from the tyranny of stratigraphy
Her husband had written down the directions. Getting there required three different trains and crossing some terrible looking river to get to Astoria. What caught her off guard weren’t the masses of people and the way they pushed and pulled. She expected that. What caught her were the smells. Some were good and others were awful. She slipped on the stairs descending from the elevated train. A man in a trench coat grabbed her arm before she landed. He walked on without looking at her face. Without her saying, “Thank You”. He wore a cologne and she smelled it around her as she continued down the stairs to a place where the reek of urine overwhelmed his sweet freshness and then a warm breeze passed over her which smelled of rotting garbage and dissipated with her walking but left her with the feeling that her hair was suddenly unclean.
The morning sun was low and cold. Bright reflections appeared in funny places, caught her eye and slipped away. She walked down a long street where the windows were paneled with steel curtains which were dirty and painted with great, complex, awkward symbols in faded colors. Old men and women, and rarely young ones, had unlocked padlocks attached to the panels and lifted them up like garage doors. The windows behind them were painted too. This paint was fresh and the letters were Greek. She noticed that every other storefront was a bakery. Behind the windows were tiers of inclined metal trays and in each of these an old woman was pulling out old trays that were empty except for sheets of wax paper and crumbs and replacing these with trays over-full with richly colored and high-piled pastries and cakes. As she passed an occasional open doorway, the aroma, almost as would a person, grasped at her arm, pulled at her, and let her slip with dissipated fingers as she continued stiffly away.
Just as she was beginning to enjoy the very different feel of the Boulevard, she saw the bent metal of the flagging green sign indicating the side street. She paused and watched the street before following it. One side of the street was fine. Rows of very small, two-flat houses with small grass and gravel yards, tight low hedges and occasional statuary: Christ and Mary and Saints. The saints she thought she might recognize but couldn’t quite be sure. On the other side of the street was a massive brick building that seemed to run for blocks. It was a tired looking five story building with few windows, many broken, and very few doors. Two of the doors were open, and empty steel and vinyl chairs sat beside them on the sidewalk, strewn with paper bags and broken glass. For the three short blocks, she kept to the good side of the street, looking for a specific upper flat.
“My name is Martha Streep”, she said, holding open the aluminum frame of the screen door. “I spoke with you last week. I believe I have an appointment.”
The face opposite her in the doorway was heavy and overly white with confused eyes peering through heavy black framed glasses mimicking the heavy black frame of the doorway. A gentle warm breeze moved from inside the house, flowing past the heavy woman at the door. The woman wore a huge caftan that was patterned in faded yellow and black and the base of it ruffled softly through the thin opening of the door and tickled
at the legs of Martha Streep. The heavy woman removed her glasses and squinted at Martha.
“Oh Christ,” she said. “You’re here about Jason Philby. When you said eight, I thought … , Sugar, in New York there is only one eight o’clock and that isn’t now.”
“I’ve taken the subway … , from Manhattan.”
“Oh Gawd. Lord, Lord, Lord. I suppose you should come in. But this, Sugar, and I say this emphatically, this is not a good time.”
“I’m really sorry,” the girl said as she followed her up a long dark set of stairs which led to an upper apartment. She could distinguish a dim dining room. Two identical patterns of the pale orange and yellow brick of the building next door, only set a foot or two apart from this building, boxed in two rectangular dark window frames, hazily reflected up at the girl from the surface of a large dining room table at the center of the room. The air was stale with smoke and the subtle scent of foods that the girl couldn’t recognize. The girl stepped into the room as the heavy woman closed the door and turned five dead bolts. The woman waved the girl into another room at the front of the apartment.
“Sugar, go in there.” she said, “I’ll be with you in a minute.” And the heavy woman moved in small steps, with her feet hidden beneath the swelling folds of the caftan, to the kitchen in the back.
“Get the lights if you could, Sugar,” she said as she disappeared into the dark kitchen.
Martha squinted and felt along the wall beside the door that Martha had just passed through until she found the switch. The room was lined with bookcases. They filled every space along the walls and one stood out into the room, perpendicular to the wall. A small notebook, the top page of which was half-covered with a bold open scrawl, a pair of large scissors and red stained wine glass sat on the large dining room table. The chairs at the table and the floor beside it and beneath it were heaped with yellowed, clipped newspapers. These drifted out and to beneath one of the two windows.
