Lynn Strongin is the author of seven books of poetry.
Her prose, essay and poems have been published in anthologies and journals. Lynn's anthology,
The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy is due to be published by the University
of Iowa Press, June, 2006. Two PEN grants and one NEA Creative Writing Grant, Lynn is an American writer,
but lives in Canada.
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"Do you not understand this woman is your
own gender?" Pegeen's voice rose at her eighteen-year-old granddaughter over from England, as she drew her
granddaughter's face close to hers, when they were alone, after the dinner, repeating her earlier words. In
those moments of anger, she saw the child's virginity shattered like marble at the blow of a hammer. Her Convent
school years slid back over her like a veil: she was overwhelmed, not with love and tenderness for Rosheen,
but with bitterness and disappointment as she saw the snow angel dissolving.
Your own gender! The three words burned with overtones: this was the gender that
begat and birthed Jesus, the gender of the Blessed Virgin, the fair sex, the flower of young maidenhood. These
three words of Pegeen's carried echoes of the burning, the crucial issue of gender. What gender, come down to it,
was the angel? For Rosheen, when would the lights go on upstairs?
Rosheen, at eighteen, had come over from Great Britain to visit old school chums,
and see her grandmother. At first she had seemed improved, on the last night, however, friends threw a party, a
wild one, an old school friend and she wrought havoc at Pru's home, Pegeen's friend. Pegeen was on her hands and
knees the next morning in the house where the party was thrown: Pru, her Welsh friend, was the grandmother of Nell,
Rosheen's old buddy.
Pru was aghast, "You're not housecleaning?"
"What does it look like, Pru?"
She was sweeping up broken glass, scrubbing the carpet where food had been spilled in,
and had made two trips to the dump before nine that morning. That evening, in a farewell dinner, she confronted her
granddaughter who she herself had delivered in the comfortable country house on old Apple Orchard Road: "You are
promiscuous, Rosheen.You've hurt Pru, do you not understand this woman is your gender?"
Did she not, Pegeen, in these moments reveal herself to be the Irish Catholic girl
wringing her hands in prayer, fingers holding the rosary, watching before her very eyes the colour white turn into
the stained red of disillusionment, of experience? But for a while, perhaps ten, fifteen short years, the child had
embodied innocence, been the colour of the unblemished snow, pure as the unborn lamb.
Only an hour earlier, at nightfall, a powdery snow had fallen: spilling into the
old red brick of the quaint Victorian town, accumulating an inch on the ground, gathering in bare forked trees,
revealing nests where the rooks had made them. Kosovo is named after rooks: the capital, Pristina is eerily
blackened by clouds of them in morning. Rosheen at eleven had had a book on blackbirds. . .Before the altercation,
the red-haired child had seemed to be turning into the pride her grandmother knew she could become, the one
Pegeen knew was destined to come round to her at last: like the child of Irish legend going out into the night
to be protected by the burnt-out cinder taken from the fire, the aingeal?
Rosheen closed her eyes afterward and cried: she saw the colour scarlet, a gash.
Pegeen saw the blue of Mary's mantle turning to white with snow. A winter rill ran thru Newport: that fine creek,
sluicing stone: teal-green like a Brueghel sky giving a medieval winter cast to the town. Winter spiritualises
things, stripping the land and the emotion to bare bones. Pegeen's spirit is hunting to hounds. Like a vision to
the visitor, "Winter Cape," the watercolour angel had loomed up in our hallway when Pegeen entered her first time,
causing her to smile.
But Elsa saw the angel before anyone. There she was, eyes cast down, head of a
young girl, holding tenderly as one does a child a bundle of snow is it? In the gallery window: the soft brown-grey
feathering done in watercolours by the master's hand, the almost human skin. (Did he paint the remembered features
of some younger sister, or some childhood sweetheart, they are so virginal?)
Elsa's premonition that the angel would be mine is yet another way she and I are one,
she who used to put herself to sleep, in the camp, dreaming of windmills & flower-carts, windmills & flower-carts,
repeating over and over, like the terror?, on people' wallpaper.
"You are young and strong, Rosheen!" Pegeen said in her granddaughter's face,
"And runnin' against the wind. But you'll have to reckon with your actions."
| "That evening, in a farewell dinner, she confronted her granddaughter
who she herself had delivered in the comfortable country house on old Apple Orchard Road: 'You are promiscuous,
Rosheen. You've hurt Pru, do you not understand this woman is your gender?" |
"Describe a London fog, Pegeen," I ask but she is too down. So I pick up the
thread of thought. I can't imagine you grubbing about so for your Rosheen."
"Oh, I wasn't on hands and knees: just polishin' a bit of silver."
