Borrowed Finery

I felt compelled to smile, though I didn’t know why.

I bent toward the books. I guessed by their bright colors that they were meant for me. Eventually Uncle Elwood read them all aloud: Robin Hood, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Tom Sawyer, Water Babies, Aesop’s Fables, A Child’s Garden of Verses, The Jungle Books, and Treasure Island.

At some happy moment, I lost all caution. When my father got down on all fours, I rode him like a pony.

It was twilight when he left. The rain had stopped. As he turned back on the bottom porch step to hold up his arm in a salute that seemed to take in the world, and before he stepped into the taxi he’d ordered to return for him, the sun emerged from a thick cloud cover and cast its reddish glow over his face as though he’d ordered that, too.

The next morning, I woke at first daylight and ran down the staircase to the living room in my nightclothes, knowing—against my wish to find him there—that I wouldn’t.

From the earliest days of my time with him, Uncle Elwood read to me every evening. A few months after my fifth birthday he began to teach me to read. From being a listener—a standing I hadn’t thought about until I had the means to change it—I became a reader.

The bookshelves in the living room held works of poetry, books about national and local history, and, as I recall, stories by Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, among others. I memorized “If,” a poem by Kipling, and in historical sequence the names of the American presidents. I would recite aloud the poem and the presidential roll call, to elicit a look of pride on the minister’s face.

I read a daily children’s story in the Newburgh newspaper. It was accompanied by a drawing of a rabbit wearing a jacket and waistcoat, and the central character was an American version of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, but plumper, far more sanguine, and never exposed to the slightest serious danger. I read the funny papers on Sunday, the Katzenjammer Kids, Moon Mullins, The Gumps, Maggie and Jiggs, and Harold Teen; the last-named I disliked intensely, for reasons I don’t recall.

I was free to read any book in the house, but what comes first to memory is my deciphering of the old postcards that lay in heaps at the top of the attic steps. Most had been mailed from foreign capitals before the Great War and showed vistas of Rome and Paris, Berlin and London. On the writing side, there were messages in the spidery but legible penmanship of those days. As I read them, I thought I could hear the ghostly utterances of the travelers, Uncle Elwood’s long-departed kin.

Around the time I learned to read, a woman named Maria and her three-year-old daughter, Emilia, moved into the house. Uncle Elwood had hired her to cook and clean and to watch over his mother when he and I were out. She and her child settled into Auntie’s bedroom.

When she came, Auntie used my bedroom, and I slept on a cot in the study. I hardly remember Maria. Uncle Elwood told me she had been born in a faraway country, Montenegro. But with no effort of memory Emilia’s face appears instantly in my mind’s eye, perhaps because among the few photographs I have from those years, there is one of the two of us.

In the photograph, she is sitting outdoors in my wicker rocking chair. Her legs, too short to reach the ground, stick straight out; her hands grip the rounded arms of the chair. Her black ringlets are clustered like Concord grapes around her little face. She is fretful. Her mouth forms an O. I am standing beside the chair. My left arm lies possessively along its curved back. I am looking down at her. My expression is troubled, angry.

Uncle Elwood takes the picture. He stands a few feet away from us. She has begun to cry in earnest, noisily. As usual, I tell myself. Her mother comes out of the house and picks her up, murmuring to her. Uncle Elwood joins me where I am standing beneath the branches of a crab-apple tree. He takes my reluctant hand. “Shall we go for a walk, Pauli?” he asks. I nod wordlessly.

Maria stayed with us for less than a year. Then, for reasons not explained to me or that I’ve forgotten, she placed Emilia in a Catholic ophanage and left Newburgh.

Uncle Elwood and I visited Emilia several times. A nun led us down a hall and into a barely furnished room smelling of floor wax, with starched white curtains at both windows. It was around noon. A distinct piercing smell that I recognized as beef broth floated in the air. One of the windows was open a crack, and a breeze kept the curtains waving like banners.

Emilia came into the room and sat down on a wooden bench, smiling uncertainly in our direction. She was dressed in a white blouse and a blue pinafore. Her curls were flattened by hair clips. She was probably four years old at the time. I don’t know what we spoke about or if she spoke at all.