The book cases continued into the front room where the girl found another light switch behind a pile of books – a stained and worn “The Joy of Sex”, four jacketless biographies of Richard Nixon, an anthology of Mark Twain, “The Mythology of the Blackfoot Indian”, and set apart in her mind like a pearl in the midst of the others: “Love in the Time of Cholera”. There were several framed photographs, certificates and drawings hung on the wall above and in gaps between the books. Otherwise the room was sparsely furnished with a love seat and a large chair, both covered with off-white, stained to yellow, sheets and a small round marble table, also stained, also yellow.
She contemplated sitting. She realized that even the windows in this front room, which would have opened to the street that she was just on and the city beyond it, were hidden behind books. The heavy woman entered with a gray tray, gone to a yellowish brown that looked to be tarnished silver. On the tray were two large conical glasses, a half full crystal pitcher and a bowl of small wet onions.
“Gimlet?” the woman said as she placed the tray on the table.
“Oh, not so early for me, thank you.” Martha Streep walked to the furthest wall. She turned and noticed that the heavy woman had wrapped her curly, short silver hair in a turban sort of thing that matched the caftan in yellow and black. The yellow of the turban was much brighter than that of the caftan. Martha turned back to the wall.
“These are Pulitzers?
“1965, 1971 and 1973”
“And a Neuman Fellowship?”
“Harvard 1963 into 1964”
The girl paused without speaking in front of a framed cartoon. It showed the head of the heavy woman, face forward, considerably less corpulent and much younger, replacing the head of a penis, looking out from a long veiny pink and purplish shaft. Beside it was a black and white, eight-by-ten photograph of the woman when she was very thin and young, beside the sweating face of an enormous man.
“Screw Magazine, 1972,” the woman said. “Fattest man in the world, 1955. It all comes to that, you know. Tired little mementos.”
“Impressive. Impressive credentials, I mean,” said the girl. She heard the woman lowering herself into the love seat and pouring a drink. When she turned she saw the woman placing a cocktail onion into one of the glasses with a pair of small silver tongs.
“Well tell me your story, why have you come?” said the heavy woman.
“I’m from Utah, as I said on the phone. I’m here with my husband.”
She paused, looked back at the wall, and moved back into the center of the room and sat on an arm of the chair and looked around the room for an ash tray as the heavy woman lit a cigarette.
“I am a journalist, well a journalism student, and I have a great interest in the the Philby house. I’ve found three people familiar with it, and you of course are one of the three.”
“That would make sense. Do go on,” the woman said.
A long pause in the conversation ensued. The younger woman watched the ashes grow long on the cigarette and fall onto the silver tray as the heavy woman shifted her hand, raising the drink in the other.
“Of course, the Philby home is something I’m considering writing about. It was extraordinary from what I’ve heard. I got your name from Jason Philby’s daughter. She’s in San Diego now. Jason Philby, as you probably know, passed on in the fire. And, well…”
“Of course he did,” the heavy woman interrupted, “He built a fortress and died with it. We all build our fortresses, fill them with our mementos, and live in them, having to dodge around the mementos wherever we may have happened to place them thirty-years ago, for as long as we can, and most of us die in them.”
The young woman paused for quite a while looking at the books and wondering how to respond and then continued, “Well my husband, he’s an attorney, was asked to attend a conference here. Of course I wanted to come and see the city. So I thought that I might meet with you while I was here. I took the subway.”
“You’ve mentioned that.”
“I suppose I did. Well Jason’s daughter could help me with a few things over the phone. But she didn’t know much of the early years. She thought of you as someone who might help.”
The heavy woman sipped her drink and cast her half finished cigarette on the tray and began.
“The house was yellow, Sugar. It was large, very large and yellow. It was Jason’s fortress. Christ I invariably fail to remember that it is gone now. It is, perhaps, an indelible concept for me now. A memorial living in this tired and old brain. Another memento laying about to trip me up every now and then in my own well furnished psyche.”
The younger woman smiled uncomfortably and the older continued without noticing.