I open the miniature book of photographs she gave Sweetheart (also at her most austere
and autocratic these infant days of the year): "Cottage Interiors" in rural England. My favourite is Buckinghamshire,
a tiny soot-blackened root-like living room with the feel of having been built within the roots of a huge old tree.
Subterranean--unhewn beams, clay wall which leans, plaster white ceiling held together with twigs.
Our winter sunsets remind me of Nelly Sachs, whose Alphabet Angel rose from the
holocaustal coals; her horror over the camps, yet her ability to sing of and thru this pain. I feel the pain of
Elsa in her war camp in Europe, taking on more grief than she should, wanting to reach out and take Nelly Sachs'
hands in her hands, healing them both of German-Jewish guilt and the victim's suffering by touch, and telling her
her appreciation: instead, she takes my hands.
Sunsets are painted in fiery chemicals, metallic, with a paintbrush dipped in oils.
By dark, I think our home sounds like Dublin after dark, a chorus of coughs. Everybody lights up in Dublin.
Often toward late afternoon, there's a potato-coloured sky.
Poor: Pegeen says the word with a wealth of expression, mellifluous, that dark richly
modulated voice.
In the beginning, her face was a mask for grief her hands kept wiping tears which
I could not see from her eyes. Now, the horrifying event is less conspicuous. Some of the tension has relaxed.
We've arrived somewhere: where? at lunch, we spoon home-made split pea soup (which she says she loves.) I'm wearing
a sweater she calls "The colour of sparrows."
Christmas decorations are packed away till another year: it is a winter, New England,
spare look to the home as to the land. Our stories are only the things we absolutely own.
The earliest language is the tongue we learn in the home, the language of mother
and father, siblings. She learned the tongue of tears and laughter. Of desperation silent tears plus Convent
language of repression: ironed spine, sever discipline, its rosary words brought home. In this, she was like Elsa
who learned in another place another time the holding-back, and in. Blind to the metallic sheets outside the window,
blind to the nails of sleet and rains coming down. The convent becomes a child's yes even a child's convention.
Carry these stories with you and you carry a gun: we carried stories like hot potatoes.
Life handed Pegeen-Trinity a burnt-out cinder which she took, blew on the coal nursing
its fire, going out into the night sheltering first her own children; when they were grown, Pegeen-Trinity protected
those who needed her as they came along: the woman from Yorkshire who took a fall in the street; her elderly aunt
who she brings Horlick's (ovaltine) her neighbour who needed to be heard over breakfast, me.
Today, two weeks after Yule, the atmosphere is grey: an all-day twilight. I buy three
gerbers, daisy-shaped flowers of orange, rust and crimson three angels of colour to bring into the home: the best
I can. We fit in one visit, to listen to Irish plays. . .Tenements of Dublin light up, grey trash-cans resemble
velvet a few seconds, the Rozzers do their beats, billyclubs in hand.
I see in Pegeen the severity of the Southern child I was just about to become when
living in Georgia while our daddy an Army officer. As a grown woman, tall, mannerly, in her sixties she travelled
down South to do some work stretching over a year in Southern hotel rooms. She fit in. She spoke London English,
emphatic speech which cannot admit of two interpretations. Also the language of immediacy: the urgent need of a
child, a family suffering dire poverty. Grub Street was never far from her tongue. It's ironic that in the South
black kids called their mother, "Mammy," and in parts of Ireland, poor parts, where the brogue is spoken, "Mammy"
is a term also used for mother.
This week she belongs to her granddaughter while I boil tea at the stove with a
forty-watt bulb. Sweetheart is out in the rain at a meeting. Rosheen, her granddaughter, visiting from the U.K.
" must do what she must do." I blow on the scalding tea, I wait. . .Pegeen looks tired who can work the long haul.
"When I sold real estate, I worked sixteen-hour days, up with the developers at dawn. Twenty-four. Seven."
She understands the way money comes and goes tells me about the large house on Apple Orchard Road she owned.
| "Christmas decorations are packed away till another year: it is a winter,
New England, spare look to the home as to the land. Our stories are only the things we absolutely own...Carry these
stories with you and you carry a gun: we carried stories like hot potatoes." |
"With your daughter?"
"I wouldn't think of living with my daughter. The house was mine, had a large garden,
I was always bringin' fresh flowers in to set on the kitchen table. I did the kitchen floor over, myself, laid tiles,
did a batch of painting. I'd keep the grand children for a weekend. My daughter told me they were spoiled when they
returned. I told her grandmothers are to spoil children, mothers to discipline them. It's still hard for me to accept
that she married a divorced man, and one with a Liverpool accent (though I know we shouldn't think such things)."
