An American Childhood Part 6

My friend Judy Schoyer was a thin, messy, shy girl whose thick blond curls lapped over her gla.s.ses. Her cheeks, chin, nose, and blue eyes were round; the lenses and frames of her gla.s.ses were round, and so were her heavy curls. Her long spine was supple; her legs were long and thin so her knee socks fell down. She did not care if her knee socks fell down. When I first knew her, as my cla.s.smate at the Ellis School, she sometimes forgot to comb her hair. She was so shy she tended not to move her head, but only let her eyes rove about. If my mother addressed her, or a teacher, she held her long-legged posture lightly, alert, like a fawn ready to bolt but hoping its camouflage will work a little longer.

Judy's family were members of the oldest, most liberal, and best-educated ranks of Pittsburgh society. They were Unitarians. I visited her Unitarian Sunday school once. There we folded paper to make little geese; it shocked me to the core. One of her linear ancestors, Edward Holyoke, had been president of Harvard University in the eighteenth century, which fact paled locally before the greater one, that her great-grandfather's brother had been one of the founding members of Pittsburgh's Duquesne Club. She was related also to Pittsburgh's own Stephen Foster.

Judy and her family pa.s.sed some long weekends at a family farmhouse in the country on a little river, the nearest town to which was Paw Paw, West Virginia. When they were going to the farm, they said they were going to Paw Paw. The trip was a four-hour drive from Pittsburgh. Often they invited me along.

There in Paw Paw for the weekend I imagined myself in the distant future remembering myself now, twelve years old with Judy. We stood on the high swinging plank bridge over the river, in early spring, watching the first hatch of small flies hover below us.

The river was a tributary of the distant Potomac-a tributary so stony, level, and shallow that Judy's grandmother regularly drove her old Model A Ford right through it, while we hung out over the running boards to try and get wet. From above the river, from the hanging center of the swinging bridge, we could see the forested hill where the big house stood. There at the big house we would have dinner, and later look at the Gibson girls in the wide, smelly old books in the cavernous living room, only recently and erratically electrified.

And from the high swinging bridge we could see in the other direction the log cabin, many fields away from the big house, where we children stayed alone: Judy and I, and sometimes our friend Margaret, who had a dramatic, somewhat morbid flair and who wrote poetry, and Judy's good-natured younger brother. We cooked pancakes in the cabin's fireplace; we drew water in a bucket from the well outside the door.

By Friday night when we'd carried our duffel and groceries from the black Model A at the foot of the hill, or over the undulating bridge if the river was high, when we children had banged open the heavy log-cabin door, smelled the old logs and wood dust, found matches and lighted the kerosene lanterns, and in the dark outside had drawn ourselves a bucket of sweet water (feeling the rope go slack and hearing the bucket hit, then feeling the rope pull as the bucket tipped and filled), and hunted up wood for a fire, smelled the loamy nighttime forest again, and heard the whippoorwill-by that time on Friday night I was already grieving and mourning, only just unpacking my nightgown, because here it was practically Sunday afternoon and time to go.

"What you kids need," Mrs. Schoyer used to say, "is more exercise."

How exhilarating, how frightening, to ride the tippy Model A over the shallow river to the farm at Paw Paw, to greet again in a new season the swaying bridge, the bare hills, the woods behind the log cabin, the hayloft in the barn-and know I had just so many hours. From the minute I set foot on that land across the river, I started ticking like a timer, fizzing like a fuse.

On Friday night in the log cabin at Paw Paw I watched the wild firelight on Judy's face as she laughed at something her cheerful brother said, laughed shyly even here. When she laughed, her cheeks rose and formed spheres. I loved her spherical cheeks and knocked myself out to make her laugh. I could hardly see her laughing eyes behind her gla.s.ses under hanging clumps of dark-blond curls. She was nimble, swaybacked, long-limbed, and languid as a heron, and as abrupt. In Pittsburgh she couldn't catch a ball-nearsighted; she perished of bashfulness at school sports. Here she could climb a tree after a kitten as smoothly as a squirrel could, and run down her nasty kicking pony with authority, and actually hit it, and scoop up running hens with both swift arms. She spoke softly and not often.

Judy treated me with amused tolerance. At school I was, if not a central personage, at least a conspicuous one; and I had boyfriends all along and got invited to the boys' school dances. Nevertheless, Judy put up with me, not I with Judy. She possessed a few qualities that, although they counted for nothing at school, counted, I had to admit, with me. Her goodness was both intrinsic and a held principle. This thin, almost speechless child had moral courage. She intended her own life-starting when she was about ten-to be not only harmless but good. I considered Judy's goodness, like Judy's farm, a nice place to visit. She put up with my fast-talking avoidance of anything that smacked of manual labor. That she was indulging me altogether became gradually clear to both of us-though I pretended I didn't know it, and Judy played along.

On Sat.u.r.day mornings in Paw Paw we set out through the dewy fields. I could barely lay one foot before the other along the cowpath through the pasture, I was so nostalgic for this scene already, this day just begun, when Judy and I were twelve. With Margaret we boiled and ate blue river mussels; we wrote and staged a spidery melodrama. We tried to ride the wretched untrained pony, which sc.r.a.ped us off under trees. We chopped down a sa.s.safras tree and made a dirty tea; and we started to clean a run-over snake, in order to make an Indian necklace from its delicate spine, but it smelled so bad we quit.

After Sat.u.r.day-night dinner in the big-house dining room-its windows gave out on the cliffside treetops-Mr. Schoyer told us, in his calm, ironic voice, Victor Hugo's story of a French sailor who was commended for having heroically captured a cannon loose on the warship's deck, and then hanged for having loosed the cannon in the first place. There were usually a dozen or more of us around the table, rapt. When the household needed our help, Mrs. Schoyer made mild, wry suggestions, almost diffidently.