“The thing of that house. The thing that surprised me about it more than anything else wasn’t the way it took Jason Philby down. It was that someone had built it there at that location to begin with. Of course it wasn’t so big when it was first built. I don’t think it was. It was built on a small knoll up against the mountains down there. Those mountains are what some might call hills. But to me, coming from the east, I figure that they’re mountains. They were funny though. Strange. They were conical and low and looked more like they were made out of earth than rock. No vegetation. They were striped horizontally in gray and brown. They looked very dry all of the year. They looked like a thousand little volcanoes all laid out. That’s the best way to describe them, Sugar: a thousand little volcanoes, all laid out. At the sunset when the light was right and fell on the mountains and that house from straight across the valley, they could be very pretty in an unusual western way.”
“But you wanted to know about Jason and the house. It’s hard, even now, to separate them, that house and Jason. Jason was born at Harlan in Iowa in around 1930. You probably know that. I first met him when I went home with his brother Daniel to meet their parents. He was taller than Daniel and better looking. He was dark then with fine features. Kind of delicate and at the same time strong. Daniel was older, but not by more than a year or two. So they were very close. Daniel and I were at Columbia then and Jason was still at home. I think he waited a couple of years before going to Chicago. But he may have been in High School. They lived in Lincoln then, when I visited, in a small house. They were Mormon. Very sophisticated though. Their father was a professor in Chemistry or something like that and their mother worked at home. She ran civic organizations. Charity work.”
The older woman began preparing a second drink and the other pretended not notice – avoiding looking directly in the woman’s eyes or at the tray.
“Some were related to the Church and some were not. They lived in a small house that was built to appear large if you know what I mean. It was an awkward trip because I didn’t know the significance of the Church. To me Daniel was just another man. Well, of course, that isn’t right. Now that I look back on it, I was a tiny bit in love with him. But I didn’t know the amount of influence that the Church, that Church, did have on him.”
“His family, each of them, reacted differently. It wasn’t the whole family that I saw. There were eight children in all but only two children were at home. The others were grown and gone. I think the mother was upset that I wasn’t Mormon. She was polite but she was not close. Every time she saw Daniel she kissed him softly on the cheek. She never once shook hands with me. She was not close in any way. She had a funny way of stepping out in front of Daniel with her arm looped through his. She’d step right between us. She seemed to care a great deal about maintaining distance. Not only distance between her and I, but between Daniel and I as well. But perhaps that was the way she was with everyone. I’d told them that I was an agnostic Jewess from New Orleans early on, via New York. That was a mistake.”
The younger woman nodded slightly and quickly, caught the older woman’s eye, and looked away, swallowing in a hard but delicate way.
“And I think that to mention that on the first night was pushing things a little further than things could be reasonably pushed. I had a lot of ideas back then. I thought it would be funny. Sugar, not a one of them laughed. The father seemed displeased but more indifferent and was a little out of sorts with the mother, with the way she was acting. The younger sister Janet was full to the brim with questions about New York and the world beyond Nebraska. I remember her well. She had dark hair cut in a bob. She must have been fourteen or fifteen then. She had a highway map of New York State and an early edition of a guide to the City, the Michelin or something like that, and she spent a couple of hours pouring over those with us. She wanted to know everywhere that we had been and what each place was like. She wanted every detail. The mother kept getting her away from us and assigning chores for her to do. She’d run through the work and be back in minutes with more questions.”
“But you wanted to know about Jason. The house was built in three sections. I think the first was very old, as old as the settlement of the country around it. It was in more of a haphazard Victorian style. There were three stories. The lower two floors had ten foot ceilings. The third floor was cramped in beneath the roof with dormer windows and a widow’s watch of all things, in the middle of the Utah desert. That old part of the house. I remember the porch when I think of that part of the house. The porch wrapped almost fully around it except where the newer portions were built, and the knoll dropped away from the porch on all sides. Whoever had built that part of the house had run the water line. The water line was an old clay pipe that came out beneath the back porch and crossed down the knoll and back up again into those dry mountains. I suppose there was a spring back up in there, but I’ve never seen it. There was a clay and wooden cistern, that kind of looked like an enormous cooper’s barrel, you know, like half of a large wine barrel with wooden slats and metal rings, beneath that old part of the house and the water line kept it full. Jason had a pump installed, when he installed the new plumbing, that pumped water from the cistern into the house piping. For that first couple of years I guess they had to collect water for household use by lowering a bucket down into the cistern. I heard that he checked the cistern for dead mice in the fall and spring.”
