At last it found a leaf-thatched burrow at the foot of a giant fir tree and it waited. It became numb. Its muscles would not respond. But it could see, and it lay inertly watching a mouse, itself searching for a hiding place. The mouse approached, nosing its way nearer and nearer, creeping noisily through weeds and grass. The mouse’s eyes were very large and its whiskers were long.
Perhaps the fact of the terrible rain saved the butterfly; the mouse seemed more concerned with shelter than with food. It rested only inches from the butterfly’s hiding place and apparently did not even catch its scent.
There was rain all night, and by 4:00 a.m. the temperature had dropped to thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit on the ground. The butterfly was immobilized. It lost awareness.
At 5:35 a.m. there was light.
At 6:00 the sun appeared. At 7:00 it broke through the trees and the air began to steam. By 8:00 it was warm. By 9:00, hot.
The butterfly responded.
It crept from its place beneath the leaves.
The mouse was gone. But there were other enemies, equally dangerous. On the ground, unable to fly, the butterfly was totally defenseless against such creatures as common ants, ground beetles, moles, and shrews. It must find the sun. It must spread and dry its wings. Flight was imperative.
At last it achieved a measure of safety on the static fronds of a fern. It lay there, groggy and hardly alive, until 11:30 a.m., when the sun struck straight down through the trees and found it.
Testing its wings, the butterfly discovered by trial and error that the rain had done some damage: a few of its scales were missing; there was a shredded irregular serration at the outer rim of its left front wing. But it could fly.
Now there were the mountains.
The butterfly selected southward-leading valleys and surmounted in dazzling arcs of flight the lower and lesser peaks. It rose on September 9th to a height of eleven thousand two hundred and fifty-one feet.
It encountered little of importance. A bird attacked it, but the bird was blind in one eye and soon gave up its attempts. (This occurred during flight.) One day, the monarch passed over such a highly populated area it found no food and midday on the 13th of September, having achieved a distance approximately one hundred and eighty-two miles north of the city of Los Angeles, it was blown out to sea.
This proved, however, somewhat providential, for the butterfly discovered, low over the water, a sea-breeze of twenty miles per hour. Riding this with easy grace, it soon found itself over land again, at a point much farther south than would have been achieved on the previous course. It traveled farther that day than on any other.
On the night of the 13th, somewhat exhausted by this excursion, it rested longer than was normal. Now the butterfly was in the area of a town called Pacific Grove, and in midmorning of the 14th, one Edwina Shackleton, a zealous amateur biologist and professional spinster, discovered it on the leaf of a milkweed plant in her garden.
Miss Shackleton ran up to the screen door of her house.
Inside, lying on a day bed and listening to the radio, Edwina’s mother, Mrs. C. Clarke Shackleton, heard her daughter’s urgent footsteps and turned down the volume of “Pepper Young’s Family.”
“Mother! Mother!” Edwina called. “You’ll never believe what’s happened!!”
“What is it, dear? What is it?” cried Mrs. Shackleton, torn between the adventures of Pepper Young and those of her daughter.
“They’re here! They’re here!” Edwina cried.
“Who’s here?” said Mrs. Shackleton. “Calm down, Edwina. Is it the Japanese?”
“No, no, Mother,” said Edwina, huffing and puffing and already lifting her mother from her pillows. “The monarchs! The monarchs!”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Shackleton.
She went through this every year.
“Come and look,” said Edwina. “He really is lovely. He’s large. He must have come a long, long way, Mama. There’s a hole in his wing. But he’s beautiful.”
Mrs. Shackleton, a self-proclaimed invalid (asthma and diabetes, a heart condition and stones), wobbled to her feet and shook her head.
“Are you going to kill it?” she said.
“Oh, no, Mama. No. You know they’re always being killed around here. I hate it.”
“Kill ‘em all,” said Mrs. Shackleton. “They give me hay fever.”
“Now, Mother. You know that’s a lie. Come and see him, please. It’s the very first one. An occasion.”
Mrs. Shackleton grumbled and swayed. “Then I don’t have to look at any more?” she said.
“No, Mama. No. Just this one. The first.”
“All right, then. Very well.”
They got down into the garden. They approached Edwina’s cultivated milkweed plot. (She grew these plants especially for the arrival of the butterflies every year.)