I would have liked going to prison with the Schoyers. My own family I loved with all my heart; the Schoyers fascinated me. They were not sharply witty but steadily wry. In Pittsburgh they invited foreigners to dinner. They went to art galleries, they heard the Pittsburgh Symphony. They weren't tan. Mr. Schoyer, who was a corporation lawyer, had majored in cla.s.sical history and literature at Harvard. Like my father, he had studied something that had no direct bearing on the clatter of coin. He was always the bemused scholar, mild and democratic, posing us children friendly questions as if Pittsburgh or Paw Paw were Athens and he fully expected to drag from our infant brains the Pythagorean theorem. What do you make of our new President? Your position on capital punishment? Or, conversationally, after I had been branded as a lover of literature, "You recall that speech of Pericles, don't you?" or "Won't you join me in reading 'A Shropshire Lad' or 'Ballad of East and West'?" At Paw Paw the Schoyers did every wholesome thing but sing. None of them could carry a tune.

If there was no moon that night, we children took a flashlight down the steep dirt driveway from the big house and across the silvery pastures to the edge of the woods where the log cabin stood. The log cabin stayed empty, behind an old vine-hung gate, except when we came. In front of the cabin we drew water from the round stone well; under the cabin we put milk and b.u.t.ter in the cold cellar, which was only a s.p.a.ce dug in the damp black dirt-dirt against which the b.u.t.ter's wrap looked too thin.

That was the farm at Paw Paw, West Virginia. The farm lay far from the nearest highway, off three miles of dirt road. When at the end of the long darkening journey from Pittsburgh we turned down the dirt road at last, the Schoyers' golden retriever not unreasonably began to cry, and so, unreasonably, invisibly, did I. Some years when the Schoyers asked me to join them I declined miserably, refused in a swivet, because I couldn't tolerate it, I loved the place so.

I knew what I was doing at Paw Paw: I was beginning the lifelong task of tuning my own gauges. I was there to brace myself for leaving. I was having my childhood. But I was haunting it, as well, practically reading it, and preventing it. How much noticing could I permit myself without driving myself round the bend? Too much noticing and I was too self-conscious to live; I trapped and paralyzed myself, and dragged my friends down with me, so we couldn't meet each other's eyes, my own loud awareness d.a.m.ning us both. Too little noticing, though-I would risk much to avoid this-and I would miss the whole show. I would wake on my deathbed and say, What was that?

YOUNG CHILDREN HAVE NO SENSE OF WONDER. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous. Their parents pause at the unnecessary beauty of an ice storm coating the trees; the children look for something to throw. The children who tape colorful fall leaves to the schoolroom windows and walls are humoring the teacher. The busy teacher halts on her walk to school and stoops to pick up fine bright leaves "to show the children"-but it is she, now in her sixties, who is increasingly stunned by the leaves, their brightness all so much trash that litters the gutter.

This year at the Ellis School my sister Amy was in the fifth grade, with Mrs. McVicker. I remembered Mrs. McVicker fondly. Every year she reiterated the familiar (and, without a description of their mechanisms, the sentimental) mysteries that schoolchildren hear so often and so indifferently: that each snowflake is different, that some birds fly long distances, that acorns grow into oaks. Caterpillars turn into b.u.t.terflies. The stars are large and very far away. She struck herself like a gong with these same mallets every year-a sweet old schoolteacher whom we in our time had loved and tolerated for her innocence.

Now that I was an aging veteran of thirteen or so, I was becoming case-softened myself. Imperceptibly I had shed my indifference. I was getting positively old: the hatching of wet robins in the spring moved me. I saw them from the school library window, as if on an educational film: a robin sprawled on a nest in the oak, and four miserable hatchlings appeared. They peeped. I knew this whole story; who didn't? Nevertheless I took to checking on the robins a few times a day. Their mother rammed worms and bugs down their throats; they grew feathers and began to hop up and down in the nest. Bit by bit they flew away; I saw them from the schoolyard taking test flights under the oak. Glory be, I thought during all those weeks, hallelujah, and never told a soul.

Even my friends began to seem to me marvelous: Judy Schoyer laughing shyly, her round eyes closed, and quick Ellin Hahn, black-haired and ruddy, who bestrode the social world like a Colossus, saying always just the right and funny thing. Where had these diverse people come from, really? I watched little Molly turn from a baby into a child and become not changed so much as ever more herself, kindhearted, nervous, both witty and humorous: was this true only in retrospect? People's being themselves, year after year, so powerfully and so obliviously-what was it? Why was it so appealing? Personality, like beauty, was a mystery; like beauty, it was useless. These useless things were not, however, flourishes and embellishments to our life here, but that life's center; they were its truest note, the heart of its form, which drew back our thoughts repeatedly.

Somewhere between one book and another a child's pa.s.sive acceptance had slipped away from me also. I could no longer see the world's array as a backdrop to my private play, a dull, neutral backdrop about which I had learned all I needed to know. I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it. I peered in one day, stepped in the next, and soon wandered in deep over my head. Month after month, year after year, the true and brilliant light, and the complex and multifaceted coloration, of this actual, historical, waking world invigorated me. Its vastness extended everywhere I looked, and precisely where I looked, just as forms grew under my gaze as I drew.

This was the enthusiasm of a child, like that of a field-working scientist, and like that of the artist making a pencil study. One took note; one took notes. The subject of the study was the world's things: things to sort into physical categories, and things to break down into physical structures.

I was not to discover literature and ideas for a few more years. All I had awakened to was the world's wealth of information. I was reading books on drawing, painting, rocks, criminology, birds, moths, beetles, stamps, ponds and streams, medicine. (Somehow I missed those other childhood mainstays, astronomy, coins, and dinosaurs.) How I wished I could find agreeable books on thin air! For everything, I had gathered, was something. And for me, during those few years before I vanished into a blinded rage, everything was interesting.

