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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497697348 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 04/07/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 170 |
| File size: | 480 KB |
About the Author
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The Sweet Birds of Gorham
A Novel
By Ann Birstein
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1966 Ann BirsteinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9734-8
CHAPTER 1
As always when Daisy Lerner was waiting for something very hard she was absent when it finally came. She had been staring out the window sipping coffee from a wet container and making up a story about a young man in March of 18&mash;traveling from Minsk to St. Petersburg, when the conductor called "Gor-ham next! Gor-ham next!" and called it again three more times before Daisy realized he was talking to her. Whipping down her suitcase, she bopped the college boy who had been sitting beside her on the head with it, apologized, scurried frantically down the aisle to the wrong door, scurried back the other way, and was lifted off the train by the elbows just in time. With the first burst of energy it had shown all afternoon the Green Valley Local whooshed away from the platform, leaving Daisy with a sudden but unmistakable impression that she had just been exposed from the rear.
After a moment or two, she smoothed down her skirt. The hush around the station was fragrant and gravelly. Also, although the violently flickering lights of the train had convinced her it was raining outside, the day was surprisingly clean and bright. Setting down her suitcase between her ankles, Daisy took a deep breath of the fresh air as she had been taught to do whenever she found herself in the country. A breeze came rustling across the treetops and tickled her chin with her own thin white collar. She giggled a little and then immediately felt out of place, since the few other people on the platform continued to suffer the same mild forms of outrage that had afflicted them on the train, including the elderly lady from Boston who kept comparing her timetable with the watch pinned to her bosom and quivering in the jowls, and the three girls from Mount Holyoke who had been playing bridge the whole way up and now rubbed their toes on their ankles in an ecstasy of boredom. Even her former seat mate, the college boy with the long legs and acne, had stuck away the cowbell he had been clanging as he cried "Toonerville Trolley!" and was picking at his chin while he stared at her morosely. Daisy smiled, but rather more sadly than she had expected to at that moment. It made her feel terrible to be the only happy one when everybody else was unhappy and it was beginning to occur too frequently. She was always skipping along gaily, like a child at hopscotch, until somebody tapped her on the shoulder and reminded her that life was tragic. Is it because there's always room in my heart, Daisy wondered, and everybody else's seems to be booked solid? Oh, Gorham, she apostrophized cautiously, shooting another quick look behind her ... I'm here ... I'm yours, in case you're interested.... A fresh tickling breeze from across the street, but otherwise no dice. Oh, life, fill me up? Life obliged. The hot September sun slid from behind a tree and hit her full in the face. It was blinding and gorgeous.
The sun slid back again, leaving Daisy slightly out of breath, but considerably dappled. It had not dawned on her before how incredibly rural the landscape was. And all in picture- magazine colors of autumn. Murky blue hills in the distance. Against them clumps of the brightest yellow, the deepest green, a blot of crimson, a streak of rust. A white nest of houses, a neat red barn, a church steeple, a mottled cow, a bush of wildly flowering orange flowers. Across the cinder path, a willow or other weeping tree dipped its branches in pond water.
"Sweet Jesus," Daisy murmured, "I really have landed in the country."
"I'll bet you're from New York," the college boy said, bestirring himself with a faint interior clank.
"New York?" Daisy repeated reluctantly. "Well, yes, I suppose you might say I am."
"And never seen a tree before, huh?"
"I have seen trees," Daisy said, pointedly ignoring the loud guffaw. "I have simply never seen these particular trees."
"How come? Aren't you from Smith?"
"Gorham."
"Don't give me that," her companion said, with a wink that advised against putting anything over on him. "The Gorham girls don't come until Monday. I ought to know."
"But I'm not a student, you see," Daisy said, sweetly playing her trump at last. "I happen to be a teacher."
"Oh?" the boy said, "I thought you were younger."
It was on the tip of Daisy's tongue to tell him that she was younger, at the outside a year or two older than he—especially if he was as dumb as he looked, and if you took into consideration that Daisy had skipped three times in grammar school—until she belatedly remembered the new dignity of her position. No, there was no point in confiding in this buster. With him she was playing it close to the chest.
"Let's just say," Daisy said simply, "that I'm embarking on a new adventure."
"Yeah? Well, look me up some time," he said, snapping his fingers jazzily. "Maybe I can show you some more adventure. Maybe I can show you some more scenery. The name's Pete."
