that. At least you’ll have the farm.”

  She stares at her mother’s paintings. “I always thought I’d become an artist because my mother was a painter. Somehow that didn’t happen. I guess that’s okay.”

  She had once wanted more.

  We went into the living room and for a long time she gazed above the dining-room fireplace, where the outline of the forest-fire painting remained.

  “Soon a stranger will walk through these rooms,” she whispered, to herself more than to me. “Will the memories living in this house still be here then? Does a house retain them?” She leaned against the painted tongue-and-groove wall and murmured—“The man who built this place, his wife was a painter, she died in 1919, in that terrible flu epidemic.” She placed her hand on the wall, as though to press history into the wood. “The real story is that the man who built this house loved his wife so much he never recovered from losing her. What love that was, what amazing love.”

  It was a mantra. A funeral. I thought—What love some never have.

  Brantley and my mother disappear as I go into my old room and get ready for bed. Maybe I’ve never understood her life. I didn’t lose my mother in infancy, I wasn’t born during one world war and had to live through another, I didn’t do without during the Depression, I didn’t watch my husband lose his mind and have to take care of him alone. Security must matter a lot if you’ve lived through all that, I think as I get into bed. I gaze across the room at the most unusual of my grandmother’s paintings, the one time she escaped the somber English landscape school. This mystical painting of a cliff over a wild sea is the brightest coral and yellow and pink that ever came from her palette. Exuberantly impressionistic. What happened this time? Has there been a time in my life, or in my mother’s, when all color turned into its opposite? Dark to light?

  We know more about light gone to dark.

  Perhaps world-shattering events are quite small. Maybe world events are one man and one woman in one place, and the world spins on its axis around them and nothing is quite the same again. Afterward, a shell-shocked soldier must preach the fifth commandment. A woman who loses her mother too early must become a mother. Maybe our lives are always an attempt at correction. But if this need is too desperate, if something gets in the way, maybe a whole house can fall down.

  One afternoon I go back over to Elmwood Park, ride by my old house, and then drive the five blocks to the brick junior high school, now a retirement home, where my mother taught English. I stroll around the grounds, hesitate under a row of second-floor windows—I think that was her homeroom. Who was she when she held forth there every morning? The building looks exactly as it did in my childhood, and I take a few pictures.

  On impulse I drive to the grounds of the closed state hospital. It still shocks me that anyone might choose to live there; the buildings, on the other hand, might make an interesting subject for a painting. Provided I ever paint again. There’s no guardhouse anymore and the ten-foot walls, at least at the entrance, were brought down to four feet in the 1970s. I hesitate alongside the Mills Building, an 1820s neoclassical beauty designed by the same South Carolina architect who created the Washington Monument. Protected by the National Historic Register, the building’s white Doric columns support a second-floor portico reached by elegant curved twin staircases. Not a barred window to be seen. Because of Robert Mills’ fame, 1950s schoolchildren, including my fifth-grade class, toured its public rooms. Did my parents know I was taken there? On the tour we were taught to distinguish between Doric and Corinthian columns, learned how Mills valued natural light, heard stories of captured Yankee officers sequestered on the grounds during the “War Between the States.” No leering psychotics in sight. But I had tortured dreams for months afterward.

  I drive on and park at the Babcock Building, a mammoth nineteenth-century brick edifice with four stories of row after row of barred windows, huge wings to the right and left, and an interior courtyard outlined with barbed wire, all topped by that omnipresent red cupola. Fifth-graders were not taken inside it. Now I know it’s a Kirkbride Plan asylum from the Moral Treatment era, when it was believed that showing kindness to the mentally ill, providing a peaceful and restful environment, was the best cure. Impressive architecture as therapy. The structure is so massive it feels unreal, a small college housed in one building. Empty for many years, it’s been left to slowly fall down. Ancient magnolia trees tower around me as I walk toward it, camera slung over my shoulder, my hands trembling. The building is now encircled by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence bearing signs forbidding trespassing. Windows are smashed behind the rusted iron bars, bricks dislodged, paint peeling. The concrete front steps to the portico are crumbling.

  I focus my Nikon and shoot.

  In a few minutes I hear a car behind me. A police car, a tall officer alighting, waving at me. I assume he’s going to warn me that the building isn’t safe. I’m about to say there’s no chance I’ll trespass this haunted mausoleum when he tells me no one is “allowed” to photograph Babcock—he says it several times. “Special permission” is required.

  My blood pressure goes up—his tone annoys me. “I’m an artist,” I say. “I paint pictures of old buildings, I use photos for the early studies. I grew up just down the street from here.”

