A cold morning for Seattle. \u00a0Since midnight in the Capitol Hill walkup, while Yves slept back down the hall, I\u2019d kept myself at the cardboard desk, trying to write. \u00a0In all that time I\u2019d managed maybe half a page of a troubled novel, but my rule then was, even though you made no progress, you weren\u2019t allowed to do anything else. \u00a0I\u2019d signed off, closed up shop, pulled on a sweater, and come out and down three floors, threadbare maroon carpet, dank yellowing cream plaster, not a soul but me, to the entrance door that locked but whose thin glass offered little security, and out. \u00a0In the entryway a giant hedgehog at the mailboxes raised a paw toward our buzzer.<\/p>\n
\u201cSorry?\u201d I said. \u00a0\u201cI live there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her points and wisps of wool-\u2013cape, beret-\u2013twinkled with the misty rain but I saw nothing festive in her pale face. \u00a0Her bee-stung lips pursed, she measured me with dark grave eyes. \u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s Yves I came to see. \u00a0You must be his friend. \u00a0I\u2019m Fanchette,\u201d she said, in a French accent a bit different from Yves\u2019s, and more pronounced.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s asleep,\u201d I said, \u201cand, well, we should probably not wake him yet for a while. \u00a0He was extra busy last night at the restaurant. \u00a0But listen, I\u2019m going out for coffee down the block. Why not join me, you know, and then we can come back and roust him out. I\u2019m Joe, by the way. \u00a0And he\u2019s mentioned you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThanks, no, I can\u2019t today. \u00a0But please give him this back, which I enjoyed. And please thank him.\u201d \u00a0Yves\u2019s dog-eared paper Boris Vian\u00a0L\u2019Ecume des jours<\/i>, his favorite. \u00a0\u201cGoodbye, Joe.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAu revoir<\/i>, Fanchette,\u201d I ventured. \u00a0Even so little French felt risky then, and with many francophones I would have stayed in English in so brief and guarded (I already felt) a first encounter. With this Fanchette, however, vulnerable and unafraid as she seemed, I felt like laying some cards on the table.<\/p>\n
Poor as church mice we all were then, in the mid-seventies, Fanchette, Yves, and I, part of a francophone Seattle demimonde of French, Arab, African, and Indochinese immigrants and visitors, and Americans who for one reason or another could be called Francophile, mostly in our thirties, getting by. We three were also, it turned out, part of another demimonde, LGBT Seattle. \u00a0Furthermore Fanchette\u2019s and my morning meeting closed the third leg of a triangle of friendship and love whose endurance has to do with more than our shared bilingualism and sexual orientation.<\/p>\n
I myself was only proto-bilingual then and (as later) felt no obligation to set straight those who might overestimate my proficiency. \u00a0I had studied French in a little western Kentucky high school, under the spell of French culture\u2013-art and sophistication that seemed achingly unattainable to the first son of a widowed strip coal miner. \u00a0At the same time, as I have come to realize, the roots of my attachment to France run in a curiouser and more personal track.<\/p>\n
My mother died when I was ten and my brother eight. \u00a0Two years later my father remarried; he lived fifteen years after. \u00a0He was always good to me and my brother, and I owe him much of my character, notably his bemused reserve. \u00a0Still, in the ten years my mother had with me she exerted a larger and more decisive influence, under which I still operate, although I haven\u2019t been able to recall her face for many years.<\/p>\n
Margaret Wise had grown up in Hazard, in the Kentucky Appalachians, been educated there through secondary school, and then moved to the western part of the state, which must have seemed minimally more prosperous, and where she had relatives, an older spinster schoolmistress cousin, and a still older childless great aunt married to a retired L&N train conductor. \u00a0There Margaret and Lawrence Porter married and soon began their family with me. \u201cBomb the Japs with junk,\u201d reads the line under the announcement of my birth in the 1942 clipping from the town paper, and sometimes in childhood, musing over that document, I couldn\u2019t help wondering about the connection.<\/p>\n
