Miller Williams

Look at their faces. You know it all. They married the week he left for the war. Both are gentle, intelligent people, as all four of their parents were. They’ve never talked about much except the children. They love each other but never wondered why they married or had the kids or stayed together. It wasn’t because they knew the answers. They had never heard the questions that twisted through the jokes to come of Moses and the Ten Suggestions. They paid their debts and never doubted God rewarded faith and virtue or when you got out of line had big and little ways to hurt you. People walked alone in parks. Children slept in their yards at night. Most every man had a paying job, and black was black and white was white. Would you go back? Say that you can, that all it takes is a wave and a wink and there you are. So what do you do? The question is crueler than you think.

We have memorized America, how it was born and who we have been and where. In ceremonies and silence we say the words, telling the stories, singing the old songs. We like the places they take us. Mostly we do. The great and all the anonymous dead are there. We know the sound of all the sounds we brought. The rich taste of it is on our tongues. But where are we going to be, and why, and who? The disenfranchised dead want to know. We mean to be the people we meant to be, to keep on going where we meant to go. But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how except in the minds of those who will call it Now? The children. The children. And how does our garden grow? With waving hands—oh, rarely in a row— and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow. Who were many people coming together cannot become one people falling apart. Who dreamed for every child an even chance cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not. Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head cannot let chaos make its way to the heart. Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot. We know what we have done and what we have said, and how we have grown, degree by slow degree, believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become— just and compassionate, equal, able, and free. All this in the hands of children, eyes already set on a land we never can visit—it isn’t there yet— but looking through their eyes, we can see what our long gift to them may come to be. If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

When I was a boy and a man would die we’d say a verse when the hearse went by one car two car three car four someone knocking on the devil’s door. I smoked all night myself awake and saw the lights and the day break. When the sun was done with the final star I left the house and the door ajar and went to the church. The father was nice but the holy water was cold as ice. I found a friend and felt his hand fall through mine like crumbling sand. I went to hear the talk in the square but there were headless people there. I turned to the clock for the time of day but the hole in the wall had nothing to say. Callous of heaven and careless of hell you knew something you didn’t tell. The soul you said was only fear, and heaven, well heaven at best was here. So heaven is gone if that was it and the soul lies there in the private pit but hell is big and hell is a bone and hell comes in from the edge of alone. Hell is a dead girl who walks through the town and hunts for my bed to lay herself down.

She could tell he loved her. He wanted her there sitting in the front pew when he preached. He liked to watch her putting up her hair and ate whatever she cooked and never broached the subject of the years before they met. He was thoughtful always. He let her say whether or not they did anything in bed and tried to learn the games she tried to play. She could tell how deep his feeling ran. He liked to say her name and bought her stuff for no good reason. He was a gentle man. How few there are she knew well enough. He sometimes reached to flick away a speck of something on her clothes and didn’t drum his fingers on the table when she spoke. What would he do if he knew she had a dream sometimes, slipping out of her nightgown— if ever God forbid he really knew her— to slip once out of the house and across town and find someone to talk dirty to her.

No matter how she tilts her head to hear she sees the irritation in their eyes. She knows how they can read a small rejection, a little judgment, in every What did you say? So now she doesn’t say What? or Come again? She lets the syllables settle, hoping they form some sort of shape that she might recognize. When they don’t, she smiles with everyone else, and then whoever was talking turns to her and says, “Break wooden coffee, don’t you know?” She pulls all she can focus into the face to know if she ought to nod or shake her head. In that long space her brain talks to itself. The person may turn away as an act of mercy, leaving her there in a room full of understanding with nothing to cover her, neither sound nor silence .

