Gotham Diary:
Becky’s Hen
30 May 2013
There were four labeled boxes of stuff at the uptown storage unit. I took the box whose label began with “Becky’s Hen” and set it in the stacked garden chairs that we rolled down to the van the other day. I didn’t care about the other stuff in the box, which, mildly annoyed, I had to find places for. But I wanted Becky’s hen (shown); I wanted it right at the center of our new, long, zinc-topped “salvaged beer garden table.” And there it is.
Becky’s hen is a wedding present, given to us by a friend named Becky. Somehow, it has survived more than thirty years in our break-prone household. Much of that time, it’s true, it spent out of harm’s way, atop a cabinet out on the balcony. The cabinet was discarded when the balcony was cleared last fall, so that the building could install new railings. Most of what we had out there, some of it also going back thirty years, was also discarded. Last month, we began with a relatively clean slate — and long experience with what is essentially a narrow ledge. We resolved to avoid furniture designed for suburban patios. We also wanted to avoid the clutter of accumulated stuff that I’ve almost completely banished from the interior of the apartment. But a clean slate needn’t be absolutely empty. Becky’s hen was going to be the centerpiece.
We have never been quite sure what Becky’s hen is meant to be. A planter, I suppose — but it’s so deep! An artisinal planter — there you go. We might, of course, ask Becky. Now that all this time has gone by, the question wouldn’t be rude. The very fact that we’ve held on to the hen is proof that not knowing what it’s meant to be has not been a problem for us. But, precisely because all this time has gone by, Becky would probably not remember. It’s very likely that she bought it on a whim, and the whim went with the wind. It’s not important. It’s quite enough that Becky’s hen is Becky’s hen. Being Becky’s hen is what it does.
***
It was irritating, last night, not to have received the lamp that we’ve bought to make night-reading possible outside. I was plowing through George Packer’s The Unwinding as eight o’clock came and went; I had to move to the bench, with my back to the light, to continue reading. This was unsatisfactory because, perhaps because I’d just seen The Great Gatsby, I was distracted by the fear that I might be shot in the back by a deranged pedestrian or a professional sniper. By the time Kathleen got home, it was dark, and we ate pork lo mein by candlelight. (I’d ordered Chinese because Kathleen wasn’t certain when she’d be home. I’ve learned not to make dinner myself when this is the case.) Then we went in for the night, Kathleen to continue working and I to continue plowing.
After a while, I turned to The Leopard. I am reading a good deal of the novel in Italian as well, and last night, I came across a passage that I had to read not only in the original but aloud. I read it aloud several times. (Lost in her work, Kathleen never noticed, but she was also in another room.) The sentence begins:
Donnafugata con il suo palazzo e i suoi nuovi ricchi…
But this is the bit that I repeated:
…perché, rispetto alla immutabilità di questa contrada fuor di mano, sembravano far parte del futuro, esser ricavati non dalla pietra e dalla carne ma dalla stoffa di un sognato avvenire, estratti da una utopia vagheggiata da un Platone rustico e che per un qualsiasi minimo accidente avrebbe anche potuto conformarsi in fogge del tutto diverse o addirittura non essere…
“the longed-for utopia of a rustic Plato…” Here is the passage as Archibald Colquhoun translates it:
Donnafugata with its palace and its newly rich was only a mile or two away, but it seemed a dim memory like those landscapes sometimes glimpsed at the distant end of a railway tunnel; its troubles and splendors appeared even more insignificant than if they belonged to the past, for compared to this remote unchangeable landscape they seemed part of the future, made not of stone and flesh but of the substance of some dream of things to come, extracts from a utopia thought up by a rustic Plato and apt to change at a whim into quite different forms or even found not to exist at all; deprived thus of that charge of energy which everything in the past continues to possess, they were a bother no longer.
I had a hard time saying “alla immutabilità ,” so I’m saying it over and over again. The Leopard is a wonderful novel on its surface, but for anyone who has been reading European fiction for a few decades it is also an impossibly delicious sundae; barely longer than The Great Gatsby, it concerns itself with the thoughts of an aristocrat who would not be out of place in something endless by Goncharov or Tolstoy, but who thinks with the delicacy of “the Marcel of the novel.” And why shouldn’t it? It was written by a learned old man in 1955!
***
I find that I must say another word about Emma Brockes’s She Left Me the Gun; I neglected to point out what a lovable character her mother is — the mother who didn’t leave her the gun after all. Pauline de Kiewit Brockes (“Paula,” once she got to England) might not have been so lovable in person — you wouldn’t know until it was too late — but on the page she’s a sweetheart.
She was in many ways a typical resident [of the village]. She went to yoga in the village hall. She stood in line at the post office. She made friends with the lady on the deli counter in Budgen’s and had a nice relationship with the lovely family that lived next door to us. Their young boys would come around to look at the fish in our pond. Every year I made her a homemade birthday card that depicted scenes from family life. She tacked them up on the kitchen wall, where they faded with each passing summer. I found them recently, seven in all, a memoir of my mother’s existence in the village. There she is, wonkily drawn in her yoga gear, surrounded by me, my dad, two cats, and the fish.
At the same time, it pleased her, I think, to be at a slight angle to the culture, someone who had adopted the role of a Buckinghamshire mum but who had at her disposal various superpowers — powers she had decided, on balance, to keep under her hat. (I used to think this an attitude unique to my motherr, until I moved to America and relaized that it is the standard expat consolation: in my case — a British person in New York — looking around and thinking, “You people have no idea about the true nature of reality when you don’t know what an Eccles cake is or how to get to Watford.”)
In my mother’s case, it was a question of style. She was very much against the English way of disguising one’s intentions. One never knew what they were thinking, she said — or rather, one always knew what they were were thinking but they never came out and said it. She loved to tell the story of how, soon after moving in, she was sanding the banisters one day when a man came to the door, canvassing for the Conservatives. “He just ASSUMED,” she raged then and for years afterwards. “He just ASSUMED I WAS TORY.” She wasn’t Tory, but she wasn’t consistently liberal, either. She disapproved of people having children out of wedlock. When a child molester story line surfaced on TV, she would argue for castration, execution, and various other medieval solutions to the problem, while my dad and I sat in uncomfortable silence. She was not, by and large, in favor of silence.
Even her gardening was loud. When my parents bought the house, the garden had been a denuded quarter acre that my mother set about Africanizing. She planted pampas grass and mint. She let the grass grow wild around the swing by the shed. Along the back fence, she put in fast-growing dogwoods.
“It’s to hide your ugly house,” she said sweetly when our other neighbor complained. After that, whenever my mother was out weeding and found a snail, she would lob it, grenadelike, over the fence into the old lady’s salad patch.
There are plenty of family photographs in Brockes’s book, almost all of them showing her mother at some stage in life (but not late), and, together with the sparkling dialogue, she comes across as someone who would have to be played by Glenda Jackson or Janet Suzman. Do such cheeky dragonesses still patrol the British stage?