Shoe Store in Snowstorm

by Lynn Strongin

Red onion domes rise in Odessan night, Marc Chagall’s lovers touch hands and feet swirling around Byzantine cones are visible, holding bouquets which they proffer each other, mosques are visible behind the early snow which by night will have frozen and closed almost all the stores up and down the Avenue on our side of the world mirroing the Slavic world of my ancestors far away.

I will be inside the shoe store, safe in a globe of glass and turn-of-century brick. I who cannot walk will have had gone in for a pair of green shoes, to match the green hose I will buy on impulse because summer was finally over, it was autumn, my season: we were on the verge of deliverance, winter. I heard voices in counterpoint, like Glenn Gould.

The freak blizzard would turn out to make history, but only one flake touched my cheek as I wheeled in. Slowly I saw, as I looked up, white in contrast to the brick building more six-pointed snow flake. One fire engine was to come to help one elderly person out of a second story apartment in the brick building with shoe store at ground level. A radiant day is one in which there is brightness and darkness, chiaroscuro. A child ended up with broken elbow. But when I went in there was the gathering silence surreal, hallucinatory which precedes snow storm. Within moments, I brushed off my rust coloured jacket and I sat behind glass in my wheelchair watching flake-after-flake silently whirl down as in a hallucinatory calm. My dream- child took place in those moments, ‘Annike with African daisies.” My Annike would have been one of those to save the “hidden children” of Europe, the Jews, had she been born earlier. As it was, born in Belgium, she had some of the guilt of the survivor. Her finely-sculptured features, her coloring marked her as a beauty from the first in my eyes. I saw her surviving the Hongerwïnter and being, in fact, a Hoöngerkinde although her eyes emoted as a child on stage, richly gifted in feeling. (Annike-Maria, what if I am your dream-child and you are mine.? You looked thru a veil of rain and might have been one of Roman Vishniac’s children of a vanished world but you remain. You would have hidden Jewish children in Europe to save them. I am a Jewish child. Your opaque voice and green eyes have always been for me, the sculpting of one of my closest spiritual kin. If there is survivor’s guilt, I remind myself you too in your teens read Anne Frank and that my younger sister must have survivor’s guilt over my polio. Thru a curtain of rain, you could be one of the children of a vanished world, features sculpted, close to the windowpane watching snow fall outside the camp in Belgium.

Entering the shoe store, I had a reminiscence of Chel asking me not to play the song “Who am I?” Her face filled with foreboding. “Did I ever live before as a mountain lion or a fly?” I could not play “Who am I?” Chel dashed at age two around corners of our Manhattan apartment in mother’s flesh-coloured girdle and made me laugh. More often she made me cry. I thought of her today. The adventure.

It all happened on our little island. Islands have the highest suicide rates of any geography and are rimmed with darkness. Yet islands hold the sun long after it is set. A red swirling dome of scarlet. I was making borscht, our way, the Russian style: bright red beet soup with an island of white sour cream floating on top is how I’ll serve it tomorrow to my Belgian friend, Annike who could have had a porcelain doll or chiming clock or bolt of bluest truest indigo but like a woman back in 1852, chose a shovel for her first gift to herself in the new land.

I chose a pair of shoes.

She had to get out of Belgium. So began the journey of a young immigrant. Like all journeys Annike’s turned out to be hazardous: overnight stops in train stations in strange Eastern European lands, horizons beyond suggesting those freshly in her mind. Annike’s pilgrimage developed a patina, an autumnal burnish making it the chiaroscuro’s of some old Dutch master’s paintings.

A good life, wisely chosen, however Annike’s’s proved to be ,in the long run birthing two daughters. Taking down the heavy black shovel from the peg in the barn, Annike leaned on it a moment or two, rocked with pleasure, then drove it into the soil Back in Spain. She had rented a room above a small hat shop where she also got a job. “Shop girl wanted,” she saw the sign at once, “hats made to order.” It was of course written in Spanish but with her sister-milliner back home Uschi could bear to stay in the old land—she had learned a thing or two and that sign in the modest brick building “Room to Let” was Annike’s lantern shining in darkness, her kaleidoscope to turn and make wondrous shapes. In real terms it was her door to freedom. When she moved to Montana across the ocean, and within the northern land, she always took the shovel with her as she had done at age twenty-three, leaving shop windows behind, and got up early to dig a small garden as she had outside the brick building with wrought iron gate and blue window boxes, so Mediterranean. Under clothes hung out drying by a rope and clothespins she dug and dug but the Spanish soil had not been as forgiving as the Canadian soil, especially on the prairies where the family settled.

