Painting by William Merritt Chase
The Telling of Grandmothers Secret
Belle's story was that she came over from
Prince Edward Island to Boston when she
was sixteen to be a nurse's apprentice,
but that wasn't exactly true. She got pregnant,
had the child – oh it's a long story.
The truth is she was sent away in shame.
— Aunt Jessica, age 87
Trying to desire nothing, be content
with motion, I walked up
Gravel Hill Drive,
then back, the day after Jessica's call.
But I was clear proof that Zen
is just flirtation and avoidance
unless you sit very still,
do the necessary work.
My disquiet wouldn't be quieted.
Still, nice to know there was a religion
you could fail without worrying
about eternal damnation, a conundrum
troubling you instead of a precept.
Nice also to ramble toward your subject,
sensing nobody cares about it but you,
feeling those first narrative latitudes,
the narrowings as you go.
Already the secret
had visited my sleep,
sat down with me at breakfast,
rubbing the dark from its eyes.
What confidence it had. Imagine,
this suddenly unlocked thing
believing it was irresistible as is.
"I'm the only one left who knows,"
Jessica explained,
then couldn't stop herself.
With each call the secret grew larger,
and I'd carry it out into the vagaries
of late October — one morning a clear view
of Savage Mountain, the next a cold mist —
aware that every story needed atmosphere
in order to exist.
And then the surprise of atmosphere
in collusion with memory,
grandmother's silence coming back to me,
and her kindness, for the first time,
feeling like an achievement. There she was,
cooking our meals, running the house,
my ill mother barely able to assist.
And there was her secret, pressing in
on her and down, asking for release.
That she was impregnated by her teacher
at age fifteen, that the teacher
married her
and on the wedding night
disappeared forever,
that she gave the baby to a relative
to raise, that she'd been sent away —
not over — to America, where she
converted shame into silence,
married again, becoming a bigamist,
that her husband and daughter
and my brother and I never knew,
all this speaks to the awkwardness
of exposition
and of a concealment so gifted
it's impossible to know the degree
to which it also was tragic —
a life denied,
a child left behind.
As family secrets go,
nothing for the tabloids, no one
beaten senseless, or murdered in bed.
But for me things to walk off,
and toward,
about which two dogs from the house
atop Gravel Hill had something to say.
Protective of what they hardly understood,
they charged, barked — good dogs, really,
their tails giving them away, and I turned,
started back, the secret seeming
less and less mine, part landscape now,
part the words used in its behalf.
A man in a pickup drove by,
his two raised fingers signaling, what?
That unlikely comrades were possible
in this world? That we share a code?
But he'd come so suspiciously
out of the narrative blue.
If you meet the Buddha on the road,
kill him, Buddhists say, worried
about anyone bearing indispensable news.
Lucky for the man that he didn't stop,
I might have had to eliminate him.
Instead, something grandmotherly —
it must have been grandmotherly —
insisted I just let him be a man
making his way home.
Open a door for him,
said that something,
now close it
so he's safe within.
I descended the hill,
the dogs still yapping as if certain
they were the cause. Up ahead,
the sudden sun through the trees
had speckled my driveway,
and, at its end, where gravel gives way
to macadam, there was the circle
that allows things
to be dropped off at the front door.
It was all shadowy and clear,
and moving toward it I felt
the odd, muted pleasure that comes
when you realize you've only just begun
to know how you feel.
Stephen Dunn
Posted over on Poetry Daily
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