Because coal mining was a vital industry, my father stayed in Kentucky while his younger brother went to fight in France, to return strutting like a bantam rooster, not a feather out of place. \u00a0All the same, both brothers proved war casualties, Earl when, his horizons shrinking to a now severe pre-war narrowness, he lapsed into alcoholism and still more pitiable failings, and Lawrence when he lost half a leg in an accident in the overworked coal tipple. \u00a0The war may have persuaded Margaret and Lawrence to propagate quickly, me after some eleven months of marriage, Dan less than eighteen months after.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I owe Margaret the early fostering and perhaps even the instigation of my love of books. \u00a0She read books herself, novels, and she taught me to read before I was old enough for school. \u00a0I remember that a censorious neighbor woman accused Margaret of \u201cfavoring\u201d me over my brother, and there may have been some truth there\u2013-I was not only the first but also, I believe, more like Margaret herself, and also simply more singular. \u00a0But the neighbor\u2019s censure surprised me, and it seemed mistaken. \u00a0Margaret loved us both well, perhaps as well as possible, and I recall no rivalry whatever between Dan and me. \u00a0Margaret had prepared me well for his arrival, and I remember her return from the hospital, the commotion of a wheelchair on the snowy front porch, and then inside, her parting the blue swaddling clothes so that I could touch the cheek of the new brother, who seemed to have been conceived and borne as a gift for me.<\/p>\n
I recall a later touch too when Dan, age three, fell off his tricycle on the sidewalk, and was struggling back aboard with a scraped knee and a few tears by the time I had crossed the lawn. It was hot summer and yet when I took Dan\u2019s little back between my hands to lift him, I felt an electric chill go through me.<\/p>\n
Margaret taught me to read, and she catered to some of my whims. \u00a0When something I was reading contained the word \u201cflorist,\u201d new to me, and she saw her explanation of its meaning provoke wonder in me\u2013-zinnias and bachelor\u2019s buttons for our living room came from the back yard, and I\u2019d never considered who supplied the carnations we wore to church on Mother\u2019s Day, red for Dan and me white for our parents–she promptly drove me to visit the town\u2019s florist. \u00a0I was amazed that a grown man could spend his days surrounded by beauty and fragrance, by delicacy, while Lawrence came home a dirty amputee. \u00a0Surely there was a lesson there. \u00a0Some time later I showed my mastery of it when, asked the standard question by an adult, I said I aimed to be a florist when I grew up\u2013-only to feel my self-satisfaction founder, for neither the questioner nor Margaret (herself learning for the first time of my momentous decision) seemed flabbergasted, but rather they smiled at one another in a way that meant, even then I could see, back to the drawing board.<\/p>\n
Generally permissive and encouraging, Margaret also had a good sense of mischief. \u00a0I had a ragged teddy bear, Patsy, who served (her name juster than I knew) as my confidante. \u00a0One morning, sent to Dan\u2019s and my room for some infraction, I joined Patsy in a corner behind a door and complained to her of the treatment that had outraged my already lively sense of ethics, not quite whispering into one of Patsy\u2019s large ears, an ear larger than her muzzle, a welcoming and commiserating ear, into which I poured my heart of grief. \u00a0The idyll might never have ended had not a sideways glance of Patsy\u2019s (black disk slipping in its amber envelope) alerted me to a presence at the crack, and a sound, muffled laughter unmuffled when I turned and peered through at Margaret. \u00a0At first more than anything else I felt shock, that my pathos could occasion such merriment, so little sympathy, in someone who loved me. \u00a0It was a good lesson.<\/p>\n
In my tenth summer Margaret died with little warning, of a brain tumor. \u00a0There seemed no justice in it, nor much consolation in adults\u2019 assurances that they had never seen so many flowers at a funeral. \u00a0The church congregation brought Dan and me a pet. \u00a0Although there seems to have been talk of a puppy, in the end it was a parakeet the minister\u2019s wife delivered. \u00a0Oscar, whom we named after her husband, never talked, but he survived our affection for a good year. \u00a0We also received a book, a white leatherette album with signatures of funeral guests, and Tennyson\u2019s \u201cCrossing the Bar.\u201d \u00a0That book, when I took it out and handled it, and that poem, provoked pangs of wonder I felt glad of, but they also seemed obscurely shameful, I would so clearly have preferred keeping Margaret.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A cold morning for Seattle. Since midnight in the Capitol Hill walkup, while Yves slept back down the hall, I\u2019d kept myself at the cardboard desk, trying to write.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1539,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[17],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n