She thought of the colorful hats, the drab native flowers. When spring rains came on the prairies, she put her plants in crates. her bedding plants could have been for sale but were not for sale. In winter, Annike used the shovel to clear a path in the silent tumbling snow. She took it to the moonlit and frozen river where she scarped snow away and went skating. Starved for life, the young bridge tasted freedom. It was her second winter of marriage that she became pregnant with the girl they were to name Brigitta in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan a prairie province lit by the blazing wheat in summer, the blinding snow in winter and year round the bowl of almost 365 degrees blue sky. This was sun like glass which cut the eyeball as she rounded the kitchen nook with fresh germanium. This was light, the light unlike anything she had known in.

Come spring that year, she planted wild flowers in the wagon wheel, ancient, dug into the back yard and she swung high her shovel, cut into the hill and built a root cellar with the help of her husband Seth for the apples on their farm. .Red was piled bright as white laundry in baskets which seemed to touch the prairie sky. Annike pulled out her watercolors. She became absorbed in doing one as the apples were baking in the blazing oven, her first child almost full term. She dreamed of this first child: a boy, dark red curls like her brother Albrecht who had died in infancy from polio. But she grabbed the shovel when rains engorged the creek the color of rust nails and made it grayer—recalling the thin trickle like a vein which had run outside the Belgian camp for Displaced Persons where she had been born. Heavy rains left dark roses printed on the old wall paper they had plastered up to keep icy blasts from coming thru the holes. She dug so the rains wouldn’t come into the kitchen any longer. When her girlchild was to be born, Annike pried the doctor’s buggy from the mud alongside the pond.

Her two births were long, arduous, the second daughter a Caesarian and she saw all seasons, passing thru them, as she was delivered of two daughters, Brigitta first and then Anna. She pictured snow in woods Belgian woods during Brigitta’s birth, melting into a wet cold spring which turned into a blazing summer. July and August rolled past with ancient merry-go-round horses. Brigitta was born in spring rains, Anna in the heart of winter, yet Annike pictured a Botticelli spring held in the cup, the bowl, the husk of home warmed by lumps of coal Annike had shoveled into the black iron stove which warmed small children as it browned loaves of bread. Distant thunder came in the heat of summer, cloudbursts, lightning struck. Once it set their barn on fire, she raced to free the horse as timbers melted to the ground. She found her shovel blade, its handle burnt off. I will name you “Starina” she thought of her third born. But he or she never came. After the fire, she found it hard to conceive and that was when she and Set decided upon adoption. “I need new shoes,” she announced one morning. Which brings me back in a loop like a loop of yarn to the shoe store I who cannot walk and have not for fifty-seven years, entered in my wheelchair having bought a pair of green hose and to match—spur of the moment—what I hardly ever wear out although I wear—shoes. Was I fallen boy or falcon? Was I leaving nests or flying home? I was thinking of Seth, of Annike who comes for lunch tomorrow—it will be borscht vivid red with an angel island of sour cream floating in the middle. Although Annike had worked an old apple handle for the broken handle of her shovel, life was more sombre after the fire. She did turn the soil, she did start raising flowers which grew tall side by side with her daughters. She sold some fruit and flowers at a roadside stand as summers kept passing by. That was where she lived until they moved to the seacoast and we met. She would no longer clear a frozen pond in winter. She left the old shovel with applewood handle behind and saw only in her mind the children skate round and round. Her years in the Arctic where they had adopted their son, Micah, came between the first and the second lives she led on the ocean. I met Annike in New England, but she visited me in Canada and in my tipping old age since I turn seventy soon. I picture the shovel on the peg in the barn, Annike looking out at the quiet frosted farm.

Here my true story opens: three pages of a blizzard to make history.

An elegant woodcut might make the blade strokes, black and white, yet bright as a blood of a life rich with blessings yet not without challenges. I pay her lyrical tribute, living over our own tribulations as I deek into the shoe storm on what began as a spring day but a false spring: it was to carve one of the deepest darkest days out of our years as though with the help of a common shovel.

Annike chose a well shaped metal shovel rather than many other things: a bolt of new indigo cloth, a chiming clock of delft figurine her first year here. She’d done her chin-ups on hard work. Although a little child, she was strong one who always possessed a strong voice which remained opaque like a boy. She made me think of Patience & Sarah from the first although of course I could not say so. She leaned upon no thing, only herself. Even exiting she squared back her shoulders like a gym teacher with silver whistle and appeared to be approaching not departing. She was courteous but not deferent. I saw my dance card filling with dates alternate Wednesday to discuss art.

I love this shoe store in which I was caught and memories rolled like music from a player piano. The shades of experience alter like lights from a magic lantern.