Nothing could be less apparently interesting, for example, than a certain infuriatingly dull sight I always looked at with hatred. It was raining and Mother was driving us along one of Pittsburgh's clogged narrow highways. I looked out through the rain on the window and saw by the roadside the raw cuts the road builders carved through the rolling rocky hills, carved long dreary decades ago, to lay the road. Blasting bores scarred these banks of sandstone and shale in streaks; gritty rain streamed down their cut faces and dissolved the black soot and coal dust and car exhaust. The car stopped and started. I stared dully through the spotted windshield. Gray rivulets poured down the rock, mile after highway mile, and puddled at the berm where the rock met the winter-killed gra.s.s and mud.

This sight slew me in my seat. It was so dull it unstrung me, so I could barely breathe. How could I flee it, the very landscape, the dull rock, the bleak miles, the dark rain? I slumped under the weight of my own pa.s.sive helplessness. Sometimes I memorized billboards. I tried traveling with my eyes closed, and that was even worse.

But now I knew that even rock was interesting-at least in theory. Mr. Pough and Herr Mohs could stand here mightily in the rain, singing songs and swinging picks into the rock cuts by the side of the road. Even I could tap some shale just right, rain or shine, and open the rock to bones of fossil fish. There might be trilobites on the hilltops, star sapphires. Right along these wretched rainy roads, Mohs and Pough could have, as the saying went, a field day.

If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals-then what wasn't?

Everything in the world, every baby, city, teta.n.u.s shot, tennis ball, and pebble, was an outcrop of some vast and hitherto concealed vein of knowledge, apparently, that had compelled people's emotions and engaged their minds in the minutest detail without anyone's having done with it. There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness. There was no one here but us fanatics: bird-watchers, infielders, detectives, poets, rock collectors, and, I inferred, specialists in things I had not looked into-violin makers, fishermen, Islamic scholars, opera composers, people who studied Bali, vials of air, bats. It seemed to take all these people working full time to extract the interest from everything and articulate it for the rest of us.

Every least thing I picked up was proving to be the hanging end of a very long rope.

For the sentimental Mrs. McVicker I had written on a.s.signment a paper on William Gorgas-the doctor in charge of workers' health during the digging of the Panama Ca.n.a.l. Liking that, I wrote another, on Walter Reed. The struggle against yellow fever fired me, and I retained an interest in medicine, especially epidemiology. So now, a few years later, on the couch on the sunporch, I was reading Paul de Kruif's overwrought Microbe Hunters Microbe Hunters.

Old Anton Leeuwenhoek looked through his lenses at a drop of rainwater and shouted to his daughter, "Come here! Hurry! There are little animals in this rainwater!...They swim! They play around!" His microscope "showed little things to him with a fantastic clear enormousness." My microscope was similar. Since I had found the amoeba, I regularly found little animals. I found them in rainwater. I let a bowl of rainwater sit by the bas.e.m.e.nt furnace for a week. When I examined a drop at low power, sure enough, little animals swam, and played around, with fantastic clear enormousness.

Not only was the roadside rock interesting; even the rainwater that streamed down its cut face was interesting. Mineral crystals made the rock; lively animals made the rain. Now when I traveled the grim highways and saw the dull rock receive the dull rain, and realized there would be nothing else to look at until we got where we were going, and Mother and I were all talked out-now when I felt the familiar restless hatred begin to rise at the stupidity and ugliness of this sight, I bade myself look directly at some streaky rock cut and said to myself, thundered to myself, "Think!"

Everywhere, things snagged me. The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world.

At school I saw a searing sight. It turned me to books; it turned me to jelly; it turned me much later, I suppose, into an early version of a runaway, a scapegrace. It was only a freshly hatched Polyphemus moth crippled because its mason jar was too small.

The mason jar sat on the teacher's desk; the big moth emerged inside it. The moth had clawed a hole in its hot coc.o.o.n and crawled out, as if agonizingly, over the course of an hour, one leg at a time; we children watched around the desk, transfixed. After it emerged, the wet, mashed thing turned around walking on the green jar's bottom, then painstakingly climbed the twig with which the jar was furnished.

There, at the twig's top, the moth shook its sodden clumps of wings. When it spread those wings-those beautiful wings-blood would fill their veins, and the birth fluids on the wings' frail sheets would harden to make them tough as sails. But the moth could not spread its wide wings at all; the jar was too small. The wings could not fill, so they hardened while they were still crumpled from the coc.o.o.n. A smaller moth could have spread its wings to their utmost in that mason jar, but the Polyphemus moth was big. Its gold furred body was almost as big as a mouse. Its brown, yellow, pink, and blue wings would have extended six inches from tip to tip, if there had been no mason jar. It would have been big as a wren.

The teacher let the deformed creature go. We all left the cla.s.sroom and paraded outside behind the teacher with pomp and circ.u.mstance. She bounced the moth from its jar and set it on the school's asphalt driveway. The moth set out walking. It could only heave the golden wrinkly clumps where its wings should have been; it could only crawl down the school driveway on its six frail legs. The moth crawled down the driveway toward the rest of Shadyside, an area of fine houses, expensive apartments, and fashionable shops. It crawled down the driveway because its shriveled wings were glued shut. It crawled down the driveway toward Shadyside, one of several sections of town where people like me were expected to settle after college, renting an apartment until they married one of the boys and bought a house. I watched it go.

I knew that this particular moth, the big walking moth, could not travel more than a few more yards before a bird or a cat began to eat it, or a car ran over it. Nevertheless, it was crawling with what seemed wonderful vigor, as if, I thought at the time, it was still excited from being born. I watched it go till the bell rang and I had to go in. I have told this story before, and may yet tell it again, to lay the moth's ghost, for I still see it crawl down the broad black driveway, and I still see its golden wing clumps heave.

