Between earth and heaven hovered a mist, heliotrope and mysterious. A lighthouse to the left, set far out on the water on a heap of dark rocks, threw its fragile beam into that mist so that it brightened momentarily to a cloudy lilac.
Alone together, Miss Jones and Frank stood hand in hand. They were only a consciousness, awestruck, worshipping, in the midst of that unbelievable glory. They breathed softly. They felt near to a Presence moving with majesty about them. They stood like this for a long time, for heaven and earth seemed reluctant to give up this tremendous splendor to the night.
Then Miss Jones whispered, her face flooded with a peaceful but exalted light: “When I was a little girl, my grandmother told me a very strange story. She said that when God recalled His artists from the earth He permitted each one to paint a sunset for Him, for the joy of the men he had left behind. So, each sunset, the selected artist would take up his great palette of paints, and turn his brushes to the sky. There he would paint the most wonderful sunsets, lovingly, carefully, and then wait, with hope, for what men would say.
“But men are very careless. They seldom look at the sky, and sometimes the artist must have only the admiration of the angels. Even to the last moment, before night came, the artist would wait. If only one man saw, and praised in his heart, and thanked God and the artist for the beauty, then the artist was happy.”
Frank, his heart swelling, looked at the tremendous glory of sky and water, and his eyes were drowned in tears. He said, in himself: “Thank you. Thank you.”
In his later years there was seldom a sunset for which he did not spare a moment or two, no matter how hurried, and though he smiled at himself, he would invariably whisper: “Thank you. Thank you.” Even when, for him, “the glory had passed away from the earth,” he could still feel a gratitude for it, could still see it though he could not feel it. “I see, but do not feel, how wonderful it is,” he would say to himself, in the words of Coleridge. But, though emotion was gone, the gratitude was always there, and this gratitude was like a soundless mirror which could only reflect, which could know nothing in itself.
Sometimes they would lie in the grassy park of The Front, watching full white clouds that mushroomed in the intense blue sky. Sometimes they would sit on the old Spanish-American War cannons, swinging their feet, and singing together. They would go down to look at the soldiers, who marched before their barracks, and the sight of the Stars and Stripes, blowing free and brilliant in the windy sunlight, would strike strongly on Frank’s heart. Then Miss Jones would say, in a trembling voice: “It is such a noble flag, such a dear, dear flag! Only bars, red and white, and white stars on a blue sky. But what it means! Freedom, safety, opportunity, instinctive kindness, largeness, hope and integrity. Men are weak, Frankie, but the blood of great men colors those stripes, their faith is white and clear between them, the stars of their souls shine always in that sweet blue sky. If America does not live, then the whole world must die. What does it matter that there are so many evil men in the world, even here, faithless men, wicked men, treacherous and ugly and greedy men? The flag remains, and the things which it represents remain, and so long as that flag flies under heaven, so free and noble and bright, the faith of good men can never pass from the earth.”
Frank would feel the benediction of the sun on his shoulders, a stronger, warmer sun than England’s. He would feel in himself a burgeoning, a passion, as he looked about him. He would hear the music of wild and tender and majestic words rising in him, like chords of disconnected harmony heard at a distance.
How ecstatic were the days of his childhood, how tranquil were the evenings of his youth! Beset though he was by the hysterias and dementias of his parents, he could forget these when he was alone, or with Miss Jones. His soul was drenched in light and sound, in glory and music, in the guessed movement of vast forces beyond the reach of eye or ear. Then, indeed, there was a glory and a mystery upon the earth, a rapture and a splendor, a leaping of the universal heart, a oneness with God. The great trees were his friends; he touched their bark lovingly. The grass was his sister. The sky was the roof of his temple. The winds at midnight were the high shouts of strange adventure, of mighty spirits flowing over the world. When snow fell on his arm, he would hold it to the light of the gas lamps, and marvel over the intricacies of each perfect and minute shape, and worship in his soul. There was no aspect of the golden spring, the green summer, the crimson autumn, and the white and blazing winter, which did not stir him with passion.