It is in the boot section that I see how, jumped ahead two grades, I was left at the edge of the playing field. You do not skip grades as you skip rope. I was a Jewish girl who’d grown up from five to seven in the South. Then During the divorce, we lived there again, when I turned from age eight to nine. These time periods were exactly outside the time frames for Chel, my little sister. I see pictures of shifting time. AS by invisible stage-furniture-movers, the year and hour frames are moved around. What I want to write about is the snowstorm that struck in the shoe store last week, only thinned from us by the plate glass but first I think of what shoes meant to me, walking. First my Buster Browns during war in which I strode rapidly across it playing fields. I was greased lightning, I shimmied down trees and walked reflectively in step with my Russian grandfather, our father’s lean Mongolian Poppa at age four and five along the rim of Lake Champlain when the yolk-yellow schoolbus picked me up, the first and last child on the rural route when I learned the loneliness of a nun. We lived during those days with Poppa or rather, he lived with us, this thin and impeccably dressed man who adored our mother, Marcelle. Mother used to say to us girls, during the war, as she struggled to light one of the four wood burners, “we not be in heaven, girls but we’re the other side of blue.” Actually, childhood took place largely in hell’s half acre. Did he sense in the wind that Marcelle was in the process, day-to-day of the interminable dreary winters and springs during war, drawing up the divorce writ to serve our father as soon as her father, Rosenblum, had died. I came home nonetheless to a chocolate cookie and tumbler of milk, the old Stromberg Carlson radio in the living room beside the Edison stove, music coming with much static from the radio, often it was Mozart. Rosenblum was the brilliant physicist, the doctor, who had burned out early, and had had several strokes in his fifties and had predicted this vibrant and brilliant high-strung drama-queen raised in comparative comfort, having moved young from Prospect Heights Brooklyn to Manhattan, middle child in tow with her older sister and younger brother, the coveted boy. Rosenblum had forecast that she who was to be our Mother, Marcelle, would come to grief if she married our father. She modeled hats and resembled Merle Oberon.

Poppa’s wife had thrown him down the cellar stairs. Being a tiny man, he simply slipped out the window. “Acting Ugly” was a phrase I knew along with girls going to pews with hair ribbons bigger than their heads. Year was sliced neatly into quadrants as a church pie.

Did I in some way want to crawl back into the wombspace, grateful to be saved? An angel cast a star into the water, goes a legend. The star is wormwood. Today is the anniversary of the disaster of Chernobyl, twenty years ago. A war plane throws a shadow at our building like a gray steel reflection in water. I received a lime green light to burn above my desk, transforming granules of darkness into light. Green as a banker’s light. I was smart for my age but sad. This pencil thin light instructed me to be sad. I stayed South up North.

All thru her difficult pregnancy, Belle (named after Dante’s Beatrice in The Divine Comedy kept a painting of a blue-eyed, blonde girlchild above her bed. When her daughter, Magritte, was born she was dusky, cross-eyed, skinny as a pancake and sickly. It served Belle right but not the child.

Belle said “I’ve got a stomach full of cough drops,” which she had, having caught a cold which lingered throughout the last months of the pregnancy. She fought constantly with husband, Will and with her best friend my aunt. Indigo from birth, I had a sense of color and found Aunt Nonnie, superficial, a trophy bride, a blur, a flapper’s girl, travail and doing her high kicks during life’s closest scrapes with the fire, bullets at the bone.

My Aunt Nonnie had fought with Belle over which stole she would buy, which car she would drive, which fur coat her husband bought her. Every material possession one woman owned the other coveted. She fought with her husband Will of the iron will, brilliant graduate of Yale Law School, over what would be the baby’s name. Belle wanted Margot, Will Greta and they settled on Magritte. Later when the child, who had balancing problems, became a professional linguist and traveled Italy she found her true name as a Florentine. The child had severe bouts with alter egos and insomnia which got her in and out of psychiatric facilities.

My uncle Billy was a total contrast to Will: a boy with the charm and guiles of a girl. He was married to Aunt Gloria whom we named Aunt Glory Be because she was a fashion plate, a buyer for Saks Fifth Avenue, six feet tall (all the people in my family are short) had jet black hair, wore large dramatic sling bags and was a goer. I was the willow, the athlete, counting my cousin, and her insomniac friend, Magritte, burdened—or released?—by alter egos, the sole one of the daughters who could walk with any balance in Aunt Glory Be’s high heeled shoes. And I was stricken The solitary child who according toe the acid-tongued Beatrice (Belle) wasn’t a “klutz’ among the girls. Magritte has just now told me in her early seventies that the whole family was in trauma after I was left paralyzed from the waist down. Mag (Magritte) meant probably she traumatized was and her sole friend my cousin, Nyrene. Could it have been true for my socialite aunt and her trophy husband as well?