I had not suspected, among other things, that moths came so big. From a school library book I learned there were several such enormous American moths, all wild silk moths which spun coc.o.o.ns, and all common.

Gene Stratton Porter's old Moths of the Limberlost Moths of the Limberlost caught my eye; for some years after I read it, it was my favorite book. From one of its queer painted photographs I learned what the Polyphemus moth would have looked like whole: it was an unexpected sort of beauty, brown and wild. It had pink stripes, lavender crescents, yellow ovals-all sorts of odd colors no one would think to combine. Enormous blue eye-spots stared eerily from its hind wings. Coincidentally, it was in the Polyphemus chapter that the book explained how a hatched moth must spread its wings quickly, and fill them with blood slowly, before it can fly. caught my eye; for some years after I read it, it was my favorite book. From one of its queer painted photographs I learned what the Polyphemus moth would have looked like whole: it was an unexpected sort of beauty, brown and wild. It had pink stripes, lavender crescents, yellow ovals-all sorts of odd colors no one would think to combine. Enormous blue eye-spots stared eerily from its hind wings. Coincidentally, it was in the Polyphemus chapter that the book explained how a hatched moth must spread its wings quickly, and fill them with blood slowly, before it can fly.

Gene Stratton Porter had been a vigorous, loving kid who grew up long ago near a swampy wilderness of Indiana, and had worked up a whole memorable childhood out of insects, of all things, which I had never even noticed, and my childhood was half over.

When she was just a tot, she learned how entomologists carry living moths and b.u.t.terflies without damaging them. She commonly carried a moth or b.u.t.terfly home from her forest and swamp wanderings by lightly compressing its thorax between thumb and index finger. The insect stops moving but is not hurt; when you let it go, it flies away.

One day, after years of searching, she found a yellow swallowtail. This is not the common tiger swallowtail b.u.t.terfly, but Papilio turnus: Papilio turnus: "the largest, most beautiful b.u.t.terfly I had ever seen." She held it carefully in the air, its wings high over the back of her fingers. She wanted to show the fragile, rare creature to her father and then carry it back to precisely where she found it. But she was only a child, and so she came running home with it instead of walking. She tripped, and her fingers pinched through the b.u.t.terfly's thorax. She broke it to pieces. And that was that. It was like one of Father's bar jokes. "the largest, most beautiful b.u.t.terfly I had ever seen." She held it carefully in the air, its wings high over the back of her fingers. She wanted to show the fragile, rare creature to her father and then carry it back to precisely where she found it. But she was only a child, and so she came running home with it instead of walking. She tripped, and her fingers pinched through the b.u.t.terfly's thorax. She broke it to pieces. And that was that. It was like one of Father's bar jokes.

There was a terror connected with moths that attracted and repelled me. I would face down the terror. I continued reading about moths, and branched out to other insects.

I liked the weird horned beetles rumbling along everywhere, even at the country club, whose names were stag, elephant, rhinoceros. They were so big I could hear them walk; their sharp legs sc.r.a.ped along the poolside concrete. I liked the comical true bugs, like the red-and-blue-striped leafhoppers, whose legs looked like yellow plastic; they hopped on roses in the garden at home. At Lake Erie I watched the solitary wasps that hunted along the beach path; they buried their paralyzed caterpillar prey in holes they dug so vigorously the sand flew. I even liked the dull little two-winged insects, the diptera, because this order contained mosquitoes, about several species of which I knew something because they bore interesting diseases. I studied under the microscope our local mosquitoes in various stages-a hairy lot-dipped in a cup from Molly's wading pool.

To collect insects I equipped myself with the usual paraphernalia: gla.s.s-headed pins, a net, and a killing jar. It was insects in jars again-but unlike the hapless teacher who put the big moth's coc.o.o.n in the little mason jar, I knew, I thought, what I was doing. In the bottom of the killing jar-formerly a pickle jar-I laid a wad of cotton soaked in cleaning fluid containing carbon tetrachloride, which compound I thrilled myself by calling, offhandedly, "carbon tet." A circle of old door screen prevented the insects' tangling in the cotton. I placed each insect on the screen and quickly tightened the jar lid. Then, as if sensitively, I looked away. After a suitable interval I poured out the dead thing as carefully as I could, and pinned it and its festive, bunting-like row of fluttering labels in a cigar box. My grandfather had saved the cigar boxes, one for each order of insect; they smelled both sharp and sweet, of cedar and leaf tobacco. I pinned the insects in rows, carefully driving the pins through chitinous thoraxes just where the books indicated. Four beetles I collected were so big they had a cigar box to themselves.

Once I returned to my attic bedroom after four weeks at summer camp. There, beside the detective table, under the plaster-stain ship, was the insect collection, a stack of cigar boxes. I checked the boxes. In the big beetles' cigar box I found a rhinoceros beetle crawling on its pin. The pin entered the beetle through that triangle in the thorax between the wing-cover tops; it emerged ventrally above and between the legs. The big black beetle's six legs hung down waving in the air, well above the floor of the cigar box. It crawled and never got anywhere. It must have been pretty dehydrated; the attic was hot. Presumably the beetle's legs had been waving in the air like that in search of a footing for the past four weeks.

I hated insects; that was the fact. I never caught my stamp collection trying to crawl away.

b.u.t.terflies die with folded wings. Before they're mounted, b.u.t.terflies require an elaborate chemical treatment to relax their dead muscles, a bit more every day, so you can spread their brittle wings without shattering them. After a few grueling starts at this relaxing and spreading of dead b.u.t.terflies, I avoided it. When on rare occasions I killed b.u.t.terflies, I stuck them away somewhere and forgot about them.