  “Like I said, you’re not allowed to photograph this building.” He says I can shoot the Mills Building all I want.

  Of course I can, it’s pretty. “I can’t take pictures of a state-owned building? An historic building?” My voice is shrill; this feels like censorship.

  He more or less tells me to get moving, and for a moment I think he’s going to demand my memory card. He’s a giant with a gun and an attitude so I decide not to argue. But what is this about? The state doesn’t want photos of ruin around to remind a developer of Babcock’s horrific history? No way will I surrender my memory card. Can the policeman arrest me?

  He doesn’t ask for the ca
rd, but stands and watches until I get in my car and drive off.

  I know what a Kirkbride building is because as a teenager I briefly wanted to be a psychiatrist. Not that either of my parents ever even alluded to my father’s breakdown. And although he never had another, during my adolescence and beyond he was given either to brooding silence or to bizarre, angry outbursts. Even on placid days he’d watch me suspiciously, as though he believed I might be up to no good. Or that I intended him ill will. On bad days he’d erupt over something innocuous and rant at me hysterically, chasing me up and down the hall until I’d lock myself in my room and pull a pillow over my head to escape his voice. He rarely spoke to me except to correct or to condemn, implying that I wasn’t smart enough to figure out anything for myself. Day in and day out he aimed verbal pessimism at me, and I took more and more risks. I knew he considered me a nuisance, someone whose insolence for standing up to him, for loudly shooting holes in his paranoid proclamations, needed to be broken like a willful beast. My mother watched the drama silently, sometimes telling me later that it’d be wiser to just go along with him. Easier. I knew this was what she wanted, that I had no ally anywhere. Often I’d feel my spirit sinking through the floorboards, where I knew it might disappear for good, and I’d drop to my knees and scratch it back up again.

  What was wrong? My father looked just fine, though he didn’t have the work life—he moved from one job to another to another—of most men with his education. Nor did he act like any father I’d ever heard about—where was the Daddy who was supposed to adore his little girl? Because my parents acted as though there’d been no breakdown, I initially wondered if I’d imagined the psychotic episode; it wasn’t until my twenties that I began remembering sketchy details. By my thirties, when I found myself painting scenes that surprised and shocked me, pictures with obscure violence beneath their surface, I wanted desperately to know what really happened. By then, a pattern was firmly in place in my life: except on canvas, my wildest thoughts often remain locked in a house whose threshold I allow no one to cross.

  When I finally asked my mother for information, she didn’t want to talk about it. I appealed to her again a few years later, begged for details. She said it had to do “with the war,” and she confirmed the long night of praying, told me about him running up and down the street in his pajamas, the arm straight up in the air.

  “What about the blood? Didn’t he try to kill himself? Didn’t he slash his wrist with a razor blade?”

  There was no suicide attempt, she said. No razor. No blood.

  I could see her throwing a razor blade under a bed. Seemed like it was Christmas. Didn’t he almost throw me out of a window?

  Maybe I was having false memories. “What month was it?”

  “Lyra, please don’t bring this up to your father. It’ll upset him. You know how he gets, what it’ll be like.” She stood up, ending the conversation. “It was December.

  Part IV: Louise

  1957

  Chapter Six

  It’s 3 p.m. I stand over the bed. William is lying down, glazed eyes staring up. I’ve replaced the bandage on his left wrist. He didn’t seem conscious—it was like touching a corpse. Now his right arm is raised toward the ceiling. He’s been like this for two hours, hasn’t said a word no matter what I ask. I sit beside him, wonder how anyone can hold an arm up that long. I reach over and touch it. He gives no notice. I pull his arm downward. It falls slightly, then pops back up. Steel.

  Suddenly he rears up, hisses, “Get away—get to the station. Now.”

  I retreat to the kitchen, lean over the kitchen table and cradle my head in my hands, rock back and forth.

  Eventually I’ll have to call Lyra home from the Truesdales. I must do something. If I could just get him to eat something, if he could get some real sleep, if—I go over possibilities, keep my mind busy with details, and when the previous night slips in—no, I can’t think about that right now, later maybe, but not now.