Often he would see the ball of the burning sun through the narrow aisles of dark mean houses, and it was like the call of God in the desert. Often he would look at the pale blue of a winter sky and feel himself caught up into the crystalline radiance of the company of the angels. When he saw the first tender shoots of the iris in his grandmother’s garden, he was so overcome with emotion that he wept. The first buds on the trees were an ecstasy. A crimson leaf, drifting to his feet, was an exalted message, for him alone.
Sometimes, on a summer dusk, he would sit on the stone step of the grocery store, and listen to the distant voices on nearby verandahs and the strident shrieking of neighborhood gramophones. He would hear laughter, softened by evening, and sometimes a song, simple, pure and happy. The hideous words and music of “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis!” would seem gay and joyous to him, and he would laugh softly in answer. Fleets of young men and women on bicycles would fly by, streaming merriment, and he would watch them disappear into the dusk with love in his heart and a strange sadness. He would sit there until the windows opposite were only disjointed rectangles of broken light, and the stone grew cold under him, and his mother called him to bed. There were children in the neighborhood, but he never spoke to them, nor they to him. He was not lonely any longer. He was lonely only in the enforced company of others. His thoughts and his emotions were enough for him, and his brightening dreams.
He loved the chuckle of the rain in the eaves. He loved the sparkles of mica in the cement sidewalks. He loved the sight of dust turning gold in the sun. When March winds tossed and tore at him, with giant buffetings, he would laugh aloud. He would plunge his feet into white drifts, and stand, for long moments, watching the blue light on the snow.
He was eleven years old when he wrote down his first poem, and gave it to Miss Jones.
“Light of the lilac dawn,
Scent of the lilac tree,
Bud on the dripping thorn,
Silver mist on the sea!
I have passed this way before.”
Yes, thought Miss Jones, you have passed this way before.
She said: “Frankie, you will be a poet, or a writer of great books. Never, never, must you forget this. Let no one stop you, hinder you, or turn you aside, my dear. There is an increasing purpose in you, a promise. If you fail that, you will have failed more than your life. You will have failed God.”
She looked at this tall boy humbly, strongly. “Remember, Frank. Always remember.”
She bought him a book of heroic poems for Christmas. “Perhaps you won’t understand all of them now. But later you will.”
He was in the fourth grade now, and was well disliked by his teachers, who invariably had an aversion to him. He was indolent, they said, and disobedient, and sly. He would not study. He evinced no interest. Moreover, he was belligerent. He sought out quarrels with the other children. “He is defending himself from their hostility,” Miss Jones would protest. The children called him “Jonesy’s pet.” He looked at them with contempt, turned away from them in silence.
Then one day he informed Miss Jones that his parents were leaving Vermont Street and were moving to Albany Street, and that he would have to attend another school. His face was full of grief and despair. But though the news was a shock to her, she pressed his hand and smiled. “Never mind, Frank. You must come often to see me, and I will go to see you, too.”
But she never saw him again. He came to see her two months later, but she had been transferred to a school miles away. He
waited for her to come to him. She had intended to, with the firmest determination. But her mother died, and she herself became dangerously ill. Then her crippled sister sickened, and she was obliged to care for her for several weeks. She was finally forced to place this sister in a public charitable institution, for she had no means and no way to care for her. She visited this sister on week-ends. Then, less than a year later, she herself died. Insufficient food and clothing, exposure to severe weather, caused her to contract pneumonia. She was buried in a humble spot in the cemetery supported by her church, and the grass grew thick and rank and sheltering over her grave. It was marked only by a stick of wood and a number, and Frank Clair could never find it.
CHAPTER 16
The exodus from Vermont to Albany Street was no casual affair, nor voluntary on the part of the Clairs. It occurred because Mrs. Watson’s newly widowed daughter and her two children were coming to live with her.
With what lamentations, revilements, agonies and despairs was the news received! Had death come to those wretched rooms, had Francis been stricken down with a fatal illness, had young Frank committed a most awful crime, the demonstrations could not have been excelled by the ones that took place when Mrs. Watson made her announcement. Francis pleaded cravenly. Maybelle bewailed. Mrs. Watson was stirred out of her malevolent indifference by such antics. She told them they were “crazy.” There were plenty of rooms and flats in Bison. They had only to look for them. “You’re the dippiest folks I ever saw,” she told them frankly. “You’d think I was taking a million dollars from you.”