One hot evening I settled on my bed in my summer nightgown with a novel I had looked forward to reading. I lay back, opened the book, and a dead b.u.t.terfly dropped headfirst on my bare neck. I jumped up, my skin crawling, and it slid down my nightgown. Somehow it stuck to my sweaty skin; when I brushed at it-whooping aloud-it fragmented, and pieces stuck to my hands and rained down on the floor. Most of the dead b.u.t.terfly, which still looked as if it were demurely praying while falling apart, with folded yellow wings in shreds and a blasted black body, fell out on my foot. I brushed broken antennae and snapped legs from my neck; I wiped a glittering yellow dust of wing scales from my belly, and they stuck to my palm.

I hated insects; that I knew. Fingering insects was touching the rim of nightmare. But you have to study something. I never considered turning away from them just because I was afraid of them.

I liked their invisibility; they did not matter, so they did not exist. People's nervous systems edited out the sight of insects before it reached their brains; my seeing insects let me live alongside human society in a different sensory world, just as insects themselves do. That I collected specimens at the country-club pool pleased me; I did not really mind that my friends turned bilious when I showed them my prizes. I loved the sport of catching b.u.t.terflies; they took bad hops, like aerial grounders. (I did not know then that the truly athletic, life-loving entomologists study dragonflies, which are fantastically difficult to catch-fast, sharp-eyed, hard to outwit.) Cringing, I taught myself to paralyze b.u.t.terflies through the net, holding them lightly at the thorax as Gene Stratton Porter had done. I brought them out of the net and let them fly away-lest they fall on me dead later.

How confidently I had overlooked all this-rocks, bugs, rain. What else was I missing?

I opened books like jars. Here between my hands, here between some book's front and back covers, whose corners poked dents in my palm, was another map to the neighborhood I had explored all my life, and fancied I knew, a map depicting hitherto invisible landmarks. After I learned to see those, I looked around for something else. I never knew where my next revelation was coming from, but I knew it was coming-some hairpin curve, some stray bit of romance or information that would turn my life around in a twinkling.

I INTENDED TO LIVE INTENDED TO LIVE the way the microbe hunters lived. I wanted to work. Hard work on an enormous scale was the microbe hunters' stock-in-trade. They took a few clear, time-consuming steps and solved everything. In those early days of germ theory, large disease-causing organisms, whose cycles traced straightforward patterns, yielded and fell to simple procedures. I would know just what to do. I would seize on the most casual remarks of untutored milkmaids. When an untutored milkmaid remarked to me casually, "Oh, everyone knows you won't get the smallpox if you've had the cowpox," I would perk right up. the way the microbe hunters lived. I wanted to work. Hard work on an enormous scale was the microbe hunters' stock-in-trade. They took a few clear, time-consuming steps and solved everything. In those early days of germ theory, large disease-causing organisms, whose cycles traced straightforward patterns, yielded and fell to simple procedures. I would know just what to do. I would seize on the most casual remarks of untutored milkmaids. When an untutored milkmaid remarked to me casually, "Oh, everyone knows you won't get the smallpox if you've had the cowpox," I would perk right up.

Microbe Hunters sent me to a biography of Louis Pasteur. Pasteur's was the most enviable life I had yet encountered. It was his privilege to do things until they were done. He established the germ theory of disease; he demonstrated convincingly that yeasts ferment beer; he discovered how to preserve wine; he isolated the bacillus in a disease of silkworms; he demonstrated the etiology of anthrax and produced a vaccine for it; he halted an epidemic of cholera in fowls and inoculated a boy for hydrophobia. Toward the end of his life, in a rare idle moment, he chanced to read some of his early published papers and exclaimed (someone overheard), "How beautiful! And to think that I did it all!" The tone of this exclamation was, it seemed to me, astonished and modest, for he had genuinely forgotten, moving on. sent me to a biography of Louis Pasteur. Pasteur's was the most enviable life I had yet encountered. It was his privilege to do things until they were done. He established the germ theory of disease; he demonstrated convincingly that yeasts ferment beer; he discovered how to preserve wine; he isolated the bacillus in a disease of silkworms; he demonstrated the etiology of anthrax and produced a vaccine for it; he halted an epidemic of cholera in fowls and inoculated a boy for hydrophobia. Toward the end of his life, in a rare idle moment, he chanced to read some of his early published papers and exclaimed (someone overheard), "How beautiful! And to think that I did it all!" The tone of this exclamation was, it seemed to me, astonished and modest, for he had genuinely forgotten, moving on.

Pasteur had not used up all the good work. Mother told me again and again about one of her heroes, a doctor working for a federal agency who solved a problem that arose in the late forties. Premature babies, and only premature babies, were turning up blind, in enormous numbers. Why? What do premature babies have in common?

"Look in the incubators!" Mother would holler, and knock the side of her head with the heel of her hand, holler outraged, glaring far behind my head as she was telling me this story, holler, "Look in the incubators!" as if at her wit's end facing a roomful of doctors who wrung their useless hands and accepted this blindness as one of life's tough facts. Mother's hero, like all of Mother's heroes, accepted nothing. She rolled up her sleeves, looked in the incubators, and decided to see what happened if she reduced the oxygen in the incubator air. That worked. Too much oxygen had been blinding them. Now the babies thrived; they got enough oxygen, and they weren't blinded. Hospitals all over the world changed the air mixture for incubators, and prematurity no longer carried a special risk of blindness.

Mother liked this story, and told it to us fairly often. Once she posed it as a challenge to Amy. We were all in the living room, waiting for dinner. "What would you do if you noticed that all over the United States, premature babies were blind?" Without even looking up from her homework, Amy said, "Look in the incubators. Maybe there's something wrong in the incubators." Mother started to whoop for joy before she realized she'd been had.

Problems still yielded to effort. Only a few years ago, to the wide-eyed attention of the world, we had seen the epidemic of poliomyelitis crushed in a twinkling, right here in Pittsburgh.