A painted and inscribed Model T Ford rolled up and she thoughtfully watched him leap into it and vanish in a fitting cloud of black exhaust. Perhaps if he had been an older man with sympathetic eyes, she might have told him that appearances to the contrary notwithstanding she was not only a teacher, but also an author. Of one short novel—or one long short story, to be painfully exact—which had been anthologized in a paperback of Young Moderns the year before only to sink without a trace into the murky depths of the Sunday Times where it was reviewed seven months too late. And that after straining her ears for the last gurgle ... oh, well. Flipping open her compact, Daisy blinked at herself interestedly once or twice (her eyes were blue, the color of cornflowers she had been told, which somehow sounded bluer than cornflowers actually were), and poked at a couple of whitish blond curls near her temples. Yes, of course she had dreamed—who wouldn't?—of lying around in a checked weskit, of center spreads in Mademoiselle, of a reputation for not giving interviews. But if what she had told that loutish boy was true, why dwell on it now? Still, as she put the compact away again, Daisy could not help realizing that if she had been a character in one of her own works that quick oval glimpse would have revealed the whole of her to herself instantly—the unfortunate influence of Henry James and his central observer—whereas all she had seen was a fragment, a bit of colored Rorschach which might have developed into a head of Voltaire, or possibly Harpo Marx, or even a Yiddishe Shirley Temple, each of whom she had been compared to at one time or another. A terrible shame, really, when life failed to imitate art.
Bending to untwist a stocking heel, she waited a moment, half straightened-up—was anything profound happening to her yet emotionally? no—and then decided to ask directions of the Railway Expressman, who was staring at her anyway.
"69 Elm Street?" he repeated, fingering a rotund watch chain. "You figuring to walk?"
"You mean it's dangerous?" Daisy asked. "Or just too far?"
"How's that?"
"Actually," she confessed laughingly, "I almost never walk by myself. I'm always thinking that other people are thinking about me. And also I'm afraid of dogs."
"Yup. There's lots of dogs in Gorham."
"But today, you see, happens to be a special day in my life. I'm on my way to my first teaching job—my first any job, actually—and also my first apartment."
"Ayuh. Well, it's not too far unless you go by way of Crescent. But you wouldn't want to do that."
"No."
"Then you want Main. Let's see...."
More meditative head scratchings followed by a series of complicated directions which Daisy thanked him for as she pondered her first lesson about Gorham: that apparently none of its citizens ever walked, which was strange since in Winesburg, Ohio, people were always strolling off and telling each other everything. Her first sight of Main Street, which turned out to be a few short blocks away, was even stranger. Could it be that she had spent a morning of oxbows and junctions only to wind up in one of the better parts of Queens? But no. Forest Hills was a mere acorn. The town of Gorham was an oak, so obviously certain it smelled sweet and clean down to the roots that the few middle-aged people strolling by looked relieved to have awakened here instead of someplace else. Or perhaps what gave them that particular air of satisfaction was knowing that they had been granted the best of two possible worlds simultaneously: such as the diner on one side of the street, and the Tudor mansion with a boar's head sign reading "Ye Gorham Inn" on the other; the modern drugstore with a Revlon display, succeeded in short order by an old-fashioned pharmacy with bottles of colored water and apothecary jars filled with rock candy and horehound drops in its window. For a few blocks more Main Street continued in this manner, alternating its supermarket with a branch of Lord and Taylor and a white church and steeple, the hardware store with an 1890 Town Hall, until suddenly it divided itself with a flourish to entertain a large grassy commons, so green and smooth and English that Daisy looked around for the villagers to come prancing across it and wind their colored ribbons around the parking meters. The commons was obviously Gorham's way of pointing with pride toward its college, for at the end of it, on a little hill of its own, stood a tall filigreed gate half strangled with ivy and bearing the legend "Gorham College for Females." Splendid. Tipping her mortar board, Daisy left its pleasures for later, turned right, and confounded herself by having arrived at Elm Street without any mishap at all.
Here she put down her suitcase, which was a present from her older sister Sylvia along with a lot of unwelcome comments about burying herself in a small college town—"Listen, nobody breaks up with a nice boy like Ronald because she isn't pregnant!"—and gave herself a rest, flexing and unflexing her hand. Something was nagging at her which had started at the station, and she could not figure out what it was. Homesickness? No, the big apartment, her mother's Italian-style silver-flecked hair already shone as distantly as the moon. Money? Only when she began to wonder if her father, that amiable furrier, expected her to live on her salary. Sex? Unfortunately, she could still hear Sylvia, who was married to an accountant, begging her never to tell her own husband anything about the past because what a man didn't know wouldn't hurt him. Which, like all of Sylvia's handy hints was of questionable value—wouldn't it hurt a man more?—but had nevertheless lodged itself in Daisy's mind accreting other thoughts around it, like an irritant planted in an oyster shell. Sylvia had also been positive that Daisy was only inviting more trouble to live in an apartment all by herself. A typical Sylvia prophecy and unrelated to what was still bothering her, though it managed to brighten Daisy considerably. She trotted off again, leaving Sylvia still giving out advice, but to a departing audience.
Elm Street was beckoning to her. A truly noble avenue, bordered by tall trees (elms!) which entwined their branches overhead into a thick rustling canopy. Beneath it, the street was a dim mysterious aisle, carpeted with fallen leaves. Daisy bowed her head, and taking small solemn steps, a little lopsided and wobbly on account of the suitcase and high heels, prepared to enter this strange new kingdom. She assumed that Gorham was about to open its arms to her. She also assumed that until she had made herself known, there would not be a soul on Elm Street to tell who she was, much less care.