"My grandmother would take me for a weekend we'd go to Schrafft's, Rockefeller Centre"
"How magical!"
"Yes. Grandmothers are magical persons."
"We are whilst we can be."
"Have you done any writing lately?"
"Letterly? Only a letter to Discount Gas and one of consolation to Dave."
"Time with you goes quickly."
"Indeed," she says.
(Sweetheart says indeed is Pegeen's word. I'll never tell her that Pegeen said men
who love men--thus women who love women--have a hole in their heart.) She would have looked swell in that emerald but
I'm glad she turned the man down. . .
(Around Elsa, around Peg, I'll trust the moment as a child, closing her eyes, lets
go for a moment, falling back into a parent's arms.)
"I knew a man once whose walls were covered floor to ceiling bookcases."
"Heaven!" she sighed.
"I fell in love with him."
" Did you?"
Around her, there is no need to talk about handicap. But we do, "I was taught not
to be inquisitive," I say over soup.
"I was taught: if you can see it, don't ask about it?"
"Right."
"I figure it doesn't matter how it happened but that it happened and this is the way
the person is now: for instance, bein' in a wheelchair a long time."
The three flowers suddenly become choir-children and break into song.
After the explosion of the story goes off, the angel has shadow-coloured wings just
a few charred feathers here and there: the angel, who is a messenger comes chaste as vestal virgins; silent as a field
after it has been stripped of landmines: call the angel death's twin, but only the way sleep is the little death.
Poor. She says the word again. "My father's sister," I say "lived thru the depression:
although they have money now they live so lean."
" They can't get over it," she says.
For a second, she seems to be a fantastical creature: crimson, rust, salmon hair
streaming. She appears to be flying! That mighty voice. But, no, those are the three flowers when I squint.
Our house--Dublin after dark: a chorus of coughing. Most of the time, I stay here in
my perch, married to silence.
Memories of her grandchild filter in. In the first days of the visit, Pegeen was
elated: "She was worth the wait. She's so much better to what she was. I find marked improvement."
"How?"
"She's taller, thinner, for one. Her hair's not straightened: it's wiry and red the way
she was born. The map of Ireland's written in her face again."
"Lovely."
"When she left us three months ago, she was full of herself. All the graduates of St.
Andrews are a bit blown up. Then they come off when they encounter the real world. She was a big cog in a little wheel.
Now, she's living in London. I told her it's well enough to make much of her friends but if she ever needs a kidney,
turn to a relation. After I took Rosheen to the doctor and the dentist and for a wax treatment, I said, 'You won't be
needing me now that you've done your runnin' round,' but she said, 'Yes, I will Gran.' Yet, I was right after all She
threw this party and pandemonium."
"I am going out, Pegeen, to pit myself against the weather. Meet me for a coffee at
the corner?"
"Can't. Got writin' to do today."
Thinking again of Bridey how can I ever forget her? I turn quietly to Sweetheart and
say, "You never made Mexican bride cookies again this year."
"I ground the almonds."
Are we not all secretly a bride to the one we love whom allow ourselves to marry in
our dreams? For example, here I am in the cottage in Buckinghamshire where I have never been: built seemingly in the
roots of a great old tree, hewn timbers, stone sink, fireplace. Close my eyes and am in a churchyard moving among
angels, as though blind I kneel and feel the features of the young woman angel, then open them: my eyes are crying.
"Evening is when I enjoy my art, I speak to it and coax it forth" Elsa said. (Rather
than coaxing forth love?) I too coax the "Winter Cape's" angel out of hiding. . .the snow angel smiles beneath glass
in her inscrutable stone. The tangerine winter sun, small, intense, a ball of fire it is setting, tangled in the
trees like a round copper bird on a mythical nest. The winter rill slices thru white snow, a bit of water shines thru,
teals: like razor-thin edge of tea thru marble with grey furred trees etched in background. This morning there was a
potato-coloured sky that's as close to its colour as I can name, turning to stone the colour of wings.
Rosheen who seemed changed for the better, has disappointingly about-faced, having
switched back into a kinky copper-haired hellion. The hell fires of her misbehaviour, her misdeeds crackle all around
and there is that edge of madness, which is anger on Pegeen's tongue. The Convent girl with clasped hands in prayer,
the rosary beads I can hear clicking as the moon rises to perfect to white stone the town.
"Pru's granddaughter, Emily said to Rosheenyou're lucky to have a grandmother. I wish
I had one like yours."
"There you go, Pegeen, she appreciates you after all."
"I wouldn't say so."
"Pegeen, get some rest. You look ashen."
"Interestin'," she changes the subject, "that there are two cathedrals in Dublin and
neither of them Catholic. Listening to the phone prayer tonight I hang on a bit over the message and hear "by the
power of the Holy Spirit Amen," (and then a thin metallic voice) " exiting system."