Billy, born Mark Herbert, fought on a destroyer against the Japanese in World War II and that chest-nut-haired little boy, so seductive and guileless feared only one thing: a typhoon. I just tried to phone them down in Arizona where they have, improbably, or probably like many Long Island Jews, relocated. I got “an invalid paging number.” O Aunt Glory Bee, I could use you now to sing a hymn.

The morning of what will now go down in history as the great October storm began like a May morning: backup light behind turn-of-century-brick buildings. It was neither lamb nor lion but playful colt or filly in a field. “Country Life” and “Island Shoe place” not belying winter round the bend. But by mid day, it was a different kettle of fish. Iron, brick, and hay blond the old buildings’ signs stood out upon sky and the shoe storm, normally quiet on a last-of-September morning, began filling. A glass fronted building with angles to the windows which slanted in obliquely reflecting people passing, the small carpentered spaces with tiers of leathers for winter—began filling. One woman came in shaking her head, ‘It’s this nail that keeps cutting my leather,” and sat down, handbag clutched in lap, “and the pension’s late this month, to boot.” She didn’t intend a pun but I looked up to the old fashioned boot silhouette Pieter, the shop-owner had framed. Peiter had been here for over thirty years. He would never change.

In northern Europe one gets not snow but low low low low clouds. You view it in Pieter Breughel the Elder. It has been discovered with the use of x-rays that the painter evoked the actual chill which emanates from the canvas like breath from a body by applying layer-after-layer of white lead paint. The zinc bleeds thru the colors turning them into teal frost, enveloping figures, sliding like a palette knife under layers of rooves and stout northern renaissance clothing. I began thinking of the braces I wore thru adolescence, and now in late life feel to lose half a body can be to lose half a life. Marriage, children. These were, however, the terms of my latter childhood which determined my life and made it spiritual. The terms were non negotiable. The poet off the page was forming in the twelve year old while in African Demoiselle Cranes flew over peaks so high it was said no bird could fly over and wildebeests ate moths. The strangeness of earth was an indelible etching. If one does not push beyond the envelope of energy how develop spiritual wings? For a while I was at irons, but then my sails filled again. There is the song of songs: that born within me and which must be borne out with my own effort and trial.

Brimming with people. the smaller and smaller store, lit up while above filling with sky now the street and snow. At first the flakes were wooly, as flakes are, like strands of yarn pulled from a child’s thick sock. Then they whirled faster and faster like a snowball paperweight shaken, the kind Mother put on my desk when I first came home. Before that time, I had connected snowfall with a gift of God, an enchantment. After, it was twice italicized as an otherworldly and wondrous event.

That morning I’d seen my first coffeecake, a little cup of compacted coffee grains which Sweetheart brought into the bedroom. Her enchantments akin to Jenny Hecht, child actor, one arm floating thru air extended before her, feet seeming not to touch the ground in her stage debut with Geraldine Paige. I flashed back to strutting in my aunt’s high-heels. Here I was in the Palace Shoe Place trying on striding shoes, tough ones such as my child feet kicked with. Suddenly, the new teacup night light I’d installed in the bathroom flashed and I smiled. The warmth of that small quail-egg bulb was imprinted in mind’s eye, a slender brush upon ivory.

The first day of October might come in the shoe store if snow shut down the street outside and all electricity. We would need to keep each other warm. I think how we are all shoehorned in here.

The painful, pale blue-eyed child morphed and was sombre, dusky, eyes closer set. It turned out that Magritte was also dreamy, an avid reader had alter egos (to escape her intolerable life?) had trouble sleeping, insomnia. I call it inpslamia. She sang psalms in her sleep, caroling her way out of there like a miner burrowing a tunnel from death. She took on the personality and customs of an Irish Catholic immigrant, going to mass each Sunday. How did she learn the details, the catechism? As I watch people change shoes, change feet, I ask myself these questions like shuffling a pack of ivory cards.

A shoe-tree rises against charcoal sky. Shoehorns begin walking, as I close my eyes a moment and envision the children of Christian Anderson. . .Grandmother Suzanne went to Copenhangen. A sea captain, in his retirement had fallen in love with her and toured her all night thru the city with snow falling. He crossed the ocean to New York to propose but she denied him.