"Nice ass," Seymour Lipshansky remarked from his vantage point of instructor of English, and then with a shrug and a yawn let the edge of the curtain slip back through his fingers to blot out the fleeting though delectable sight at his window. He buried himself deeper in his bathrobe, like a turtle seeking the safety of its own shell. It was a nice bathrobe, a little soiled maybe—his wife had given it to him as an engagement present—but of the most durable English wool, which it needed to be considering the time Seymour spent in it.
"Whose ass?" his wife said, sitting beside him on the sofa and making out checks signed Julia Clark Lipshanksy.
"Oh, some girl who just walked by," Seymour said with an innocent smile.
"Which girl?"
"I don't know. Somebody from the college, I suppose," Seymour guessed, not with any great difficulty since the college owned all the houses on Elm Street. "Can't be a student, though. The dorms don't open until Wednesday. Oh, I know—it must be the new one Dudley got the apartment for and was talking about."
"Daisy Lerner," Julia said distinctly. "Tootsie Goldfarb is holding her key."
"Yeah, that one," Seymour said.
Giving him a quick sideways glance, Julia bent back over the checkbook again, keeping a hand on the untidy pile of papers in her lap. Bills, bills, bills, Seymour thought, wearily flexing his long bare feet against the do-it-yourself coffee table, and squinting with a sudden, new-found interest at the do-it-yourself bookcases on the opposite wall. He put on his glasses. It had just occurred to him that almost all of his furniture had been done by himself and that for a man who was all thumbs he had spent an awful lot of his married life nailing and hammering, since in addition to the coffee table and the bookcases, he also seemed to have put together the dining-room table—a board mounted on a wrought iron stand—the hi-fi cabinet, still unvarnished, the also unvarnished chests of drawers for the five tiny bedrooms upstairs, the beds themselves—mattresses hauled on top of box springs into which he had screwed sets of legs—and also.... Seymour lacked the energy to go on. Besides, it was a point of pride never to be burdened by possessions, in any sense of the phrase. Not that people didn't sometimes talk. They would make remarks about the large abandoned swing rotting away on the Lipshansky front porch, and the fact that the last spring thaw had uncovered a sled and a boot in the flower bed which were now waiting for the next snowfall to cover them up again, and also mutter exceedingly nasty things when they happened to trip over a toy truck or two on the living-room floor. But what difference did it make? It did not even actually bother Seymour that his home, as he had just realized, was practically a warehouse of splintering wood and raw fabrics. No, the only thing he owned that had ever actually stuck in his craw was the one piece of furniture, oddly enough, that had been finished off and polished in a factory—an enormous refrigerator sold to him at an unrefusable bargain rate by Edgar Dudley, professor in charge of basketball and housing, and the crookedest son of a bitch who had ever stalked the groves of Academe.
"You know, come to think of it," Seymour said casually, "we ought to have her over one of these days."
"Who?"
"You know, that kid. I mean what the hell, it's lonely around here at the beginning and the lower echelons ought to stick together."
Julia looked at him silently.
"I better get to work?" Seymour suggested, though he made no attempt to rise.
Still no peep out of Julia. In spite of himself, Seymour had to hand it to her. She could certainly be a perfect gem of nonexpression when she wanted to, the crystallization of many years of fine background and breeding, and sedate Philadelphia suburbs, and family subscriptions to chamber music series, and clothes selected from a Best and Co. catalogue. Yes, of course that was it, Seymour decided as Julia's look continued to pinion him and he remembered that as a literary historian he could clutch at larger issues: his wife was a product of a culture so homogeneous there was nothing she was required to do or say. As in the case of her motherhood, for example, which happened to be a large consideration since Julia had four lusty children and a reputation for being an excellent mother to them. (Even the children thought of her as an excellent mother to them.) But when Seymour looked for some evidence to support this general opinion, which he also shared, there didn't seem to be any. Did the lady sitting beside him with the family checkbook ever sing to her kids, for instance, or pinch their behinds, or give them a kiss when no kiss was indicated? Not at all. She had merely given birth to them, which in Julia's case was more than sufficient. And then there was Julia's entire physical set-up, Seymour meditated, warming up to his subject, who was unfortunately still keeping an eye on him. When he first met Julia on his way out of the army he would have sworn that she was tall and statuesque (could a Clark woman be anything else?). But lately it had begun to dawn on him that his wife was short and dumpy and, for a well-bred girl, very schmaltzy in the thigh. As the light spilling below the curtain was troubling to point out, there was more than a little gray in Julia's blond pageboy these days, more than one wrinkle in her pert baby face. But it did not matter. Julia was still essentially an undergraduate in one of the better women's colleges, Gorham itself in this case. What a life: to be without doing, to look without saying. All of which explained, at least to Seymour's satisfaction, why when Julia looked at a man silently there wasn't anything he could put his finger on. She wasn't accusing or condescending or condemning. She was only looking. You were the one who squirmed, or thought up alibis, or defended yourself heatedly or tried to change the subject. You were the one who....
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Sweet Birds of Gorham by Ann Birstein. Copyright © 1966 Ann Birstein. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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