Do our Mammies realize their children are drifting toward Jesus?
The underbelly of loneliness. . .threatens.
Bending over paper, pen in hand, I pray for the angel, to descend. Language. Nelly
Sachs' Alphabet Angel has always caused the elevation I feel with Pegeen. We climb the scaffold of word who cannot run.
Even when she uses slang phrases, it is with discretion, peppering her narrations, like calling the other Pegeen
(Pegeen-Maura) "Tight-arsed," the height of its humour is word magic, brewing like "The cheeks of her arse," another
phrase she uses for a ring.)
Year is the stub-end of a candle: wine-brown. I pretend the room is tangled with roots,
a brown cradle, underground . . .In this iron cold, I think of Pegeen's self-sufficiency spun about her like a pewter
halo, a body-halo armouring her like heart-armouring.
Does the young whippersnapper visiting from Britain not see her grandmother's war-wounds?
That she moved under the shadow of the bomb? That the Blitz was the backdrop of her
childhood? That, later during young womanhood, the same woman turned white, not with the moon but with radiation? That
with an alcoholic husband she could never own a home? only rent a flat after flat first in Britain, then here in
Canada? That she had to secrete money for her children earned from their work in plays. That she wanted to give them
a theatrical childhood, an exciting one?
And what can Rosheen know of the nuances, the profound darks and bright of gender?
"Cancer is one place I'd rather not re-visit. It cast too deep a shadow over my present."
* * *
As a hospitalised child I learned:
I go to glory when I lie with you...
the white owl cried as his tears spun blue villages around the moon...
The weather is “Zero at the bone.” That swatch of teal in the sky like bandage,
rough-textured, linen which consoles me against never having gone to Holland.
I wake feverish, shivering with my recurring dream: Hospitalized, I am twelve again:
Bridey’s face is pressing close to mine! I have never seen her so close. She terrifies me. There is the wart on her
cheek with the hair sprouting from it. Her brown-green eyes which are kind from far off, brought close, glare, they
have a hard lustre, like frozen stone. She’s got the mirror out of her pocket in her right hand. . .
“Whose are those?” I point to the roses in cello.
“They ain’t’ for the likes of you, youse ain’t on fire with love for the Lord!” she
says and shoves them into the bin, flower-side down. The guardian angel of our ward has turned into the avenging
angel.
The antidote to the Bridey dream is my Ophelia dream: Andrea was a girl
on our ward whose mother had a baby: their mother brought the baby, swaddled, in the heart of winter to hold out the
window: Ophelia, blew and a white circle of frosty breath bloomed her face she laughed, amazed. She reached out to
grasp it. Brought into the sunroom because she was not allowed into the ward for fear of infection we who could
wheel ourselves to see her. She puffed her cheeks like outside, but no wreathe came, Ophelia began to cry.
The evil thought entered me: Bridey imagined wanted me dead and gone? Had she secretly
exulted when God came for a child?
My angel, you are suddenly shot thru with the threat of violence.
The body has a memory that stretches way back like a road in a landscape
painting: I can remember lying in bed between my two parents drinking in warmth from their two bodies after a
heinous nightmare. I had already learned the secrets:
I go to glory when I lie with you
Cried the white owl...
I’d fallen perhaps into a near-death sleep: after treatment room, dark,
unlike the bathing room (with its clerestories); that grey winter afternoon being stretched on the plinth where
the torturer had moved my bones around: there was no mother or father I could tell. Winter sunset was a blur or
charcoal with a clot of rose, like blood, out the window.
The body has a long memory: I can remember the touch of earth under the ball
of my foot down half a century; and remember the glaze of ice under my skates, the flexing of my calf muscle as I
took the ice in a spin, winter air mirroring everything.
When I waken I see Elsa’s photograph next to Pegeen’s.
Aingeal? In a way, yes, both loom up a vision like the angel in our hall, both
vivid and quiet. Elsa and she share a childhood, in separate worlds, which was traumatic. The camp. The Blitz,
evacuation into the country which was living death. On the other hand, there is Rosheen, born with a silver spoon,
with red wiry hair and long hands, changeable nature, promiscuous? A vixen. Coal glazes over to black mirror: it
still holds a spark of warmth to coax at nighttime. Like those towns I love in the Northeast it is both miniature
and charged, our Victorian town of red brick and coal ovens. I close my eyes, open them to find a few burnt feathers
in my hand. . .
*The Irish word for angel is aingeal. This was also the word for a burnt-out cinder taken from the fire.
It was often given to children going out in the night to protect them. John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes, p. 137
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