Harriet Doerr Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part I - The Tiger in the Grass

  The Tiger in the Grass

  Part II - First Work

  Chapter 1 - The Flowering Stick A fable for Carmer Hadley

  Chapter 2 - Carnations

  Chapter 3 - The Extinguishing of Great-Aunt Alice

  Part III - Mexico

  Chapter 1 - The Seasons

  Chapter 2 - Sun, Pure Air, and a View

  Chapter 3 - The Local Train

  Chapter 4 - Way Stations

  Chapter 5 - The Watchman at the Gate

  Chapter 6 - Saint’s Day

  Part IV - Memory

  Chapter 1 - Please

  Chapter 2 - Low Tide at Four

  Chapter 3 - Like Heaven

  Chapter 4 - A Sleeve of Rain

  Part V - Edie: A Life

  Edie: A Life

  FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE

  Praise for The Tiger in the Grass

  “Some of the most enchanting prose around … Tiger connects the author’s life and her fiction with veins as delicate and rewarding as traces of copper in an ore sample.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “In the same unflinching, unsentimental voice of Stones for Ibarra, Doerr sketches the facts of her life…. Just as in her best fiction she swiftly and effortlessly makes us care about her characters, here in her memoir we are equally enchanted.”—The Boston Globe

  “Uncommonly elegant … Doerr’s intimations explode in a seemingly placid landscape … her prose must be considered matchless.”

  —Newsday

  “Redolent of her beloved Mexico … Doerr casts her compassionate yet razor-sharp eye over situations with imbalances… detail[ing] the atrocities of village life… in the same lyrical prose with which she illuminates pockets of happiness.”—Elle

  “Wise insights, couched in stunning metaphors and sensory imagery that lifts individual sentences off the page.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Incandescent … written with great tenderness and understanding”

  —Library Journal

  “Masterfully varied in its rhythms … Doerr’s assured control of tone persuades us of her deep involvement with her material. She can … capture the whole sweep of a life in a single emotionally charged perception.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Full of grace… her insights are like the stones of her stories, worn smooth by wind and weather. Through her experiences, stones speak.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Doerr is a master of selecting telling details and then weaving them together to create fictional portraits that have the clarity of photographs…. Her characters reverberate with truth as she celebrates the small miracles that, taken together, make up a life.”—The San Diego Union Tribune

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE TIGER IN THE GRASS

  Born in Pasadena, California in 1910, Harriet Doerr attended Smith College in 1927, but received her B.A. from Stanford University in 1977, where she was accepted into the Creative Writing Program. She was a Stegner Fellow, received the Transatlantic Review Henfield Foundation Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Doerr’s first novel, Stones for Ibarra, won the 1985 National Book Award for First Fiction, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, the Godal Medal of the Commonwealth Club of California, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Harold D. Vursell Award. Her second novel, Consider This, Señora, was a national bestseller. The Tiger in the Grass is Doerr’s first collection of stories and anecdotal pieces.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1995

  Published in Penguin Books 1996

  Copyright © Harriet Doerr, 1995

  All rights reserved

  “Sun, Pure Air, and a View” (under the title “Consider This, Señora”) first appeared in Atlantic

  Monthly; “Way Stations” and “Edie: A Life” in Epoch; “Low Tide at Four” in Ladies’ Home

  Journal; “Like Heaven” in Los Angeles Times Magazine; and “A Sleeve of Rain” (as “Houses”)

  in The Writer on Her Work, Volume II. New Essays in New Territory, edited by Janet Sternberg,

  W. W. Norton & Company. “The Local Train,” “Way Stations,” “Saint’s Day,” and “Like

  Heaven” were published in the author’s collection, Under an Aztec Sun, Yolla Bolly Press.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Some of the selections in this book are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and

  incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any

  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67431-0

  I. Title.

  PS3554.036T54 1995

  813’.54—dc20 95-32391

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For

  (in order of appearance)

  Glive Miller

  John L’Heureux

  and

  Cork Smith

  Part I

  The Tiger in the Grass

  The Tiger in the Grass

  Yesterday was my eighty-fifth birthday, and my son, who has had lung and brain cancer for two years, gave me a toy stuffed tiger as a reminder to write, without further delay, a short account of my long life. My daughter, substituting a baked Alaska for a cake, whipped egg whites for twenty minutes by hand to produce a confection that towered on the plate and melted into a sort of heaven on our spoons. This backward look is for them. It was only four years ago that I realized I was making my way through the thickets of life together with a scarcely visible, four-footed companion, who matched his steps to mine.

  I first learned of the tiger in the examining room of my glaucoma doctor.