The movie reel slowly winds backward and I am again who I was: a kick-ass kid and spanking true. Like Magritte whose name off-rhymes with Marcelle whom she adores. All my adolescence I spent at home practicing orchestration, composition, the only woman major at the music college I attended for three years, from age seventeen to twenty, bent over scores writing music at a drawing board uncle Billy had rigged. One entire year at composition college I wrote motets setting words of the psalm. One began with one word “mot.” “The Lord is my shade upon my right hand. . .” The following year I learned the five species of counterpoint. I learned endurance. Greater than that I had begun to absorb during the war. Aunt Glory Be put her hands to her hips and smiled, “I’m tickled pink.” She was a fashion plate, by then head buyer for Saks Fifth Avenue. Mother spent afternoons while our Black nanny scrubbed and shone pots and pans and cooked dinner, Mother Marcelle, who smoked up a storm inhaling like taking a sip from a glass of brandy, breathing in from a gold cigarette holder, exchanging hats which she could not afford at Bonwit Teller’s, or Saks for other hats which she could not afford. She’d phone her mother in evening and say in a tone which exemplified ennui, “What did I do today, mother? I exchanged the blue hat for a plush rose one. And don’t tell me to take it easy, it’s all I do,” she’d grind out her cigarette butt in the glass ashtray in the front hallway where the phone was. Privacy was out of the question. Chel would spend days at Professional Children’s School in the West Sixties for children who acted, danced, played a musical instrument. She was among the favored even then.

I remembered as the shoe store got fuller and darker, our father’s waiting room. I wept silent tears for him that were iron, brick and hay to go with the colors of our street wintering.

I dreamt last night of “The Snow Queen,” and opening the morning paper read the expected. it is a given that a shooting in Kandehar is called a “weapons malfunction.”

Look, Indigo, I tell myself. Now the shoeman is bringing me another pair of green shoes—easier to slip on but not as solid. He uses a shoehorn. . .with which as he on slips my shoe. I recall the shoebox mother filled with Christmas toys, with her Napoleonic capacity to overcome all hardship. She was positively Daedelean. I was her child, her girl-boy, only son, Icarus who flew too near the sun and singed his wings, melting the wax, tumbling to earth. In Breughel’s pointing. I fell in Brueghel’s great masterpiece reflected in the looking-glass of Auden’s poem. (A field mouse with ink-bright eye might peek out of that shoebox. It also culled my trading cards. Now shoe store morphs into embryo, womb.)

The snow is lessening to let in a little mirror-shine: a window into fairytales. Look twice and it’s thickening. Shoes and our father. He agreed to have a meeting with child violinist, Florika, born in a camp-like setting on Romania, Florika after her trying to commit suicide walking all night over broken glass in the bleakest blackest hours of New York’s midnight. He decided not to commit her. She was not suicidal at the time but crying for help. She succeeded in taking her life in her thirties, no longer under his eagle eye.

Shoes. Brown shoes, like liver-and-onion evenings on the West side. Shoes of dark red and shoes of cobalt, the other side of blue? I longer for normal shoes which didn’t need the thick sole for a flank of steel. The long leg braces, made in the German brace-maker’s shop, Winterkorn and Wittenberg, there were only the two in New York, the braces were constructed with knee locks cut all my clothing. I could not dress like a girl: I wore slacks like a boy and my two skirts had holes at the fine wool knees even though mother made suspenders: the back corset with steel or bone ribs took away my waist line. No hour glass sylph, whose dance card would be filled, but a boyish girl. In a wheelchair I could zoom and be called “Silver wheels.”

Pieter, who sells the shoes, as he has for three decades in this same glass-plated store on the Avenue, bows his head and resembles a young Netherlandish Christ although he has a reddish beard and blue eyes. Why should this be an anomaly? Not the perfect blonde, that horrific Aryan, he is an auburn-haired man who never married. A titian, short. “What are your hobbies?” I asks. He smiles. “The stars.” “Ah astronomy I say,” He smiles more broadly taking first the left shoe out of the long Moccasin box and slipping it on my left foot, the one with two toe which can move. (You the athlete, who lost her legs,” says Magritte.) “You must have a telescope then,” I smile, five telescopes,” he holds up the fingers of his left hand. I think of the domes rising from more and more urban homes. “They must come from different countries. “Yes, one from Japan, one is Swiss.” And probably, I thought, one German and had that bad taste I have whenever I say this word. “Home Comfort Centres” began rolling down the Avenue, huge oil kegs of stainless steel. “Angel Fuels,” says one.

With the fuel of an angel I dream myself flying down the avenue, turning left at Godwin and into the room where Sweetheart will be, head bowed, reading, wearing her burgundy dressing gown. I call it a bathrobe. “My mother said,” she imitates the clipped Scottish burry voice, “why turn up the heat and waste pennies when you can put on a robe?”