“He’s so big, Mama. You won’t believe him.”
“Where is he?” said Mrs. Shackleton.
“Oh, dear,” said Edwina. “He’s gone.”
“Maybe someone else will kill him,” said her mother, wheezing dramatically and shedding nose tears. “He’s left wing dust everywhere.”
“Oh, Mama. Butterflies don’t have wing dust. That’s scales.”
“And I’ve missed the end of ‘Pepper Young’s Family,’” said Mrs. Shackleton, making her way alone toward the house. She banged the door and turned up the volume of the radio until it was deafening.
Edwina stared off into the sky.
“Good-bye,” she said. “Vaya con Dios.”
She stood quite still for a long time, with her hand up to her forehead. Then she went back to the cultivation of the milkweed.
On the afternoon of the 15th of September the butterfly was flying southward twenty-three miles northeast of Los Angeles. In the distance there rose a mighty pillar of smoke.
The butterfly broke to the west, seaward, driven away by the smell of fire.
At dusk it made for land.
On the 16th of September, noon, it reached its destination—a grove of pine trees south of Santa Monica, where the other butterflies would soon begin to join it by ones, twos, and finally by hundreds in the following days and weeks.
For the time being it rested alone.
Et in Arcadia ego.
With everyone.
The Chronicle of
the Nightmare
It is always night.
I am always alone.
And so are they.
They.
They live in their own world.
It is not like any other world. No other world is real. They knew once another world but that has been forgotten. They think they remember. But it’s forgotten. They remember that it was joyful and it wasn’t. They remember that there were feast days and there weren’t. They remember babies and there were no babies; children and there were none; mothers and fathers and there were only men and women. They remember houses and there were only hiding places; street greetings but no one spoke. Carelessness but there was always care; freedom to come and go but where you came from you hurried back to and that was the only place to go. They thought of words but the words were silence. And they thought of the One Who would come Who never came. It was the Others who came. Always the Others.
They dreamed in long rows. Lined up dreaming.
I saw them.
The world was lovely if you closed your eyes.
And there was always a band playing somewhere.
The sun shone.
The flags were up.
The streets rang in chorus.
There were geraniums on the balconies.
People wore their hearts on their sleeves. Stars and crosses. One or the other.
This was the world to belong to. The one they had never lived in, but thought they had.
This was the world they wanted to remember. It belongs to someone else. It always did.
The Nightmare is always present and timeless. It is formless. I have gathered it all the w
hile I’ve been away.
America is not the Nightmare. It will be.
The Nightmare is Europe. I went there in 1936. I can tell you that all parts and portions of this Nightmare belong, fit or can be wrenched away from the period between 1936 and 1938. That is, between going and coming back; then and now. Today it is sometime in August or September. I honestly don’t remember. August or September 1938. I know that I came home the other day and it was August and a dear old friend of mine whose shoes I remember and whose eyes are close to my heart threw himself down on the cinders under the very train I rode in. I was arriving and he died. It was voluntary, or so I understand. His death is important to everyone. It holds the beginnings of a new Nightmare.
This is how a new Nightmare begins. With an act. Sometimes an act of absolution. Sometimes an act of atonement. The act will inevitably involve your integrity. You will believe in what you are saying and doing and perhaps you will even have bothered to make a chart of consequences, all of them hypothetical by necessity, but all of them bound up in the parings of intellect. Lovely long sweet parings. You throw them away. You are left alone with the washed body, skinned and peeled and pure, and this is the act. Inside the body, however skinned and peeled, however washed, however scoured and pure, there are seeds. These are the seeds of everything and there are worms.
It is the worms I think of.
It is the worms.
He threw himself under the train. His lovely feet were severed and broken. I have arrived on many trains. I have never been aware of these deaths, although now I see them very clearly. Someone throws part of himself under every train, coming or going. I’ve just never been aware of it before.
I am never going to know why Bully killed himself. But I am certain that somewhere in someone he has started a Nightmare and perhaps I will know the consequences of that. Perhaps that Nightmare will touch me. But this is not important. What I am thinking is: just as with Bully, every Nightmare begins with integrity and action. They do not all end in death. Think of Bully’s feet and what he did with them, for himself, for us. Think of Bully’s feet. They led and were led. They were both guides and followers. Dancer and walker. Think of Bully’s feet. In shoes they tell a story. Naked? No one ever saw them naked. They were silent. Think of Bully’s feet.