What I felt was the force of my longing to move into the orphanage that very hour. I wanted for myself the aroma of broth, the white starched curtains, the clothes Emilia wore, the nuns with their pale moon faces and black habits.

Emilia looked so calm, so rescued.

I grew aware that Uncle Elwood’s public life consisted of more than preaching sermons. He wrote a weekly column for the Newburgh News called “Little-known Facts about Well-Known People.” He told me that before he’d been called to the ministry, he’d been a journalist working for a newspaper in Portsmouth, Virginia.

I spelled out his name on the spines of several books set apart on the living room bookshelves. Among them were a history of the Blooming Grove church, a collection of his own sonnets, a biography of the twenty-fifth president of the United States, William McKinley, and a slim volume about the winter George Washington spent at his headquarters at Temple Hill, at that time a bare site not far south of Newburgh.

Years later, when a replica of the headquarters was erected, it was partly paid for with funds raised by the minister.

When Auntie visited, or during the months Maria worked for him, Uncle Elwood was free to explore the countryside and chase down clues to Hudson Valley history, many of them given to him by people in his congregation. One time he told me, an expression on his face that somehow combined horror and fastidiousness, how Indians had killed the infants of settlers by grabbing their feet and swinging them against tree trunks. He often quoted Washington’s whispered question on his deathbed—so it had been reported—“Is it well with the child?” Uncle Elwood explained to me that the first president had meant the new country; the new country was the child. I repeated the words silently, not sure whether I meant the country or myself.

“We’ll drive there like blazes!” he would declare, after he’d been told where there might be a foundation of a house built during the American Revolution or a tumbledown ruin that could have been built even earlier.

Once when we were walking in the woods somewhere, we stumbled upon an Indian burial ground, the mounds fallen in and covered with moss, and a light broke over his face. He treated the Hudson Valley and his ministry with the same ardor, as though both historical discovery and biblical allegory were equal manifestations of the divine.

We took trips.

We drove south to Nyack, a town on the western shore of the Hudson, to visit a cousin of Uncle Elwood’s, who had recently had a house built for herself and a woman friend.

The river glinted in shards of light. Light-colored stones formed a promenade next to the house. The rooms were open, without doors; whiteness hung like a great curtain outside vast windows. The cousin’s name was Blanche Frost.

She gave me a doll she told me she had bought in Paris.

“Where is Paris?” I asked the minister in a whisper, awed in the presence of the tall woman with such beautifully arranged white hair.

“Across the sea, in a country called France,” he told me.

The doll’s long yellow hair was held back from its face by a raspberry-colored ribbon, the same color as its startling dress, very short, revealing long light-pink cloth legs. I put it in my bookcase at home. For weeks, it was the last thing I looked at before I fell asleep.

We drove to Elmira, New York, to see Mark Twain’s grave. It was a happy moment afterward, to sit in the sunlight on a nearby slope among the gravestones. The minister had on his high-crowned Panama hat, so it must have been August, the only month he wore it.

We went to Albany. In the governor’s mansion, or the state-house, I forget which, the minister pointed to a deep scar in the banister of the broad staircase, made by a tomahawk hurled by a long-dead Indian.

We descended by elevator to the Howe caverns. The deep shaft down which we traveled looked like a giant’s work; the earth split open just like the stones I had pounded on the long driveway.

One morning we were to go to West Point, where Uncle Elwood was to give an invocation at a military ceremony. We had to take the Storm King mountain road to get there. A snake coiled to strike would not have frightened me more than the snakelike curves of the road. At its highest point, where the rock face soared above and dropped to the river below, a sign warned of a zone of falling rocks. When we came to it, I drew up my legs and shut my eyes tight, expecting to be crushed by a boulder or flung out into space. When the road leveled out, I thought, This time we got away with it.

Uncle Elwood read me stories by Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, out of whose pages a headless horseman pursued me into a dream. I told him I was haunted. Soon after, he took me to Sunnyside, Irving’s estate near Tarrytown on the east side of the Hudson. Perhaps by showing me evidence of the writer’s existence, he thought to exorcise the horseman.