The shoes are proffered like an offering. A burnt offering. Why does one do these things, bow like a young disciple? To get into heaven? Peiter. He has two shoe stores. “Business is good,” I say. “I can’t complain.” Of course, he wants to make each sale of a pair of shoes a masterpiece. The room, indeed, is framed in gold and now in white for one cannot see beyond the front pane. “I’ll turn up the heat, folks,” Pieter says.

Last year this room filled with school children in September but he no longer carries children’s shoes. The crush.

“Can you walk at all? Say, a few steps?”

“No.”

I see Anne Frank’s favorite tree blossoming black upon sky from her cell. A crane of sparrows or cranes. Only, the sky was imprisoned: No, that cannot be true because you cannot put the sky in a prison as you could Magritte in Rypins House. As Beatrice, that bitch who fantasized her name was Belle, did citing not her daughter’s agony but the expense of the internment which had gobbled up all the college funds.

Really, I can do much against melancholy which, in Sweetheart’s case, is the comfort in being novice, lifelong apprentice to another, a little cork bobbing in my wake? That she is not as she once put it but a person whose deepest delight in life comes from the discipline of generosity, serving another. “I have the face,” she wrote before we ever met, “of a very serious clown.” Wear burnt orange, argyle sweaters. My inheritance, let’s face it, is not puny. When my chest was flat as a pancake mother gave me to know I would be an heiress one day. Me? With my modified Dutch-boy bowl cut and green eyes? Mother was generous in her bequests if not in her moods. No children for Pieter then, “You would make such a fine father,” I tell him, hoping to hear his story, but he defers, bows more deeply “I have nephews.” Meanwhile Elton John’s installation in the Baltic closes because of insinuations of child pornography. Two children dancing. Who can resist them, skin as soft as butter or peaches and cream?

I open the Globe & Mail again to rustle its pages, make some noise like scratching match into flame in the now almost silent and darkening room. Someone helping me out of great illness once said, “This woman is a leader even though she may have no followers.”

People are getting jittery. “I must phone a Bluebird. But the line’s busy all the time,” says one elderly woman, rising on her third leg, a parrot-headed cane. Another says, I can walk the one block taking care lest I skid and break a bone. The paper tells me that a new problem has arisen since school re-opened only weeks ago: classrooms are becoming too noisy. I shut the rag. I pit the noise against the now frightening start-of-panic silence overtaking the shoe store, one room with an aisle where the shoes are kept in boxes, boxes which could house love letters, field mice, anything. Researchers indeed have found that Grade 1 students, on average, miss one in every six words spoken by teachers. WE are at Nab End. At day’s end. we could be at a train station called “Nowheresville”

Studies have shown that a disproportionate number of teachers compared with other professions end up in voice clinics, making up about a quarter of the clinic caseloads, the association says. I raise my voice seldom these days. Mother taught us to speak in a whisper to reach the last seats in a house. Still, those years teaching were not characterized by deep quiet, except when Martin Luther King was killed and I asked the class to simply write in silence for two hours about him after I had shattered the mirror glass in the bathroom at home with my fist.

A light goes on in the store next door, a Patisseries. “Ici Mario Pacquet” comes over Pieter’s radio. He plays the French channel. The evening news will come on soon. People shuffle. Lynda throws the light switch which is never on: it illumines a strangeness in the back of the store, footgear, like stacks of books, shoes are shelved, shoes of all kinds. Bit shoes, smaller shoes, wide and thin. Black shoes, white boots, narrow slippers, hay-rick blond. After nearly thirty years here, my family feel they have lost me and I flip easily into one language from the other. They overlap like waves of water or like ridges of land, like fields in a photographic negative or slide. French / English. English / French. The day of triumph came the day I realized I wasn’t translating but thinking in the other language. My other country where I walked the shores of Lake Champlain during World War II with Poppa, that land rests in memory, ripples moving every now and then; yes, that terrain lies down there icily, silver reflected in metallic water, water of all golds. I can plunge my hand into water and touch it at times I feel. or in ice, cut thru t with a knife.

The stores along this quaint, Victorian avenue, dress shops, Chintz & China, hardware—how vital, how necessary they have become to me: they are the hub about which the wheel turns. Like Jane Austen, I have my two inches of ivory to carve upon. I glean the gossip here like gold from wheat. Suddenly Louise, for example, from Holland, of whom I am fond has disappeared. Another brave Hollander whose mother remembers the Hongerwïnter. “It’s her head,” one of the young girls pointed to her own head. “It’s been coming over her for a long time.” “We were simply told,” says floor manager, an elder, “that she would never return and not to get in touch.”

