Essays of E. B. White (25 page)

The Supreme Court decision is like the Southern sun, laggard in its early stages, biding its time. It has been the law in Florida for two years now, and the years have been like the hours of the morning before the sun has gathered its strength. I think the decision is as incontrovertible and warming as the sun, and, like the sun, will eventually take charge.

But there is certainly a great temptation in Florida to duck the passage of time. Lying in warm comfort by the sea, you receive gratefully the gift of the sun, the gift of the South. This is true seduction. The day is a circle—morning, afternoon, and night. After a few days I was clearly enjoying the same delusion as the girl on the horse—that I could ride clear around the ring of day, guarded by wind and sun and sea and sand, and be not a moment older.

P.S. (April 1962). When I first laid eyes on Fiddler Bayou, it was wild land, populated chiefly by the little crabs that gave it its name, visited by wading birds and by an occasional fisherman. Today, houses ring the bayou, and part of the mangrove shore has been bulkheaded with a concrete wall. Green lawns stretch from patio to water's edge, and sprinklers make rainbows in the light. But despite man's encroachment, Nature manages to hold her own and assert her authority: high tides and high winds in the gulf sometimes send the sea crashing across the sand barrier, depositing its wrack on lawns and ringing everyone's front door bell. The birds and the crabs accommodate themselves quite readily to the changes that have taken place; every day brings herons to hunt around among the roots of the mangroves, and I have discovered that I can approach to within about eight feet of the Little Blue Heron simply by entering the water and swimming slowly toward him. Apparently he has decided that when I'm in the water, I am without guile—possibly even desirable, like a fish.

The Ringling circus has quit Sarasota and gone elsewhere for its hibernation. A few circus families still own homes in the town, and every spring the students at the high school put on a circus, to let off steam, work off physical requirements, and provide a promotional spectacle for Sarasota. At the drugstore you can buy a postcard showing the bed John Ringling slept in. Time has not stood still for anybody but the dead, and even the dead must be able to hear the acceleration of little sports cars and know that things have changed.

From the all-wise
New York Times
, which has the animal kingdom ever in mind, I have learned that one of the creatures most acutely aware of the passing of time is the fiddler crab himself. Tiny spots on his body enlarge during daytime hours, giving him the same color as the mudbank he explores and thus protecting him from his enemies. At night the spots shrink, his color fades, and he is almost invisible in the light of the moon. These changes are synchronized with the tides, so that each day they occur at a different hour. A scientist who experimented with the crabs to learn more about the phenomenon discovered that even when they are removed from their natural environment and held in confinement, the rhythm of their bodily change continues uninterrupted, and they mark the passage of time in their laboratory prison, faithful to the tides in their fashion.

B
AYOU
L
OUISE
, J
ANUARY
1966

Up until a couple of years ago, the Christmases I have known have
been in lands of the fir tree and pine. The same is true of my wife, who is a New Englander and whose Christmases have been observed in a cold setting, Bostonian in design. But times change, circumstances alter, health glides slowly downhill, and there is, of course, Christmas in lands of the palm tree and vine—which is what we were up against last month. Our Christmas, 1965, was spent in a rented house on the edge of a canal in Florida, locally called a bayou.

I knew there would have to be certain adjustments, emotional and physical, to this shift in ceremony, but I guess I was not quite prepared for them and had not really figured them out. It was obvious to both of us that we were not looking forward to being away from home at Christmas, but I busied myself with road maps and thermos arrangements and kept my mind off the Nativity. We arrived in Florida tired from the long motor journey but essentially cheerful and ready for anything.