“So I rarely drank the water there. I stuck to wine which Jason seemed to happily tolerate, but only extremely rarely would he drink with us. The other two parts of the house were newer. They were more box-like. Federalist, I guess would be the name of the style. I really don’t know a thing about architecture. The external moldings and windows and that sort of thing were made to match the older part of the house. These two newer sections extended out at angles from the sides of the older part of the house. The three parts of the house closed off the back of the knoll so that there was an area that was most ways enclosed by the three sections of the house and the beginning slope of the mountains. Because the knoll sloped down from the house and the mountains sloped up again, there was kind of a dip, I guess you would call it a swale, behind the house. The water pipe crossed it. Down and up again. That was Jason’s garden. That was something. Jason’s garden was a good three acres. He’d tapped water off the water pipe near the back porch and constructed a run of channels and ponds that allowed a lot of the water to drain back to a large pond that he built down at the base of the knoll where the down-slope from the knoll ended and the up-slope into the mountains began.”
The younger woman noticed that the older was speaking with her eyes closed but was turning her head about very slowly as if she was looking at what she was remembering.
“Jason had, when they first bought the place, gone out into those mountains and found some cool wet places that were hidden and had gathered some of the natural vegetation. He’d planted oak and reeds and cattails and lots of odd but beautiful flowers. There were stone walls in the garden and three large ramadas made with enormous beams that he’d brought all the way from Wyoming. Ramada’s are something like a very heavy western trellis. A horizontal trellis, above a patio, or as he called them, plazas.”
The younger woman nodded in acknowledgment. “The thing that was so wonderful was the way he’d put it all together. The stone walls were built in the same way as Anasazi walls. The old Indian style of wall. I remember once in the early fall, I was sitting on a patio that he’d built on a terrace about fifty yards behind that old wraparound porch. The terrace was small and the patio, the plaza, was flag-stone. There was a low stone wall around about two thirds of it with a little stream flowing around the outer part of the wall. The edge of a ramada hung over the patio and a cluster of little gamble oak covered the slope of the knoll above it. The oak was so red it was almost like a flame. The light was pure and crisp. I remember a small round table sat there. We had coffee in the mornings when I visited. That was before Joanna had gone.”
“I’m trying to think. I have been, since your call. About photographs. And I’m moderately certain I have none. Another thing about the garden was the angels. Jason somehow came into a lot of stone angels. He collected them. The kind that are used in cemeteries. He had some forty or fifty of them. There were placed all about the garden as if they were sculptures in an Italian courtyard. Only they were different because he would conceal them. You’d look carefully at a stand of flowers and notice, only as you were looking away, that through little gaps in the flowers was just a piece of the smooth white face of an angel.”
“Yes, Joanna. I should talk a bit about her. Daniel and I, of course, never married. We remain … , I will remain single until the end. It was difficult being a journalist and a woman. I couldn’t provide what a husband in that day would have wanted. I wasn’t stable. I was here and there and so was Daniel. I think he didn’t marry because of the Mormon Church, for similar reasons. I think he saw it as an obligation, if he were to marry, to settle down and provide from one spot. I remember hearing of Jason’s proposal to Joanna. I was in Europe. Jason was very young and Joanna was hardly a woman. I think that her age at the beginning perhaps was the source of the trouble later on. I didn’t go to the wedding. It was at the Temple in Salt Lake City. But I visited them in a very small house up in the hills above the refineries later on, there in Salt Lake City. Joanna was striking. I often think of how far they could have gone if they would have left Utah in those early years.”
“Joanna wanted to go. I don’t think she was dramatic about it. There was little opportunity for women there and I sensed, and I suppose, that was all it was, that she recognized her disadvantage there and wished to overcome it by moving away. Jason wanted to stay in Utah. He always seemed to be more at home there, even when he was younger and didn’t live there. They’d visit to tour the temple and the other Mormon sites and Jason would talk about staying. Daniel told me this. It was funny Joanna was from there and Jason was not, but he was the one who kept them there.”