  I can go to Uta’s house and call a doctor, but we don’t have a regular family doctor, someone who knows us. I get up and walk through the house and out onto the porch and gaze through the dirty screens. All the houses look different now, familiar cars are foreign, a dark sky despite the sun. Someone is there, then isn’t. Things are one way, then gone. I walk through the screen door and down the concrete steps, calling for you. Across the street, I pause and stare at our house as a stranger might. Not a remarkable house, just a tired two-story of white clapboard fronted by the effusive blue-headed hydrangeas, now in crusty December droop, that I planted in the spring. Glorious flowers that hide peeling paint, that soften the square corners and right angles. Lovely cobalt flowers gone to brittle clusters.

  Just a moment ago I was young, holding my baby close, whirling her around in the summer grass, singing to my child, this living light.

  How did our lives come to this day—to razor-blade blood? How did we turn into these cruel streaks of crimson on my old winter dress?

  Groggy. Wonder what drugs they’re giving me—maybe drugs are taking me back there. So hard to take a breath sometimes. Dr. Dumaine was just here, the dear man, I wish I could thank him. Someone else’s voice. Lyra. Did I think she might not come? Oftentimes I wouldn’t have blamed her.

  When I imagine I’m talking to her, I want to find excuses for not having seen what was coming back then—I could say a new home and a new job, working full-time and taking care of that home and a child and a husband. The Asian flu epidemic didn’t help. Nor did the rigid patriarchal “rules” of 1950s marriages, nowhere more entrenched than in the South. William had always been “unusual,” and in many ways I liked that. His passion for trees, for instance. While the Asian flu ran through the schools, he began bringing home a forest. The first was a cedar sapling about three inches high, which he’d noticed in the crack of a concrete bridge and extracted with his penknife. At home he transferred it to a glass jelly jar, placed it in a window, and checked on it every day. I watched the care and attention he gave it and slipped my arm around his waist—this was the man I’d married, my biology major, a man who’d save a living thing he found on a bridge.

  A week later he brought home another sapling, this one an oak. It joined the cedar in the windowsill, as did two pines. In time there were more seedlings and several small trees two or three feet tall. Your father never did anything halfway. One day he said that many trees had been burned down in 1865 and someone had to replace them. Since it was still warm outside, he moved them to the front porch. We could barely see the street. Rosa Truesdale reportedly told Bill Faherty, the pot-bellied neighbor who preferred government checks to personal labor and sat on his porch all day smoking cigars, that William had obviously been hit on the head by a big tree.

  Your father told you, while we were eating supper, that growing conifers like the loblolly pine was important because they preserved history. “Conifers have undergone little evolutionary development—the trees on my farm are identical to their primeval ancestors.”

  He never called it our farm. I said, “Oaks and maples though—the hardwoods—give us wonderful color. I like the change, variation, the marking of time. Pines are always green, but hardwood leaves are softer than a pine’s prickly needles.”

  You piped up, “Why do the colored leaves go away every year?” You’d told a neighbor that raking leaves hurt them. She’d called to say you were a very unusual child.

  “The trees can’t get the nutrients they need,” William said. “The leaves die because the trees go dormant. You’re too young to understand these things, but the main sustenance for trees comes from air and sun. They take almost nothing from the ground. They grow deep in the earth but aren’t very connected to it.”

  After supper I sat on the tree-barricaded porch thinking about connections. I could hear someone passing by on the sidewalk, but I couldn’t see a thing.

  A week late
r I’m sitting at my desk at Laidlaw listening to children’s voices in the yard below. I go over and lean on the windowsill, staring down at them. Someday my child will play with brothers and sisters. How many will there be?

  I’m waiting for Max Wells to pick up the Underwood typewriter atop my desk. Yesterday he’d stopped by my room looking sheepish, his eyes downcast as he said, “I write a bit of poetry, and I was wonderin’ if you’d read it. Tell me how it can be better. It’s not anythin’ but some things I think about. I get my best ideas when I’m trimmin’ the trees, when I’m up on a branch takin’ off dead limbs. Life looks different from the sky.”

  He put a sheaf of papers on my desk. “I apologize for this handwritin’. I’m savin’ up for a typin’ machine.” He was about to leave when he added, “I saw your husband again at the cemetery.”

  “What does he do there?”

  “He just kinda walks around. Seemed that day like he was lookin’ for somebody.”

  Max’s voice disappears. I gaze at his poetry on my desk: it’s about nature and faith, about a girl he loved who died when he was seventeen.

  In a few minutes Principal Hindeman comes in and we talk about the flu epidemic and various school activities. Then he says, “There was a special meeting of the school board last week, don’t know if you heard about it or not. We will voluntarily integrate next fall—before some mess like Little Rock has a chance to get started. I have to select the teachers for our first integrated classes. Needs to be our best teachers. I’m here to ask you to be one.”