The house we walked into had been engaged sight unseen, and this is always fun and full of jolts, like a ride at an amusement park. Our pleasure palace was built of cinder blocks and was painted shocking pink. The principal tree on the place was a tall power pole sprouting transformers; it stood a few feet from the canal and threw a pleasant shade across the drive. The house itself, we soon discovered, was wonderfully supplied with modern labor-saving appliances and almost completely bare of any other sort of furnishing. We found an automatic washing machine, a dryer, an automatic dishwasher, a reverse-cycle heating-and-air-conditioning unit that had just burned out its compressor and was lying in disarray behind a board fence outside, a disposal device that would grind up a grapefruit rind if you cut the rind into slices, a big refrigerator, an electric wall oven, an electric stove, an electric warming oven, and so on. All this was pretty good except that there was no ice bucket, no water pitcher, no rugs on the terrazzo floors, no pictures on the pastel walls, no bookshelves, no books, and no garbage pail. There were bathrooms everywhere you turned, but I saw no sign that anybody had ever done anything in the house except take baths and adjust the controls on the machinery.

When we were rested from our trip, we started buying things for the house, mostly from a large department store in town. This store fell into the habit of delivering most of our purchases not to us but to a house next door, whose owners were away. We got on the phone and stayed there for most of the daylight hours.

Several days before Christmas, I began to notice that my wife was suffering from crying spells, all of them of short duration. I would find her weeping quietly in what seemed like elegant, if uncomfortable, surroundings. “It's Vietnam that is making me feel this way,” she said. But I did not believe it was Vietnam. I knew her well enough, in her December phase, to know that something far deeper than Southeast Asia was at work.

I was too busy to cry. There was a man that came each day to work on the collapsed heating system. He was from a firm called “Air Comfort” and was a fine, brave, taciturn man. I would find him in a kneeling position, as though he were a figure in a crèche, gazing at the tangle of tubes and wires left by the removal of the burned-out compressor. He, too, seemed melancholy, but did not weep. He kept his own counsel and did what he could, hour after hour, to remedy an almost impossible situation. I felt that if I hung around him long enough, I might catch the drift of the reverse-cycle system and pick up a crumb or two of knowledge that would stand me in good stead later on. On the west side of the building I found a pile of fatwood logs, and when the living room became chilly I would light a fire. The logs left no ash; it was as though you were burning clear kerosene. The weather held good, and we were not really cold. The sunsets were spectacular. But the sun always sank behind the Australian pines and the palms on the opposite shore across the Pass, and I knew that my wife and I were, unconsciously, watching it descend in its more familiar rim behind the birches, the black spruces, the firs, the hackmatacks across the road from our house in Maine. Like everything else in Florida, the birds seemed inappropriate. I happen to admire the mourning dove, but by no stretch of the eardrum can its lament be called Christmassy. I like to see the turkey buzzard wheeling in the sky, but he is not a merry bird, like the chickadee; his vigil is for the dying. There arrived in the mail a program of the Christmas ceremony in the school at home, reporting that our youngest grandson had appeared in a pageant called “Goodbye to Last Year's Toys,” and that our granddaughter had recited something called “What Do Our Hearts Treasure?”

There was very little traffic in the canal. Once in a while a pint whiskey bottle would float slowly by on the outgoing tide. A small powerboat named Digitalis made an occasional sortie, and two boys in a homemade bateau paddled through. Sometimes, toward the end of the day, a little green heron showed up and fished from a mangrove that overhung the water. The scene was idyllic. Christmas was in the air, yet the air seemed too soft to sustain it. In the vast shopping centers that ringed the city, Santa, in jumbo size, dominated the parking lots. In the commanding noonday sun, with the temperature in the seventies, he seemed vastly overdressed in his red suit with the ermine trimming—a saint who perspired under the arms. Through the arcades in front of the shops sauntered an endless procession of senior citizens, with their sad faces, their painful joints, their last-minute errands.

I went on an errand of my own. I visited a nursery and bought a poinsettia plant, hoping to introduce a spot of the correct color into our house. In the North, this errand would have enjoyed a certain stature, but in Florida the thing seemed faintly ridiculous. Driving away from the nursery with my prize, I passed a great forest of poinsettias blooming naturally in somebody's front yard. It seemed to take the point out of my purchase. A lot of things are red in Florida—the powder-puff bush, the red hibiscus, the red bougainvillaea, the cannas—all these blooms make a monkey out of a husband carrying home a small red potted plant.