“He never made much money doing all kinds of little jobs. He was a writer, a copy writer for an advertising company and they wanted him to move to California and he wouldn’t go. Joanna was upset, I think, about that. He sold houses sometimes and insurance once. There were a lot of those little jobs that didn’t last for very long. It always came down to Utah being a poor place, a small market I guess you could say. The companies he worked for all would want him to move and he was never willing to go. He said it was the weather and the mountains, things like that. We all figured that the Church had something to do with it. Daniel and I, and Janet also, went on to live all over the world. Jason was rooted, hunched down. He seemed to be waiting for something that never came.”
“It was the move to that house that finally did it for Joanna. I could understand, I suppose. Jason didn’t make much money and they had four children. Jason had wanted to have more children but Joanna had claimed health problems or so I was told by Daniel. So they moved to that house with the children and Joanna didn’t work. The only town nearby was along the highway there. I still remember the billboards. It was the last town on the highway for something like a hundred miles in both directions. It was a filthy row of rundown gas stations and mostly bad restaurants. They had no social life outside of the Church and that was only ranchers and farmers from all through that valley. They were good people I suppose, but not very much for conversation. Once Daniel and I were there together and Jason and Joanna took us to dinner. The restaurant was small but clean with honest good food. When we left, it was dark. There was a gypsum factory in the town. They processed gypsum for wall board. Gypsum is a white mineral produced from the evaporation of water. Sort of like salt. When we left the restaurant it was snowing gypsum. Enough that it covered the car. It was shocking, being early August. We all laughed. Joanna started crying, called it asbestos, which it isn’t, and we drove back to the house in silence. She wasn’t happy and that came through in those kind of ways. I don’t think she even mentioned it overtly to Jason. I’ve always wondered if he understood how she really felt. That was another era which probably a girl your age wouldn’t be able to even comprehend. Not just in Utah. It was everywhere like that, except for the very few of us who were, at least for awhile outside of it.”
“It was in August also, when she left. It would make sense with the heat there at that time of year. She must of just grown so needing of a cool breeze that she began to walk alone and away and never turned or stopped. He stayed. Why, with those children to care for, he didn’t leave that house and move to a more suitable location then, I’ll never know. It must have been so hard. I was there four or five times after she’d gone. Every time a little bit more of the house would be finished and a little less of it would be awaiting construction. But there was always much more awaiting construction than finished. It was like once he slipped into that house, he was under it and couldn’t even hope or want to get out from under it.”
“Joanna ended up in New Orleans. I go there occasionally or I did at one time. So I saw her once or twice after she left. I was born in New Orleans but left there when I was very young. Young enough not to remember it. I’ll never forget the first time I visited Joanna there. She was working at a small hotel in the French Quarter not far from where Faulkner wrote his first novel. Well I found her in a one of those French Quarter courtyards, fiddling around with rose bushes with small stone angels here and there amidst the greenery. I kind of had to laugh a little. It looked an awful lot like Jason’s garden. She’d gone far but at the same time not so very far. I remember we went out for coffee. I don’t think we spoke much about Jason or the children. I recall being uncomfortable about bringing them up and she didn’t. I do remember, and this is a wonderful story. We were stopped and watching one of those bands who play in the street there. You know how wonderful they are, those street bands. Just amazing that they are so good and play just out there in the street for tips when they can get them. Well we had stopped there. I think it was out in front of the Cathedral on Chartres. And a kid who looked to be street tough came up to us and slid down the wall beside us into a kind of miserable heap. He was pretty dangerous looking and we were starting to walk away when a cop came up on horseback. The cop went right up to him and leaned over the flank of the horse. I thought he was going to tell the kid to move on. Instead he leans over and says, ‘Hey Billy.’ The kid sits up and kind of unscrews his face and says to the cop, ‘How’s it happening, Maurice? How’s that new trombone working for you?’ Then the cop says, ‘Good, man, it is working real good. I’m cutting a single behind Russel Sims.’ The kid says, ‘Damn, that is good, I’m still playing with Marty over to Algiers.'”
“New Orleans, now that is a mysterious town. You can find dignity there, in just the strangest places. ‘There is but one true aristocracy, and that is aristocracy of passionate souls,’ that was Tennessee. His ode to the quarter.”