Even she, who pared her cheeses and utilized her crusts with the utmost thrift, could not understand with what horror Francis regarded the moving bills, small though they might be. Had she suggested a pint of his blood in lieu of the moving, he would gladly have agreed. She stared at him, despising him, and then waddled away with a shrug. Moving bills! Two dollars, at the most, and him making good pay in that drugstore! She knew. She had listened at the door when Francis, in jubilation, had announced that Mr. Farley had increased his salary to thirty-five dollars a week. That was nearly a year ago. Maybe he was making more now.
After the stunning initial shock, it was Maybelle who recovered first, and a look of speculation came into her eyes. She, more than Francis, had suffered in these rooms. Now there was a possibility of a “place of our own.” A flat, perhaps. A little cottage. As in England.
She went out, searching. A few days later she found on Albany Street the most minute house imaginable, a house with so small a facade that it appeared to be of toy dimensions. But, surprisingly, it had a large “front” room and a big kitchen, one bedroom, and “our own toilet.” It had no bathroom, but there was a huge back yard, grassy and full of trees and clumps of golden-glow. The rent was no more than what the Clairs had been paying to Mrs. Watson.
“That’s all very well,” groaned Francis, in anguish. “But we’ll have to buy furniture.”
“It won’t cost much,” replied Maybelle, sturdily. “Secondhand shops all over Connecticut Street. I’ve priced some things.”
She bought two secondhand beds, one of brass, the other of iron, the latter for Frank. She bought linoleum, brown and shiny, for the front room, which was to serve as a bedroom for herself and Francis. Then she purchased a hideous oaken dresser for that room, a table, and a single wooden chair, and a gas heater full of clay rings, with windows of isinglass. This was the furniture for the marital chamber. Frank’s room was much more spare, containing the iron bed, a table and a stool, with a strip of nondescript carpet for his feet. A kitchen range, thick with grease and stove polish, was set up in the kitchen and flanked by a secondhand wooden table and three chairs, and an ancient, imitation black-leather sofa was installed near one window. This was to be the combined kitchen and living room of the Clairs for a long time.
The cost of this munificence came to exactly thirty-five dollars.
“Thirty-five dollars!” lamented Francis. “Two weeks’ savings! We’re that much behind, now. You’re out to ruin me; I can see that.”
But Maybelle, secretly delighted that she was to have “a place of our own,” was more optimistic. “You can cut down a dollar on the food bill, and I’ll go without that new winter coat, and you can manage without a suit for another year,” she said. “We won’t miss the money. And we’ll be alonel Private.”
She was temporarily happy, as she scrubbed and polished and scoured the tiny house, and arranged the furniture. It was true that neither the house nor its furnishings could compare with the comfort of the home in England, but it was her own now. She was freed from the everlasting presence of “a stranger.” To the Englishwoman, privacy and independence were sacred things, to be desired above all else. “A garret, if you are alone in it, is better than sharing a palace with others,” she told young Frank happily.
She even felt a new fondness for her husband and child, which lasted all of two months.
The house was less than two blocks from Niagara Street, where Frank discovered a fascinating blacksmith’s shop, stables, granaries near the river, the Erie Canal, and the ferry dock. Also, trains swept by at the foot of the street, and he was never tired of watching their roaring passage. He got to know the hours when they could be expected, and would go down the long incline, beyond Niagara Street, past brothels, saloons and shacks where fishing bait and tackle were sold, and there await the trains. He loved the fishy smell of the river, the hot and splintery ferry dock, the brawls he could hear behind the swinging doors of the saloons, the sight of dubious ladies sunning themselves on rickety wooden galleries above the filthy and narrow street, the fishermen, with their bending rods, sitting on the piles, and even the stench of beer and dust that permeated the little stretch from Niagara Street to the river.