We had all been caught up in the polio epidemic: the early neighbor boy who wore one tall shoe, to which his despairing father added another two soles every year; the girl in the iron lung reading her schoolbook in an elaborate series of mirrors while a volunteer waited to turn the page; my friend who limped, my friend who rolled everywhere in a wheelchair, my friend whose arm hung down, Mother's friend who walked with crutches. My beloved dressed-up aunt, Mother's sister, had come to visit one day and, while she was saying h.e.l.lo, flung herself on the couch in tears; her son had it. Just a touch, they said, but who could believe it?

When Amy and I had asked, Why do we have to go to bed so early? Why do we have to wash our hands again? we knew Mother would kneel to look us in the eyes and answer in a low, urgent voice, So you do not get polio. We heard polio discussed once or twice a day for several years.

And we had all been caught up in its prevention, in the wild ferment of the early days of the Salk vaccine, the vaccine about which Pittsburgh talked so much, and so joyously, you could probably have heard the crowd noise on the moon.

In 1953, Jonas Salk's Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh had produced a controversial vaccine for polio. The small stories in the Pittsburgh Press Press and the and the Post-Gazette Post-Gazette were coming out in were coming out in Life Life and and Time Time. It was too quick, said medical colleagues nationwide: Salk had gone public without first publishing everything in the journals. He rushed out a killed-virus serum without waiting for a safe live-virus one, which would probably be better. Doctors walked out of professional meetings; some quit the foundation that funded the testing. Salk was after personal glory, they said. Salk was after money, they said. Salk was after big prizes.

Salk tested the serum on five thousand Pittsburgh schoolchildren, of whom I was three, because I kept changing elementary schools. Our parents, like ninety-five percent of all Pittsburgh parents, signed the consent forms. Did the other mothers then bend over the desk in relief and sob? I don't know. But I don't suppose any of them gave much of a d.a.m.n what Salk had been after.

When Pasteur died, near a place wonderfully called Saint-Cloud, he murmured to the devoted a.s.sistants who surrounded his bed, "Il faut travailler."

Il faut indeed indeed travailler travailler-no one who grew up in Pittsburgh could doubt it. And no one who grew up in Pittsburgh could doubt that the great work was ongoing. We breathed in optimism-not coal dust-with every breath. What couldn't be done with good hard travail? travail?

The air in Pittsburgh had been dirty; now we could see it was clean. An enormous, pioneering urban renewal was under way; the newspapers pictured fantastic plans, airy artists' watercolors, which we soon saw laid out and built up in steel and gla.s.s downtown. The Republican Richard King Mellon had approached Pittsburgh's Democratic, Catholic mayor, David L. Lawrence, and together with a dozen business leaders they were razing the old grim city and building a sparkling new one; they were washing the very air. The Russians had shot Sputnik into outer s.p.a.ce. In Shippingport, just a few miles down the Ohio River, people were building a generating plant that used atomic energy-an idea that seemed completely dreamy, but there it was. A physicist from Bell Laboratories spoke to us at school about lasers; he was about as wrought up a man as I had ever seen. You could not reasonably believe a word he said, but you could see that he believed it.

We knew that "Doctor Salk" had spent many years and many dollars to produce the vaccine. He commonly worked sixteen-hour days, six days a week. Of course. In other laboratories around the world, other researchers were working just as hard, as hard as Salk and Pasteur. Hard work bore fruit. This is what we learned growing up in Pittsburgh, growing up in the United States.

Salk had isolated seventy-four strains of polio virus. It took him three years to verify the proposition that a workable vaccine would need samples of only three of these strains. He grew the virus in tissues cultured from monkey kidneys. The best broth for growing the monkey tissue proved to be Medium Number 199; it contained sixty-two ingredients in careful proportion.

This was life itself: the big task. Nothing exhilarated me more than the idea of a life dedicated to a monumental worthwhile task. Doctor Salk never watched it rain and wished he had never been born. How many shovelfuls of dirt did men move to dig the Panama Ca.n.a.l? Two hundred and forty million cubic yards. It took ten years and twenty-one thousand lives and $336,650,000, but it was possible.

I thought a great deal about the Panama Ca.n.a.l, and always contemplated the same notion: You could take more time, and do it with teaspoons. I saw myself and a few Indian and Caribbean co-workers wielding teaspoons from our kitchen: Towle, Rambling Rose. And our grandchildren, and their grandchildren. Digging the ca.n.a.l across the isthmus at Panama would tear through a good many silver spoons. But it could be done, in theory and therefore in fact. It was like Mount Rushmore, or Grand Coulee Dam. You hacked away at the landscape and made something, or you did not do anything, and just died.

How many filaments had Thomas Edison tried, over how many years, before he found one workable for incandescence? How many days and nights over how many years had Marie Curie labored in a freezing shed to isolate radium? I read a biography of George Washington Carver: so many years on the soybean, the peanut, the sweet potato, the waste from ginning cotton. I read biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Daniel Boone.

It was all the same story. You have a great idea and spend grinding years at dull tasks, still charged by your vision. All the people about whom biographies were not written were people who failed to find something that took years to do. People could count the grains of sand. In my own life, as a sideline, and for starters, I would learn all the world's languages.

What if people said it could not be done? So much the better. We grew up with the myth of the French Impressionist painters, and its queer implication that rejection and ridicule guaranteed, or at any rate signaled, a project's worth. When little George Westinghouse at last figured out how to make air brakes, Cornelius Vanderbilt of the New York Central Railroad said to him, "Do you mean to tell me with a straight face that a moving train can be stopped with wind?" "They laughed at Orville," Mother used to say when someone tried to talk her out of a wild scheme, "and they laughed at Wilbur."

