2: Within a family . . .
Little Follies, “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” the Preface begins
Preface
I think the memory of most of us can go farther back . . . than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; . . . I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.
Charles Dickens
WITHIN A FAMILY, some events that an outsider might consider important are allowed to pass almost unnoticed and are soon forgotten; yet others, which seem trivial to the world at large, may be elevated to positions of such eminence that they acquire the status of milestones. In my family, for example, no one remembers my birthday, but they all remember the day my mother tumbled from her lawn chair.
In the years that followed her tumble, if talk around the dinner table turned to Mr. Beaker, a former neighbor, my mother would often ask, wistfully, I thought, “Do you remember the night he threw his desk lamp through the window? When was that?”
Someone else, usually my grandmother, would answer, “Why, Ella, don’t you remember? It was the night before the day you fell out of your lawn chair.”
It’s comforting, when I feel a bit “lost,” to be able to put my feet up, close my eyes, and look back, as it were, along the road that I followed from wherever I once was to wherever I may be now, to “retrace my steps,” and find, along that roadside, familiar milestones. Not only am I often a bit lost when I begin such a backward ramble, but I’m often lost during it as well, wandering on someone else’s road, or backing out of a cul-de-sac, and it is always a great relief to come upon one of these milestones, or, if you prefer, landmarks. It is a particularly great relief if I stumble upon the milestone that marks the day that, for the rest of my family, came to be known as “The Day Ella Tumbled from Her Lawn Chair” and is, on the map of my childhood memory, labeled “The Day I Was Chasing Kittens,” for it is from that day that I date all the rest.
However, I began writing “My Mother Takes a Tumble” not with the aim of commemorating that event but to find a woman for Mr. Beaker.
When I was a child on No Bridge Road, living with my parents in my grandparents’ house, Mr. Beaker lived next door, alone. I knew very little about him, and as far as I can recall I never set foot inside his house. He visited my grandparents from time to time, and he always stayed just a little too long. He worked for the Babbington Clam Council, writing advertisements. Later, I think, he became president of the council; I’m not certain. He considered himself a fine craftsman with an uncanny knack of echoing, in each of his advertisements, the tone, style, and yearnings of potential clam consumers.
Mr. Beaker relished his work and labored at it longer and harder than was really necessary, often working at home well into the night, when there were fewer distractions and his vast unseen audience seemed to draw in around him, like a group around a campfire, and lean forward, waiting for him to spin a yarn about the succulent mollusk.
Between his house and my grandparents’ grew a young oak that never fully lost its leaves until the very end of winter; when Mr. Beaker was at work at night, when I was in my crib, the light from his desk lamp would throw the shadows of its branches across my crib, across my parents’ bed, and onto the opposite wall, where a door opened into a hall that led into the living room, where Gumma and Guppa and my parents sat listening to the radio or talking, quietly and uneasily, for living together was difficult for all of them.
Whenever Mr. Beaker was visiting and the time had come for him to go home, his face would grow long and dark, and he would begin praising my grandmother’s cooking and my mother’s figure. “Dudley,” my father would say after he had left, “needs a woman.”
Years later, I was walking along one fall day and smelled the unmistakable odor of burning leaves. It brought to mind, for reasons I will explain shortly, the years I spent on No Bridge Road, and Mr. Beaker, and all the rest, ending with my father’s saying, “Dudley needs a woman.” I realized that my father had been right, and that Mr. Beaker had thrown his desk lamp through the window that night because he was alone and hated it; so I created Eliza Foote, arranged a meeting, and let events take their natural course.
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The Personal History continues in Episode 3.
In Topical Guide 2, Mark Dorset considers Prefaces from this episode.
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You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.