In Balmville, just at the start of the dirt road that led home, there stood a very old Balm of Gilead tree encircled by an iron fence. Uncle Elwood told me that Washington was said to have taken shelter beneath its outstretched boughs during a sudden downpour. I could imagine the general standing there, looking as he did in a large portrait of him that hung in Uncle Elwood’s study: cloaked, pink-cheeked, white-haired, with a marionette’s stiffness of jaw. We often paused at the tree, the car motor idling, when we returned from our travels.

A mile or so away from the tree was the Delano home where we were once invited to tea. It was during the period when a family member, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was governor of New York State. I might have forgotten the grandeur of the house and of the great winding staircase if I had not for the first time glimpsed the possibility of beauty in clothes, watching two little Delano girls hovering like butterflies about the table in white organdy dresses, slipping little cakes into their mouths.

We went to a neigboring town to attend a dinner given for a bishop. He sat at the head of a long table. During a lull in the general conversation, I asked the bishop, “Do you like me?” and he replied, “Don’t you think your question is a little premature?”

I was chagrined. Later, when Uncle Elwood smiled as he told people the story of my question and the bishop’s response, I was confused by the currents of pride and shame running through me and felt a small pinch of estrangement from him.

Uncle Elwood wrote his sermons and newspaper columns on an Underwood typewriter on a table that stood in the middle of his study. It was a large, square, plain room with big windows. On fair days, when the light poured in, it seemed to float. Books lined one wall. Against another was an immensely tall desk that suggested a Chinese temple I had seen in an issue of the National Geographic. It had many tiny doors, which opened to dusty secret passages. In little drawers, mostly empty, there were piles of foreign coins, mementos of trips to Europe, and a piece of yellowed hardtack that Uncle Elwood told me dated from the Civil War. I would surprise myself with it, the last thing I examined before I got down from a high desk chair. I had to fight off an impulse to eat it.

On the wall beside the desk there hung a photograph of Edwin Markham, the poet, and he had written a few lines from his poem “The Man with the Hoe” in the open space beneath it. He had more beard than face. I invented a story: He was the missing one of the Smith Brothers whose cough drops came in a box illustrated with sketches of themselves, bearded and disembodied, that Uncle Elwood brought home for me when I had a sore throat or a cold.

Except for an occasional clatter of typewriter keys, there was a companionable silence between us. He asked me once, “What shall I preach about next Sunday, Pauli?”

“A waterfall,” I replied at once. I had just been thinking about a recent picnic we had on the shore of a stream fed by a small cascade whose spray dampened our sandwiches and us.

I can still recall the startled pleasure I felt that Sunday in church when I realized his sermon was indeed about a waterfall. I grasped consciously for an instant what had been implicit in every aspect of daily life with Uncle Elwood—that everything counted and that a word spoken as meant contained a mysterious energy that could awaken thought and feeling in both speaker and listener.

An ancient parishioner, “old as the hills,” Uncle Elwood observed, died in her sleep. He was named executor in her will. A few days after her funeral service in the church, we went to the Washingtonville boardinghouse where she had lived for many years. Her room had not been touched. The unmade bed, a half-pulled-out drawer in a small bureau, gave the place a disheveled look. Uncle Elwood walked across the dusty floor to a window, threw it open, and dusted his hands in a finicky way.

There was a hard-hearted aspect to his nature. Perhaps he had grown too accustomed to the dying, to death. We spent less than fifteen minutes in the room. He collected a few papers from a table and plucked, from a tangle of threads and spools in a sewing basket, a small ring with an amethyst stone that he gave me on the spot.

He spoke to the elderly landlady who was fluttering about in the hallway, asking her to pack Miss Hattie’s things, keep whatever she liked, and give the rest to charity.

On our way home that day, he parked the car in front of a large house on the outskirts of Newburgh. Its roof formed steep hills, each one crowned with a chimney. Uncle Elwood sat in silence for a moment, his hands resting on the steering wheel.

Several years earlier, he told me, before he had brought me home to live with him, he had been on what he called a “thinking walk” in a field near Balmville. Suddenly he heard alarmed cries from a neighboring field. He turned to see that an untethered bull was about to heave itself at a young woman who, at that very second, hiked up her skirt and turned to run away from it. He diverted the animal by presenting himself as a target. The woman escaped and so did he. That was how he met Elizabeth, the person we were about to visit in the many-chimneyed house.