I had small experience of the evil hopelessness, pain, starvation, and terror that the world spread about; I had barely seen people's malice and greed. I believed that in civilized countries, torture had ended with the Enlightenment. Of nations' cruel options I knew nothing. My optimism was endless; it grew sky-high within the narrow bounds of my isolationism. Because I was all untried courage, I could not allow that the loss of courage was a real factor to be reckoned in. I put my faith in willpower, that weak notion by which children seek to replace the loving devotion that comes from intimate and dedicated knowledge. I believed that I could resist aging by willpower.

I believed then, too, that I would never harm anyone. I usually believed I would never meet a problem I could not solve. I would overcome any weakness, any despair, any fear. Hadn't I overcome my fear of the ghosty oblong that coursed round my room, simply by thinking it through? Everything was simple. You found good work, learned all about it, and did it.

Questions of how to act were also transparent to reason. Right and wrong were easy to discern: I was right, and Amy was wrong. Many of my cla.s.smates stole things, but I did not. Sometimes, in a very tight spot, when at last I noticed I had a moral question on my hands, I asked myself, What would Christ have done? I had picked up this method (very much on the sly-we were not supposed really to believe these things) from Presbyterian Sunday school, from summer camp, or from any of the innumerable righteous orange-bound biographies I read. I had not known it to fail in the two times I had applied it.

As for loss, as for parting, as for bidding farewell, so long, thanks, to love or a land or a time-what did I know of parting, of grieving, mourning, loss? Well, I knew one thing; I had known it all along. I knew it was the kicker. I knew life pulled you in two; you never healed. Mother's emotions ran high, and she suffered sometimes from a web of terrors, because, she said, her father died when she was seven; she still missed him.

My parents played the Cole Porter song "It's All Right with Me." When Ella Fitzgerald sang, "There's someone I'm trying so hard to forget-don't you want to forget someone too?," these facile, breathy lyrics struck me as an unexpectedly true expression of how it felt to be alive. This was experience at its most private and inarticulate: longing and loss. "It's the wrong time, it's the wrong place, though your face is charming, it's the wrong face." I was a thirteen-year-old child; I had no one to miss, had lost no one. Yet I suspect most children feel this way, probably all children feel this way, as adults do; they mourn this absence or loss of someone, and sense that unnamable loss as a hole or hollow moving beside them in the air.

Loss came around with the seasons, blew into the house when you opened the windows, piled up in the bottom desk and dresser drawers, acc.u.mulated in the back of closets, heaped in the bas.e.m.e.nt starting by the furnace, and came creeping up the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs. Loss grew as you did, without your consent; your losses mounted beside you like earthworm castings. No willpower could prevent someone's dying. And no willpower could restore someone dead, breathe life into that frame and set it going again in the room with you to meet your eyes. That was the fact of it. The strongest men and women who had ever lived had presumably tried to resist their own deaths, and now they were dead. It was on this fact that all the stirring biographies coincided, concurred, and culminated.

Time itself bent you and cracked you on its wheel. We were getting ready to move again. I knew I could not forever keep riding my bike backward into ever-older neighborhoods to look the ever-older houses in the face. I tried to memorize the layout of this Richland Lane house, but I couldn't force it into my mind while it was still in my bones.

I saw already that I could not in good faith renew the increasingly desperate series of vows by which I had always tried to direct my life. I had vowed to love Walter Milligan forever; now I could recall neither his face nor my feeling, but only this quondam urgent vow. I had vowed to keep exploring Pittsburgh by bicycle no matter how old I got, and planned an especially sweeping tour for my hundredth birthday in 2045. I had vowed to keep hating Amy in order to defy Mother, who kept prophesying I would someday not hate Amy. In short, I always vowed, one way or another, not to change. Not me. I needed the fierceness of vowing because I could scarcely help but notice, visiting the hatchling robins at school every day, that it was mighty unlikely.

As a life's work, I would remember everything-everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net. I would trap and keep every teacher's funny remark, every face on the street, every microscopic alga's sway, every conversation, configuration of leaves, every dream, and every sc.r.a.p of overhead cloud. Who would remember Molly's infancy if not me? (Unaccountably, I thought that only I had noticed-not Molly, but time itself. No one else, at least, seemed bugged by it. Children may believe that they alone have interior lives.) Some days I felt an urgent responsibility to each change of light outside the sunporch windows. Who would remember any of it, any of this our time, and the wind thrashing the buckeye limbs outside? Somebody had to do it, somebody had to hang on to the days with teeth and fists, or the whole show had been in vain. That it was impossible never entered my reckoning. For work, for a task, I had never heard the word.

WE WERE MOVING THAT SPRING because our beloved grandfather had died, of a brain tumor. It was the year I got a microscope, and traveled with Judy Schoyer to Paw Paw, watched robins fledge from the school library window, and saw the Polyphemus moth walk toward Shadyside; I was now thirteen. I was expecting to attend an upper-school dance at the boys' school, Shady Side Academy, to which an older boy had invited me, but our grandfather died that day, and our father cried, and the dance was out. I shamed myself by minding that the dance was out. because our beloved grandfather had died, of a brain tumor. It was the year I got a microscope, and traveled with Judy Schoyer to Paw Paw, watched robins fledge from the school library window, and saw the Polyphemus moth walk toward Shadyside; I was now thirteen. I was expecting to attend an upper-school dance at the boys' school, Shady Side Academy, to which an older boy had invited me, but our grandfather died that day, and our father cried, and the dance was out. I shamed myself by minding that the dance was out.

Our grandfather had been a straitlaced, gentle man, whose mild and tolerant presence had soothed Oma for forty-four years. He doted on Amy and me, from a Scotch-Irish banker's distance; we loved him. For several weeks that spring as he lay in the hospital, the tumor pressed on his brain in such a way that he could say only one word, "b.a.l.l.s." Amy and I watched him move on the bed between sheets; he twisted inside a thin hospital gown. Neither of us had seen him angry before; he was angry now, and shocked. "b.a.l.l.s," he replied to any inquiry, "b.a.l.l.s" for h.e.l.lo and "b.a.l.l.s" for goodbye. Goodbye it was, and he died.