It was an odoriferous neighborhood, and an evil and violent one. But it was full of zest, noise and vitality, and he preferred it to the dirty dull quiet of Albany Street, on the other side of Niagara, where the cobbles were gray and decorous, and where West Avenue, solidly middle-class in 1912, bisected it.
He delighted in the strenuous little ferryboats which plied between Bison and Canada, and the sight of the huge ice floes grinding and tilting in the spring as they thundered towards the Falls was a most exciting thing to him. Sometimes he was rewarded by the sight of long and smoking lake boats moving sluggishly down Erie Canal, heavy with cargo from far, strange cities. What a sight it was, after the shrieking of the whistles, when the bridge lifted to accommodate the smoke stacks of the large boats. Sometimes he saw that women and children lived on these vessels, and he thought the lines of miscellaneous laundry fluttering in spring and autumn breezes the gayest of all things. Often there were dogs aboard, who barked importantly at the little boy standing on the stony edge of the Canal. To his nostrils would come the rank smell of stagnant water, of stinking aqueous vegetation, of water fungus, evilly green, which spread from the shore halfway across the Canal. But it did not revolt him. Adventure lived here among these rough and roaring men, among these boats, in these dilapidated squatters’ shacks along the edge of the Canal, in the passing of trains, in the spluttering plowing of the ferry vessels.
There was bliss in the aspect of the Canadian shore opposite, all broken green, smiling little hills, tiny white houses, and, far down the river, the delicate black span of the International Bridge. As yet he had not set foot in Canada, though each summer Francis had faithfully promised to take his family to Erie Beach, “when things look up.” They had still not “looked up.”
Here he spent his days after school, vanishing discreetly from the miniature house on Albany Street and returning at dusk. He wished Miss Jones could see this new wonder, and he looked for her. But she never came.
He explored the squatters’ colonies, was chased by their savage dogs, was enchanted by the slatternly women and the filthy children who romped about among piles of ashes and tin cans and discarded beds and springs. Once he had the joy of witnessing a ferocious fight bet
ween two male squatters, and he saw the flash of a knife, and blood, and heard the shrieks of drabs.
He was not lonely, but now he began to long for some companion with whom he could share these stimulating wonders. He wanted to hear someone comment excitedly on his discovery of the impressive water-works at Front Park, and the armory on Niagara Street. Often he ran after lumbering wagons, and climbed up on the backs of them, thus going for a long and blissful ride, or, in the winter, he “hitched” onto the sleighs of milkmen and explored new neighborhoods. Each Saturday, Maybelle gave him six cents for carfare, and he would visit the Public Library on Washington Street, downtown, and come home with armfuls of books. Sometimes, when Maybelle felt particularly benevolent, she gave him two or three extra pennies and, thriftily investing the return carfare in additional candy, he would walk the three miles home, sucking, chewing and dreaming. To him, every street was a mercurial adventure, where the strangest and oddest things might happen, and each new face a fairy tale.
No, he was not lonely, but he longed for a companion, for an ear.
Later, he discovered the homes of the rich, on Richmond and Delaware Avenues, and in Delaware Park, and the beautiful cemetery called Forest Lawn.
CHAPTER 17
It was one of those summer days which seduce the senses into a languid unreality, when there is nothing but a long hazy warmth and utter, golden silence. Even the shadows of the heavy trees blurred on the dancing sidewalks, and the houses had an unsubstantial look like the painted houses on a stage backdrop, and the streets had this look, too, deserted, vista-less, hotly blank. If a sound came, the shutting of a distant door, the bark of a dog, the rumble of a wagon over shimmering cobbles, it was a sound like the echo in a dream, bodiless and meaningless.
It was the sort of a day that Frank Clair loved, for all disturbing human elements had melted out of his awareness, and he was alone. In his dreams, he often dreamt that he was the only living soul in a great abandoned city steeped in sheltering peace, and that he could wander through the long avenues with only trees for company, and with no face to stare at him with hostile derision. The silvery hushed light of a Never-never land would gleam in the far distances, and would lurk in the drooping branches under which he would pass. Then he would be happy, serene and full of content, looking at mighty mansions which held no enemies, pausing by lawns on which faint shadows played.