Moved. No forwarding address. How often that has characterized by life. More about shoes: AMSTERDAM, Sept. 28—sixty-two years after dying of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp continues to haunt countless readers of her diary, with its youthful exuberance, dry humor and shattering hints of the violence that would sweep away her world. But fewer people know of the soaring chestnut tree that gave comfort to Anne while she and her family hid for more than two years during the German occupation.

The Jews held onto their shoes if nothing else.

For five months after polio, I wore no shoes. Mosca Bianca that I’d been even running, I was more so now, paralyzed, singing, bald spot in back of the hair, the badge of honor we kids acquired like bedsores on buttocks from bed-lying or scars carved in each flank from bedpan-resting. Not yet anybody’s darling. Except Maman’s. Whose white fly was I to become? I’d have to wait out the years till that time.

During our adolescence, which I now see was highly disciplined like burnished wood or polished sterling silver, blackened with tarnish, then again brightened, during that decade, Chel and I read “Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl.” Did I identify more with her and her tree and bell tower in Holland than Chel? I rebelled against our mother Marcelle. “Helmet head!” I called her occasionally resenting her power and my own seeming powerlessness until I discovered the truest source eof my power: writing. Did I then learn some of the ecstatic surrender the mystics experience?

A chipped square box of porcelain comes to mind, Grandmother Suzanne’s whom Magritte calls Aunt Suzanne. She peopled her world with my family having none of her own. She filled the temple with our folk, warm, pressing close as the folk now in the Avenue store. Glancing about I think of that journey a young immigrant, Magritte took a journey of uncertainty and hope illustrated with elegant woodcuts. Did she wear a crucifix to boot? The illustrator owns a pair of good shovels, a pair at least knowing the importance of the shovel to tunnel one’s way out of real and metaphysical darkness. One took it from the peg and beam. . . The busses again are running! Thru the still-falling snow. I will be able to push out the thick glass door of “Island Shoe Palace” and bus home. First, I will call Sweetheart who will give me a wide welcome.

So here is a lyrical tribute to the theatre of the shoes, carving a life with the help not of a common shovel but an uncommon imagination developed in a housebound, for a long time, bedbound child. That virus also lashed me, by default, to the mast of imagination where I caught the high, the umber and the charcoal winds. Thinking of our father, one of the first practicing psychologist in America, cross town counseling the suicidal child who had walked all night on glass, and our mother, long-suffering in the kitchen doorway of our West Side apartment as well as emotionally but also clasping her hands, dishrag in tow, to nod approval toward her two girl children at music hour before supper. As lamplight fell on my hair which I now thought of as dark, not dirty, blond and my little sister, Chel’s chestnut hair, that child Magritte still sees as the girl with the three- cornered smile, doing this surely mother knew the apex of earthly bliss.

We used to serve our borscht with the sour cream on top, not mixed in: it appeared Russian (our father’s side) a white floating island on a Red Sea. We had a common enemy: first the war, then anti-Semitism, then the divorce, then polio. We wore lead aprons for x-rays. This bliss she tasted despite the fact that for six months she lifted my snow-white socks from the floor or in the wheelchair seat and said “I’d give anything to see them dirty again.” “I’d give you my legs if I could.” She also said, “Anyone call you a paraplegic, I’ll turn them into a quadraplegic.

That was a tunnel we had no way to shovel ourselves out of: not with violin, or later viola (alto) bow, not with Sister Kenny crutches or long wooden ones, not even with the celestial ski poles I imagined now as Pieter came toward me saying, “We are closing early due to the snow storm.” Pieter, you go home to five telescopes, I will wheel to the bus, will take it home to Sweetheart, then start the purple-red root vegetable, beets boiling for Annike tomorrow, up from New England’s Providence for ten days. The borscht with white island of sour cream, dollop in the middle. Slavic like this moody sky, these weathers these days of whip and riding leathers. The sun is a riding hat bronzed. Blues began to swirl as in a Dutch painting, Pieter’s Seventeenth Century Dutch face beckoned.