Because you’ll find how hard it can be to tell which part of your body sings, you never should dally with any young man who does any one of the following things: tries to beat all the yellow lights; says, “Big deal!” or “So what?” more than seven times a day; ignores yellow lines in a parking lot; carries a radar detector; asks what you did with another date; has more than seven bumper stickers; drinks beer early and whiskey late; talks on a cellular phone at lunch; tunes to radio talk shows; doesn’t fasten his seat belt; knows more than God knows; wants you to change how you do your hair; spits in a polystyrene cup; doesn’t use his turn signal; wants you to change your makeup; calls your parents their given names; doesn’t know why you don’t smoke; has dirt under his fingernails; makes a threat and calls it a joke; pushes to get you to have one more; seems to have trouble staying awake; says “dago” and “wop” and words like that; swerves a car to hit a snake; sits at a table wearing a hat; has a boneless handshake. You’re going to know soon enough the ones who fail this little test. Mark them off your list at once and be very careful of all the rest.

We thought it would come, we thought the Germans would come, were almost certain they would. I was thirty-two, the youngest assistant curator in the country. I had some good ideas in those days. Well, what we did was this. We had boxes precisely built to every size of canvas. We put the boxes in the basement and waited. When word came that the Germans were coming in, we got each painting put in the proper box and out of Leningrad in less than a week. They were stored somewhere in southern Russia. But what we did, you see, besides the boxes waiting in the basement, which was fine, a grand idea, you’ll agree, and it saved the art— but what we did was leave the frames hanging, so after the war it would be a simple thing to put the paintings back where they belonged. Nothing will seem surprised or sad again compared to those imperious, vacant frames. Well, the staff stayed on to clean the rubble after the daily bombardments. We didn’t dream— You know it lasted nine hundred days. Much of the roof was lost and snow would lie sometimes a foot deep on this very floor, but the walls stood firm and hardly a frame fell. Here is the story, now, that I want to tell you. Early one day, a dark December morning, we came on three young soldiers waiting outside, pacing and swinging their arms against the cold. They told us this: in three homes far from here all dreamed of one day coming to Leningrad to see the Hermitage, as they supposed every Soviet citizen dreamed of doing. Now they had been sent to defend the city, a turn of fortune the three could hardly believe. I had to tell them there was nothing to see but hundreds and hundreds of frames where the paintings had hung. “Please, sir,” one of them said, “let us see them.” And so we did. It didn’t seem any stranger than all of us being here in the first place, inside such a building, strolling in snow. We led them around most of the major rooms, what they could take the time for, wall by wall. Now and then we stopped and tried to tell them part of what they would see if they saw the paintings. I told them how those colors would come together, described a brushstroke here, a dollop there, mentioned a model and why she seemed to pout and why this painter got the roses wrong. The next day a dozen waited for us, then thirty or more, gathered in twos and threes. Each of us took a group in a different direction: Castagno, Caravaggio, Brueghel, Cézanne, Matisse, Orozco, Manet, da Vinci, Goya, Vermeer, Picasso, Uccello, your Whistler, Wood, and Gropper. We pointed to more details about the paintings, I venture to say, than if we had had them there, some unexpected use of line or light, balance or movement, facing the cluster of faces the same way we’d done it every morning before the war, but then we didn’t pay so much attention to what we talked about. People could see for themselves. As a matter of fact we’d sometimes said our lines as if they were learned out of a book, with hardly a look at the paintings. But now the guide and the listeners paid attention to everything—the simple differences between the first and post-impressionists, romantic and heroic, shade and shadow. Maybe this was a way to forget the war a little while. Maybe more than that. Whatever it was, the people continued to come. It came to be called The Unseen Collection. Here. Here is the story I want to tell you. Slowly, blind people began to come. A few at first then more of them every morning, some led and some alone, some swaying a little. They leaned and listened hard, they screwed their faces, they seemed to shift their eyes, those that had them, to see better what was being said. And a cock of the head. My God, they paid attention. After the siege was lifted and the Germans left and the roof was fixed and the paintings were in their places, the blind never came again. Not like before. This seems strange, but what I think it was, they couldn’t see the paintings anymore. They could still have listened, but the lectures became a little matter-of-fact. What can I say? Confluences come when they will and they go away.