We talked over the matter of the tree and decided that the traditional Christmas tree would be silly under these circumstances. We would get, we said, a tropical thing of some sort, that would look good all winter in a corner of our stylish living room, next to the glass wall through which we watched the tropical sunsets. The nursery came up with something very fine indeed—a cluster of three little palmlike trees called
Dracaena marginata
(the man called it
imaginata
, which I liked better). The pot was handsome, and the trees looked like a miniature version of the classic oasis scene in the desert. When the plant was delivered, a small chameleon arrived with it and soon made the living room his own. He liked the curtain on the south wall, and would poke his evil little head out and join us for cocktails. I named him Beppo. Everyone admired our plant. The crying spells ceased, but it was plain that there was still something the matter; it wasn't Vietnam, it wasn't the reverse-cycle system, it was some kind of unreality that pervaded our lives.

On the twenty-second, a large package arrived from the North and I noted the familiar handwriting of our daughter-in-law. I carried the package into the living room, dumped it on the sofa, slit its throat with my jackknife, and left it for my wife to dissect. (She is methodical at Christmas and keeps a record of gifts and donors.) Soon I heard a sharp cry. “Come here! Look!” I found her standing on the hearth with her nose buried in a branch from a balsam fir, which she had hung over the fireplace. With it hung a harness strap of sleigh bells. The branch had unquestionably been whacked from a tree in the woods behind our son's house in Maine and had made the long trip south. It wore the look and carried the smell of authenticity. ‘There!” said my wife, as though she had just delivered a baby.

The package also disgorged a tiny red drum and two tiny drumsticks, made from bright red wrapping paper by a grandchild. And the package contained school photographs, which we eagerly studied. Our youngest grandson had done something odd with his mouth, in a manly attempt to defeat the photographer, and looked just like Jimmy Hoffa. “How marvelous!” said my wife.

We placed the toy drum at the base of
Dracaena marginata.
(What do our hearts treasure?) Not to be outdone, I constructed one small cornucopia out of the same bright red paper and hung it on a spiky frond of the tree. I fashioned a five-pointed silver star, strung it on a length of monofilament from my tackle box, and suspended it from the ceiling above the tree with a piece of magic tape. The star revolved slowly, catching the light at intervals—a holy mobile. The tree now seemed biblical and just right. We were in business at last. I gazed out across the pass to where the soft and feathery Australian pines were outlined against the bright sky. They had hardened up momentarily for this hour of splendor. They were spruce! They were birch! They were fir! Everywhere, everywhere, Christmas tonight!

When I was in my teens, I lived in Mount Vernon, in the same block
with J. Parnell Thomas, who grew up to become chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. I lived on the corner of Summit and East Sidney, at No. 101 Summit Avenue, and Parnell lived four or five doors north of us on the same side of the avenue, in the house the Diefendorfs used to live in.

Parnell was not a playmate of mine, as he was a few years older, but I used to greet him as he walked by our house on his way to and from the depot. He was a good-looking young man, rather quiet and shy. Seeing him, I would call “Hello, Parnell!” and he would smile and say “Hello, Elwyn!” and walk on. Once I remember dashing out of our yard on roller skates and executing a rink turn in front of Parnell, to show off, and he said, “Well! Quite an artist, aren't you?” I remember the words. I was delighted at praise from an older man and sped away along the flagstone sidewalk, dodging the cracks I knew so well.

The thing that made Parnell a special man in my eyes in those days was not his handsome appearance and friendly manner but his sister. Her name was Eileen. She was my age and she was a quiet, nice-looking girl. She never came over to my yard to play, and I never went over there, and, considering that we lived so near each other, we were remarkably uncommunicative; nevertheless, she was the girl I singled out, at one point, to be of special interest to me. Being of special interest to me involved practically nothing on a girl's part—it simply meant that she was under constant surveillance. On my own part, it meant that I suffered an astonishing disintegration when I walked by her house, from embarrassment, fright, and the knowledge that I was in enchanted territory.