Oma sadly sold their Pittsburgh house. She and Mary Burinda moved into a pair of penthouse apartments in Shadyside. In the summer, Oma and Mary and Henry lived at Lake Erie. In the fall, they moved back to Pittsburgh and Oma caught opening nights at the Nixon Theater. And for the winter and spring, Oma and Mary moved to Pompano Beach, Florida, where they had an apartment on the water.

Oma sold their house, and we had bought it. A year later we moved from Richland Lane, from the generous house with the gla.s.s sunporch under buckeye trees. We moved to Oma's old stone house, another corner house, high on a hilly street where all the houses were old stone, and all their roofs were old slate, and the few children played-if they played at all-inside.

We lived now on a hushed hill packed with little castles. There were only three, dead-end streets. The longest street, winding silently into the very empyrean, was Glen Arden Drive. The McCulloughs lived at one end of it, and the McCradys at the other. Houses rarely changed hands; from here, there was nowhere in town to move to. The next step was a seat at the right hand of G.o.d.

In horizontal s.p.a.ce, our family now lived near our first house on Edgerton Avenue, near St. Bede's Church. In vertical s.p.a.ce, we were quite distant from it. Queerly, an inhumanly long and steep flight of outdoor stairs connected our newest neighborhood to our oldest one. These were the Glen Arden steps. From the top of Glen Arden Drive, between two houses, thirty concrete steps descended a scruffy unbuildable cliff to Dallas Avenue below, across the street from St. Bede's. The steps made a dark old tunnel. They were like the stairway in the poem, the stairway to the sea where down the blind are driven. Their concrete was so rough it ruined your shoes. Children from below played there; Popsicle wrappers and wrecked plastic toys kept the cliff a mess. People's maids used the steps to connect with Dallas Avenue buses-the maids climbed wearily up the cruel steps in the morning, and wearily down them at night.

The steps landed between and behind two small ordinary Pittsburgh brick houses; a walkway sloped down into the daylight of Dallas Avenue, where buses ran. If I stood on Dallas Avenue waiting for the bus to art cla.s.s and looked across the street at the corner, by squinting down across the rows of sycamores at St. Bede's I could make out our first house. There it was on the farthest visible corner, painted white again, and there were the Lombardy poplars behind it, next to the alley. Down that now leafy street Jo Ann Sheehy had skated, and I had run from the nuns and run from the man whose windshield we hit with a s...o...b..ll. There were the maple trees Henry planted when Amy and I were born.

Too old to play on the steps, instead I dreamed about them-how I dreamed about them!-a hundred steep steps dark as a chute. Fuzzy staghorn sumac poked their cold pipe rails. I dreamed about the blackened soil and frozen candy wrappers on the dizzying cliff they spanned. I dreamed the steps let me down in the wrong place. I dreamed the steps swayed underfoot, and rose, and tilted me over the ocean. I dreamed I couldn't find the steps.

That first spring our family walked out together, as we had not done for many years, to see the Memorial Day parade pa.s.s down Dallas Avenue. Our neighbors did, too; once a year the pale families emerged from their stone houses and climbed stiffly down the Glen Arden steps to watch the Memorial Day parade.

Now our family was seeing the once familiar parade from the other side of the street. A dozen bands pa.s.sed, and the bra.s.s horns wagged from side to side in time. The kids from the big all-black high school came bopping and tossing batons. I felt the low drumbeats in my breastbone. More marching bands pa.s.sed, then shuffling ranks of men, then children, in uniforms. Horses, of all things, walked by or skittered, backing the crowd. Then, to everyone's boredom, open cars drove by; it was over. Loose children on bikes, mad with excitement, rode squiggles and loops at the parade's rear, like tails on a kite. We stayed to hear the music wind away up toward the cemetery.

When the parade had pa.s.sed, the people from the two sides of Dallas Avenue were left looking at each other. There were our former neighbors. Mother crossed over and talked to some of them. There were some of my earliest friends, altered, and my dear old friend Cathy Lindsey, whom I had already met up with again in our big public art cla.s.ses; we always sat together. Now we waved across Dallas Avenue. The Sheehy women were there: Jo Ann in pink makeup, and her mother listless in a wide housedress, holding some sort of baby. The nice Fahey boys weren't there; they had moved. Father and I saw the polio boy who had worn such a tall shoe; now, miraculously, he had grown almost all the way up and had two equally long, good legs. He never knew us, so we didn't wave.

People were scattering. The Glen Arden families wordlessly climbed back up the thirty cement steps, and burst out like dead souls on another full scene enacted on a higher plane. They looked around strangely from between the two high houses, got their bearings so that the highest circle of Glen Arden Drive seemed like the very horizon, glided to their own houses, and closed their doors again.

SINCE WE HAD MOVED, my reading had taken a new turn.

Books wandered in and out of my hands, as they had always done, but now most of them had a common theme. This new theme was the source of imagination at its most private-never mentioned, rarely even brought to consciousness. It was, essentially, a time, and a series of places, to which I returned nightly. So also must thousands, or millions, of us who grew up in the 1950s, reading what came to hand. What came to hand in those years were books about the past war: the war in England, France, Belgium, Norway, Italy, Greece; the war in Africa; the war in the Pacific, in Guam, New Guinea, the Philippines; the war, Adolf Hitler, and the camps.

We read Leon Uris's popular novels, Exodus Exodus, and, better, Mila 18 Mila 18, about the Warsaw ghetto. We read Hersey's The Wall The Wall-again, the Warsaw ghetto. We read Time Time magazine, and magazine, and Life Life, and Look Look. It was in the air, that there had been these things. We read, above all, and over and over, for we were young, Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl The Diary of a Young Girl. This was where we belonged; here we were at home.