“So when Joanna left it was strange. In terms of Jason I mean. It was like she stepped right out of his reality. Once she was out of the house, she was out as far as Jason was concerned and he didn’t seem to care or even notice. It bothered Daniel more than Jason. Jason, it seemed, just worked on the wiring of that house or the garden or something. With that place, there was always something. Daniel told me that Jason spent a whole summer laying in the dirt beneath that house replacing the wiring. I just picture him there on his back with dirt in his eyes and mouth and the weight of that whole place sagging down onto him. He pressing it back up here and there and it sagging again everywhere else. I really think he stayed with the children more because of the house than because of the children.”
“That last time I saw him was at Daniel’s funeral. He didn’t cry or show much emotion for what I could see. He was talking about new fixtures in the upstairs bathroom. The thing with Jason was: He really did, he believed in that house. When Daniel killed himself I was very surprised. We led similar lives and his was a good one. At least at the beginning, our lives were similar. Later, of course, mine became infested with books. He had tiny apartments in San Francisco and Paris. He was a true Epicurean. Not the type shoveled us by our contemporary literature. But more in the vein of Seneca. He didn’t live extravagantly. But he lived well and with full attention given to the sensual pleasures.”
The younger woman blushed and looked away.
“I was shocked when I heard. He did have too many relationships. Even in his late forties he was still something worth looking at. That was Daniel: a grey suit, a black convertible, a pretty girl. He was getting older though. I’m not sure his career was taking him where he intended it to go. Maybe the women were passing him by. He could have seen it all coming to an end, because when you think about it, and I have, none of it was all that real. Just an ephemeral kind of magic. I’d long thought that we’d hear Jason was found with his throat cut beneath some stone angel or hanging from the widow’s watch of that ridiculous house. But I never in a million years would have seen that coming to Daniel. They found him in San Francisco, in a bathtub. Barbiturates and gin. Certainly intentional. Who can guess at a thing like that. Perhaps from that altitude, that high living, you can simply see too much of things, or perhaps you’re so removed from things, so that almost nothing really matters in life, and it brings you crashing down. There’s no real insulation at that kind of altitude. I feel the same way you know. Often I do. But I’ve got my reading.”
“At Daniel’s funeral Jason brought pictures of the children and of the house. He showed anyone, absolutely anyone who would look at them, the pictures of the house. He was really proud of what he’d done with it. I can’t imagine being proud of maintenance. But with him it was almost an art form. It was all brass fixtures and hardwood floors, bookcases without books and light wood wall panels. He’d done it all true to the history of the house he said. He’d gotten old photos and done it all just the way it had been wherever he could. Jason was still active in the Mormon Church. Daniel’s burial was Methodist. The newspaper arranged it. His editor. That is a little sad I suppose. I think Jason started to get involved but backed away because he didn’t know really what Daniel would have wanted. To Jason it remained the house, the Church and the children in that order. All of those were things which sent Daniel running.”
“I was a little angry. What happened to Daniel just passed over Jason. He didn’t seem to absorb it. He was attending his brother’s funeral and he was talking about varnish. It was the same when Joanna left and it didn’t wreck him. It was as if the weight of the house consumed every bit of him and he didn’t have the strength to give a long thought to another thing. I suppose, Sugar, It was exactly what kept him alive.”
When Martha Streep left the heavy woman’s home it was near the middle of the day and the street was warm around her. Two children, who looked to her like Mexicans or Puerto Ricans, rolled a tire with broken broom sticks down the middle of the street. A third one ran close up behind them with a can of lighter fluid. The child behind sprayed the fluid into the rolling tire; and it was lit inside. Now and again the flames would shoot out up the stream of fluid and come very near the can and the boys arm; but then it would drop back down into the tire. When the tire tilted slightly, it spilled out onto the asphalt and little dissipating patches of flame followed the kids down the street. Martha Streep noticed that old black and latin men were siting on the chairs beside the empty doorways on the opposite side of the street. She noticed that none of the men appeared to see the children and the burning tire. She looked back and up at the front of the upper floor of the older woman’s house and saw the stained, off-white and irregular rows of the backs of books along the primitive shelves of boards and cinder-blocks, and completely covering the two front windows.