Fresh Linen, and: Poor Willy, and: The Mysteries of Hannah and Ivar

Fresh Linen

The house was yellow with white trim,the basement whitewashed and mustywith an Evinrude or Johnson Seahorse

resting in a barrel of water from the tap.There were thick porcelain washtubs,spider webs in corners, fishing poles,carpenter's and garden tools.

There were shade trees in front and flowerbeds:bright orange nasturtiums, noble peonies, top-heavydahlias. Rockers moved in a breeze on the empty porch.Clothes hung on a rope pulley strung betweena pair of Norway maples.

The sheets rose and billowed in the rinsed light.They warmed the arms of the boy who unpinnedand took them down.

He carried the breath of a moment in Eden intothe dark wallpapered rooms of the house.

Poor Willy

He sat on his stoop as we walked to school,his clothes a washed-out blur of browns and grays.His head rolled off center, he drooled a little,his speech a moan.We called out taunts, thumbed noses,even hopped and sang.

Poor Willy fell in the fireand was burned to ashes.All of a sudden the room got chilly,Someone forgot to poke up Willy.

Would he hobble after us in a gameof Tortoise and Hare?Couldn't we bear the sight of so much misery?

What swam at the bottom of our dreams was fearof the black wind that might rise anytime while we slept,seep under doors, rattle old windows,and change five boys to toads.

The Mysteries of Hannah and Ivar

A tall slender man sits at a roll-top deskin the office of Passage Broker S. Jarmulsky,32 Canal Street, near the west tower of Brooklyn Bridge.His name is Ivar, my Swedish grandfather.He wears a thin brown beard, a mustache, and workson papers of immigrants like himself, travelingback and forth from northern Europe.

His eyes are as blue as ice on the winter streetsof his native Goteborg.He has married a woman and sent her awayto live with her parents in far-off Boston.Times are hard.

Why did Ivar come to this unruly land?

He was traveling with his tutor.Perhaps the sea air would curehis migraines.

The trip was a gift from his fatherafter long university study.

In love with a Christian girl,he was sent away to thwart their marriage.

Stories, family legends. Each could be trueor not, or some combination, permutation.

He had a gift for languages, he even studiedAramaic, yet never found a wayto earn a living.

More stories:

He brought his cane down on the headof a raw, sunburned man who popped outfrom behind a tree in Central Parkand asked for a match.

On days when the black mood seized himhe would brandish that cane in trafficlike Moses at the Red Sea.

Once his mother sent steamship ticketsfor the family to visit Swedenhe burned them in a glass dishin a kitchen ceremony.

Now from the home of a great aunt, I receive lettersfrom Ivar to Hannah in Boston, and from Sweden,letters from his younger brother Bernhard,just back from a trip to America,both packets tied with brittle ribbons.

Ivar writes in elegant faded script on tea-colored paper.He complains in graceful English of harried, ten-hour days.

He longs to see his mother and the dustless light of Sweden.The fear he might lose his job to Jarmulsky's sonsends him to bed with a Migraine (capital letter).He teases Hannah for being snappish, himself for being cruel."You know I am a very old young man."He counsels patience, their separation will end.

Then this—like a slash—from Bernhard,"I felt such joy when the mail brought your picture,I kissed it and wept."He hides the photo from disapproving eyes.

Why did Hannah keep these letters and a small photoof Bernhard in a box that has gathered silencefor a hundred years?

Had she fallen...