  Sitting in a black revolving chair, my chin in a rest, my forehead against a strap, and facing an intense light about to be focused on my inner eye, while the doctor at his illuminated glass counter made entries on my record, I turned pessimistic. ,

  “Let us hope,” I said, “that I don’t lose more sight in my right eye,” and went on, “since I have only peripheral vision in my left.”

  Without turning from my folder, the doctor said, “Don’t belittle peripheral vision. That’s how we see the tiger in the grass.”

  Then he added, “It’s also how the tiger sees us.”

  In this way, at the eye clinic, almost at the end of my life, I met and recognized the tiger that was mine and had been from the start.

  If I began at the very beginning, I would probably tell you, dishonestly, that I remember taking my first reeling steps on garden paths while wearing rompers and ankle-high brown button shoes. Or I might say I remember taking baby chickens with me down the slide when I was two or three.

  But how much of all this is remembered, how much absorbed from torn and faded Kodak pictures, taken by my father, who died when I was eleven?

  Unsupported by snapshots is my recollection of the time when, at the age of eight, I we
pt at the blackboard in French class. I still have total recollection of the event, but none at all of its cause. Was it simply not knowing the idiom, or needing to go to the bathroom? Was it fear of the teacher, who had snapping black eyes and wore two strands of jet beads? Or was it because the year was 1918 and the war had lifted my family from southern California and set us down hundreds of miles north of the house where I was born?

  This was a place I had come to know intimately by sight and sound, touch and smell, a place whose arrangement of roof, walls, and intervening spaces I loved with a passion that occasionally flames even now. Did I weep that day for the door knocker, a twisted metal ring? Or for the umbrella stand in the shape of a copper frog with four holes in its back?

  Or were my tears merely a child’s acknowledgment of the times of band music and parades, of images of soldiers bleeding on stretchers or caught in barbed wire? Or of the spiked helmets and starving Belgian children in the posters people hung in their front halls?

  Toward the end of the war, Spanish influenza crossed the Atlantic, then North America, finally to reach California. On certain days, decreed, we supposed, by President Woodrow Wilson’s doctor, we had to wear white gauze masks to school. However, on the day of my shame at the blackboard, I was unmasked when I cried.

  I think occasionally of these unexplained, long-ago tears and wish I could cry them now.

  After the war I lived at home, as before, with two parents, three sisters, and two brothers in a shingle-roofed, brown-shingled house that had been built with no sleeping porches and before long had three.

  Bamboo grew along the driveway, eucalyptus over the toolshed, and, at the bottom of our hill, three peach trees blossomed pink in a field that turned yellow with wild mustard in the spring. There was also a steep canyon, which every summer hid its rough slopes under green drifts of poison oak.

  If it is evil to care too much for things that have neither mind nor heart, then I am evil. For in the house where I was born, I cared about the tiles around the fireplace, the oak banister broad enough to slide down, even the dumbwaiter, which carried up the trays for those of us in bed with measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, or mumps.

  Once, two male cousins, aged eight and nine, sat on top of the dumbwaiter and tried to lower themselves, hand over hand, by its ropes, from upstairs to downstairs, and became stuck between floors. “Let them hang there,” one uncle said. “They can cool their heels,” another shouted down the shaft.

  And so it was during all my childhood I touched such things as glass doorknobs, the carved border of a table, the inside of a windowpane when it rained. Outdoors I touched leaves, branches, and stones and still do.

  Not long ago, in conversation, my son suddenly said, out of context, “I don’t know much about this business of dying.” As he might have said, “I don’t know much about pruning this boxwood hedge,” or “I never learned much Italian. ”

  Relatives lived three canyons beyond ours, in a bigger house on a bigger hill. They had room in their garden for cows, chickens, parrots, peacocks, and some captive deer. There was also a shallow lake, which rose and fell with the seasons. A leaking rowboat and some swans floated on its surface, and as children,. it was entire joy, no matter how wet our feet, to row this boat as fast as possible in the direction of a swan and watch its flight.

  On one side of the canyon in this garden stood a newly built Japanese house with paper walls. Sometimes we entered this empty replica through its wooden door, sat on the matted floor, and pretended to have tea from an empty black pot that stood on a low black table. After that, we sometimes put our fingers through the paper of the sliding doors. When the Japanese caretaker caught us at this, he would chase us away, shouting in his language as we fled. I suppose‘teasing and destroying are part of every child’s nature, just as endless reasoning is part of an adult’s, but if I could find the swans and the caretaker now, I would perform a deep Oriental bow of apology.

