Seeking Rapture: A Memoir. Kathryn Harrison
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Название: Seeking Rapture: A Memoir
Автор: Kathryn Harrison
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007441075
isbn:
My stocking brimmed with gifts wrapped meticulously in marbled Florentine paper tied with narrow ribbons. I opened them slowly, with unnatural, unchildlike care. Inside were tiny carved bears, sets of colored pencils too small to sharpen, books the size of postage stamps. Always, the guiding aesthetic was of a life made as small as possible: an electric lamp complete with three-volt bulbs the size of apple seeds. It didn’t matter that I had no dollhouse to plug it into. I didn’t want, ever, to test it.
Adults find it difficult to reconcile the simultaneous knowing and unknowing that is inherent in faith. Children rarely try. I had many opportunities, even invitations, to conclude that it was my mother who filled my stocking. And I was old enough to have heard for years the playground challenge: You don’t believe in Santa, do you? Well, no, I didn’t, and yes, I did. What I believed in was some thing I identified as Santa Claus, having no more sophisticated language to articulate what I now understand as a longing for the ideal home. To me, this platonic space was so far away that it appeared as small as a dollhouse, but it was the place where my mother and I would someday live: a home too small and controlled to contain quarrels or tears.
The Christmas I was nine, my dark-haired, white-skinned mother went to Jamaica with a man I didn’t know and came home on New Year’s Day, her hair streaked blond, her white skin brown and peeling. In her absence, for which she tried to apologize with brightly painted maracas and pink shell bracelets, my grandmother had filled my stocking. On Christmas morning I saw right away that something was wrong. It was too lumpy, the things it contained too big: hair bands and candy, perfume, a matching pen and pencil set – nothing I wanted.
‘How was Christmas?’ my mother asked, sitting on the couch, scratching her sunburned arms. ‘What did Santa bring you?’
‘Who?’ I said disdainfully. ‘Santa? Why would I believe in something as stupid as Santa?’
The surprise and hurt on her face and on my grandmother’s was what I wanted, and yet I felt their quick intake of breath as if it were my own. I felt the air leave the room as if I’d struck the house itself, punishing it for being what it was, outsized and filled with mistakes lit by the glare of hundred-watt bulbs.
Now I live in the big city of New York, and my children are subjected each holiday season to a barrage of Santas – Santas ringing bells and asking for money, Santas sitting in department stores and posing for pictures, Santas doing the cancan in sync with the Rockettes. At five and seven, already they exchanged knowing looks with each other, having, I think, decided to spare me the truth.
So much of the holiday ritual – exhausting, essential – is about creating perfect moments, picturesque gatherings that cannot be sustained longer than a night, if that long. Years after the deaths of my mother and grandparents, I’m the stocking stuffer of the family, the one who travels hours to a store that sells small-scale horses with real horsehair manes and tails. I keep a bag hidden in a closet in my study and fill it with things I know my children will love. As early as June I am gathering little toys, things I won’t allow myself to give them until the occasion – Christmas – presents the excuse I need. I can’t face their father’s accusations: You spoil them. You buy them too much.
And more damning: These things aren’t for them, they’re for you. They’re for a little girl who doesn’t exist anymore.
Except that she does, of course. We’re all burdened by ourselves. This is what makes the holidays the celebrated trial we bemoan. There are so many hopes and longings, so many pasts and futures, all jostling and confused, that the present can seem as thin and flimsy as the discarded wrappings scattered around the tree. Just at that point when we’re confronted by the remains of it all, we find ourselves asking, Was it worth it? Did it work? Were we all as happy together as we thought?
‘Forty coolies!’ was my grandmother’s abbreviated reference to her life in Shanghai a hundred years ago. She and her sister were cared for on an estate in the city’s International Settlement. My grandmother would shake her head as she spoke the words forty coolies, spoke them with wonder, not embarrassment. At the turn of the last century, Shanghai was home to many Europeans, expatriates who created their own little Englands and Germanys and Frances and whose households were served by Chinese labor that was unimaginably affordable. To illustrate, my grandmother would tell this story: One day an old groundskeeper fell from the top of the ladder while pruning a tree on the family’s property. As he fell, he grabbed for the ladder and pulled it over with him. The head gardener came running from the greenhouse, picked up the ladder, dusted it off, and left the groundskeeper where he had fallen.
When asked by my great-grandfather why he would pick up the ladder and not the man, the head gardener shrugged as if the answer were obvious. ‘Man old, ladder new,’ he said, and he bowed and returned to the greenhouse. In China, life was cheap, and, my grandmother would have added, dirty.
‘The filth! The filth!’ was the second most frequent of her invocations of the country in which she lived until she was seventeen. In an age without vaccines or antibiotics, where yellow fever and cholera and typhus outbreaks were common, dirt meant danger. From my grandmother’s childhood home, ‘night soil’ was collected by one of the under coolies (out of forty, one was designated for the literal shit work) and carried out to the street in the morning to be collected by an ox-drawn wagon when it passed on the boulevard. These wagons, called kongs, took human excrement to the rice paddies where it was used as fertilizer, guaranteeing the contamination of waterways and the spread of cholera. My grandmother’s only brother died before his second birthday, and according to family lore, what he died of was dirt. The little boy’s death began before the meningitis subsequent to a teething infection; it began with his very birth in China. Even as the only son of an otherwise Orthodox Jewish family, he died uncircumcised because my grandmother’s mother once saw black crescents of dirt under the Shanghai rabbi’s long fingernails and was so frightened by the sight of them that she decided to wait until she could take her son home to a rabbi in London.
Seventy years later, if you were to put a plate of Chinese food before my grandmother, she would vomit. Traveling with me through New York City’s Chinatown in the back of a taxi, she covered her eyes. And if she didn’t readily offer her hand in greeting to an Asian person, it wasn’t racism or snobbery (not exactly, although my grandmother was an imperious woman who never questioned her right to any of her wealth or possessions), but a fear of contagion that never diminished. Her family bought ivories and porcelains, silk rugs, jade, cloisonné; they decorated their homes in Shanghai, and later in Nice, in London, and in Los Angeles with these things. But that was the extent of their interaction with China. Much of the food they consumed was imported from England. Even the cows and the chickens were brought to them over the oceans – a long journey for livestock. ‘Orpingtons,’ my grandmother said the chickens were called. She spoke this name with rapture. ‘White and beautiful!’ she said. What she meant, I knew, was white and clean.
Vegetables were grown on the family’s own land and, before they were eaten, scrubbed with carbolic soap, a poisonous antiseptic detergent made from coal tar. Decades later, when washing anything she considered particularly dirty, my grandmother would whisper the words ‘carbolic soap’ to herself and would shake her head with longing. Clearly, nothing could be dependably laundered without it. For me, a child born in Los Angeles in 1961, the words had a quaintly ridiculous ring, and yet one winter, when our children succumbed СКАЧАТЬ