It is Chagallian, this nightfall. I can see his lovers whirling describing a full circle holding bouquets in the snow. Snow swirls, milk-blue, over everything. It is in the shoes of those passing on the street, struggling against the now-high winds. People struggle and windmill their arms not to lose their balance. They must save themselves from a fracture on ice. But in the store our feet are snug in dry shoes. It is as if we have come in from a great storm, the storm of life and indeed we have for these hallucinatory two hours. Why shoes? Why now? In order to step into a room, a child again, of eleven, elfin yet gymnastic, already good at rope-climbing in the school gymnasium at age ten and eleven, walking to petits fours and tea set out by Grandmother Suzanne in her Park avenue apartment with the marble foyer, brass fixtures, glass doors, and liveried doormen. One tips them. A taxi is always drawing up and a lady in furs and Channel # five getting out, ducking in order not to crush her swish hat with ostrich feather broad brim and velvet ribbon. I can smell something delicious simmering on the stove. Will it be leek and potato soup? Taking the city bus home, I wish the past to begin again, I taste, to my surprise, salt on my lip. “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.” Sky now mother of pearl. In those last moments, I listened to conversation contrapuntally. Even shoes were filling up with snow.

Behind bus windows, I saw the other side of blue: what color? ash-gray, dove-pink, cracked taffeta? These colors rifted open in the storm now thinning again—it was like lungs breathing out and in—circling the city bus, I can see onion domes as in Turkey and Russia. “What’s for dinner, grandmother?” I ask in my politest tone. “Borscht” she says. “Borscht, darling.” I ask myself how can marriage last as long as mine has with Sweetheart. Because of love is my answer to myself. Because of the continued life in the arts. Perhaps since we were raised beyond the pale, due to inherited wealth from intellectual brilliance, we grew up without any emphasis on earning a living. No man after all left our triumvirate of the three graces, three women, one mother, two girl children, the three graces—really we never looked up to men, in fact I pitied them their shape thinking perfection had been broken by the part that carries the seed—indeed, there was no male presence abiding in the home, no example of going out with briefcase and coming home. Our father was a figure of love but distanced, fascinated by lab and pathology, married to the eye institute as much as to mother or more at first, father, the brilliant patriarch across town, the god in white, the doctor in the coat. We shook hands when we met him, Chel and I. O the coals of marriage always burned underneath our steps. The flaws in our lives made them more searching. Perhaps Annike, wise in many things beyond way beyond peasant wisdom inherited from Polish ancestors, has told me all marriage which begin with an abortion wind up bitter, perhaps she is right. Our mother’s only son was never to be born. Perhaps I am him and myself. Always my two parents are with me, one wing at the right, the other at the left. Or looked at in more earthly terms, my mother is the wand of enchantment I move before me, the baton with which I keep time, my father the shoes of discipline I move forward in, the beat, the brown shoes of time. We are too dark for children out of Hans Christian Anderson, but then there are dark Scandinavian children. These are the days before the world flanked in like a prison and steel stood where columns of air had stood earlier, only bees circulating round them. “Anna with African Daisies” my own dream child swirled again.“Life’s no bed or roses,” Mother said from time to time, and Chel would smile her strange triangular smile at me, whispering “the other side of blue.” Mother was of course stating the obvious yet at the same time looking up at our faces in the lamplight, her dream children Sweetheart’s is an Ingres body, long torso and legs but ours were more the children of the French pastel artists. I knew what my life was worth: a red bowl of peasant borscht. And what would my dream child? Annike, Annike, maybe I am you are my dream child. You might have been Jewish. I have slid the ring off my finger then back on. Perhaps reserve holds both of us down to earth. Perhaps, otherwise, like the balloon of the eye, we might float away. Annike-Maria, we are all hidden children in some sense, we cannot deny our brokenness. O Höngerkinde, we are all searching for more expression and affection.

The new painting I have bought by a modern Dutch master, does it strike Annike and other friends as severe, mathematical? A radiant day is light and darkness, chiaroscuro. Annike, child of a vanished world may love something about it. Like Chel, she reaches to the furthest side of blue when it becomes another color. It is severe. But it has compassion.Hongerwïnter. WE are all hidden children, children of a vanished world: O come forth with your honger, dream-child. Europe had become a ruined continent. We are all islands ringed by darkness. Like our clinical father, the painting combines precision with compassion. Annike, you said “Happiness does not matter,” but oh it does. Mother? Text and texture of Sabbath or any Sunday Sermon. Black shning water table of sky tilted above. She gazed very long at our expressions, Chel’s and mine as if she had indeed come into her chosen land where milk and honey, roses gave off their perfume in two daughters bending over piano and violin, the lamplight on mahogany tables and on our dark pre world war Two Steinway, the lamplight from Royal Copenhagen lamps. On our walls hung no pictures of the royals unless the Romanian princess young. But the blue lamps, beyond price, were symbolic with their brass fineals (perhaps they are the other side of blue and there exists no name for this color) these luminous lamps reflected in pianos which we play catching our downcast eyes, the dark lashes and the silken blond a color the other side of azure, one my Russian ancestors might have known indigo, cobalt: the color of beyond.