  The elderly relatives who lived in the house ate chicken and eggs and drank milk from their garden and, I suppose, enjoyed the oranges, loquats, and figs from their trees as much as we, as children, did. Train tracks entered one side of the garden. But why? we wondered. Who got off and who got on and where did they go?

  When we went, washed and combed, to call on these relatives in their house, we rang the doorbell and then guessed who would answer. It was bound to be McGilvray, the butler, John, the footman, or Alfonso, the valet. If we were lucky, it was Alfonso, a man who liked children, no matter how bad, who would lead us down a long hall to the room where the elderly relatives sat. They were an unusual pair. A divorce had made it possible for him to marry her. She had been a widow and wore mourning for her prior husband as long as she lived. She wore the wedding bands of both husbands on a finger of her left hand. She saw the world through very thick glasses and had a Brussels griffon for a pet. Her present husband, the male elderly relative, had a pocket watch that played a tune. He ignored his second wife’s black dress, black hat and veil, ignored the second ring and the Brussels griffon. He saw her on the other side of the thick glasses.

  Now they are buried together in a graceful, perfectly proportioned, circular structure, designed by John Russell Pope. Floored and domed and columned in marble, it stands on grass among trees, not far from where we used to chase peacocks for a tail feather. It is called the mausoleum.

  When Alfonso died twenty or thirty years ago, his will provided that flowers from him be laid on these relatives’ graves. A dozen or so of us came on that green, sunny day and heard my oldest sister, Liz, say a few words about our Spanish friend, whose natural state of being was happiness.

  I hope, and have left instructions, to have my ashes tossed, or spilled out, into the Pacific Ocean. As I understand it, California law allows the disposition of cremated remains wherever they cause no nuisance. So far, I myself have disposed of four people’s ashes, three times illegally before the new law was passed. Each time the place was the concerned individual’s choice, spoken or unspoken. Under oak trees, in the sea, Mexico.

  I suppose I grew up like the rest of my contemporaries, on peaks of rapture and in pits of despair. I loved my piano lessons and even the hours of practicing they involved. How is it that all I have left of those twenty years are a nocturne, a few waltzes, and part of a sonata? Five people in my family played the piano, and, among them, I was the least accomplished. But I am glad now for every Czerny exercise I played, for the thousand repetitions of arpeggios and scales.

  School, always a scene of heights and depths, reeled on, taking me from Latin verbs to Virgil, decimals to logarithms, and, in the case of boys, from imaginary encounters to the rejection of the awkward reality. Suddenly at seventeen I grew up, fell half in love, and went east to college.

  Six weeks before I left for New England, I was invited to my first prizefight on my first date with the man, then nineteen, I eventually married.

  This person, on a July evening of singular calm, took me to a championship bout. Part of a sell-out crowd of 35,000, we sat outdoors, three rows back from the ring, I in flowered chiffon and a wide-brimmed straw hat, whose ribbon fell in streamers down my back.

  The moment we sat down, my escort said, “You’ll have to take off that hat.”

  During the preliminary bouts, I learned a little about what to watch for and why it mattered. Then came the main event, a contest between two middleweights, Ace “Wildcat” Hudkins and Sergeant Sammy Baker. By the fourth round, blood poured from their noses, ears, and chins, reddening the referee’s white shirt. I watched it spray into the air, along with one or two teeth. Ace Hudkins won the fight.

  “Well, how did you like it?” my friend asked, as we drove home.

  “I need to know more about the fine points,” I told him, and, over a period of forty-four years, tried, without success, to find the grace and glory in this particular manly art.

  The rest of our dates that summer were unexceptional, consisting of movies and long, aimless dri
ves at night. We headed north, east, south, or west, making here a right turn, there a left, circling one, or two, or three blocks at a time, passing dark houses and closed stores, and sometimes coming back to start again.

  This was territory we knew and, at the same time, could scarcely recognize. It hung in space between heaven and earth.

  My son’s first word was “car, ” and, as of two months ago, his doctor has forbidden him to drive, Now his car is parked outside his house and is visible from several windows. I have forgotten the details of the Chinese water torture we used to hear of, but it must be something like this.

  I left California with a classmate named Jane, and some friends came to the train station to see us off. The nineteen-year-old who turned into the man I married was among them and brought with him three dozen long-stemmed red roses. These spent three days and nights in a container of water on the wall of our compartment. I sat on one of the green seats while the landscape disappeared behind me, watched the buds open and, twice a day, added water. Because of this attention, the red roses lasted all the way to Chicago.

  “Those flowers!” said Jane.

  On the way to Massachusetts, we stopped in New York long enough for me to buy my first and last fur coat, full-length musk-rat, and to see Good News, Rio Rita, and My Maryland.