Think of the dreamers.
Dreaming in long rows.
I saw them first in midsummer 1936.
I was in a taxicab and Bruno was holding my hand and we had got off the boat in Southampton and I wanted him to ask me to marry him. We were going to the hotel. As I was sitting there with my thigh against his thigh and my hand in his hand I looked out the window, waiting, thinking, He will ask me now, we will register at the hotel as man and wife and tomorrow he will marry me. We were still near the sheds. And out of one of these sheds, having come through customs, having got off a boat from France, having traveled on trains from Switzerland and Italy, having left Munich and Hamburg, Bonn and Dresden, Stuttgart and Mannheim, having left Vienna (only the very wise left Vienna in 1936), there they were in England walking in a line, the queue that had become second nature, the row they dreamed in, standing still or moving, there they were in England on their way wherever next they would be told to go and the taxicab stopped for them and they walked across in front of us, me watching, Bruno not watching and there were forty of them. Forty or fifty.
This was the first row I saw and the first time I saw that all the faces were the same so that the next time I saw them in a row I knew already that all the faces would be the same and much later when the rows fell down, disintegrated, and became uneven, and later still when I began to see rows of one, the faces were still the same and the dream had not changed but had intensified, become desperate, was held to with fists, like the fist I had to break open to find its star, and I was seeing, sitting in the taxicab, waiting to be asked “Will you marry me?” when I saw this first row of dreamers and I knew that it was the first of something but not the first of a Nightmare.
I don’t know why but it seems to me a dream may be more dangerous than a Nightmare. In a Nightmare you are pursued upright. In dreams you are helpless and float. However you die only in Nightmares. In dreams you live forever. And that is marvelous and horrible.
Bruno did not ask me to marry him then. We went to the hotel and he still didn’t ask me. We did, however, share a room. I thought about the row of dreamers.
“Who are they?” I asked Bruno.
Bruno had kinder eyes then. You could see all the way into them. They were brown. American brown. He wanted blue-eyed children. He didn’t know that then. He wanted to be German and he didn’t know that either. But he did know that a brown-eyed man isn’t likely to have a blue-eyed child. He knew about genetics.
“Who?” he said, unpacking.
“Those people who walked in front of our cab.”
“What people?” Shirts and socks; dirty and clean.
“All those people, Bruno. At the harbor. Coming out of the sheds. They carried bundles of children; they were all very tired and they seemed to be going somewhere together.”
“They were probably people on some sort of excursion, Ruth. Put out that cigarette.”
“Didn’t you see them, Bruno?”
“No. I didn’t see them. Stand with your back to the wall.”
“They were sad.”
“Throw your arms out.”
“And yet they were happy.”
“Swim.”
“One-and-two-and-one-and-two…”
“Make your behind flatter. Keep it against the wall.”
“What sort of excursions?”
“Ruth, I don’t know. Swim.”
“I hate this. It makes me ache in the ankles.”
“Relax them. Keep your ankles loose.”
“Am I going to win, Bruno? Do you really think I’m going to win?”
He hit me. He was my trainer.
That was his answer. He did not speak.
“Bruno.”
“What?”
“They had no leader. There was no one leading them.”
“Then they were lost. That’s all.”
“They knew where they were going.”
“Then you stop worrying about them, can’t you?”
“Yes.”
No. “Swim.
We crossed over into France. We were not with the team. The team would meet us there.
We went to Paris. I was sure that in Paris Bruno would ask me to marry him. We stayed in a hotel. Again we shared a room and Bruno would sit on the bed in his American trainer’s uniform: sweat shirt, sweat socks, and blue jeans, and I’d put my back against the wall and swim.
Sometimes I would lie on the bed or between two chairs and swim and Bruno would stand against the wall. His ankles did not hurt.
In the evenings we would go to the cafés and I was allowed to drink a little wine. Bruno drank beer and he was always going off to the bathroom.
I had a hat I loved that summer, a large hat. The brim turned down over one side of my face and it made my profile show to good advantage. I have large eyes and a long nose and what Bruno used to call a Russian mouth—“strong and wide.” My lower lip has a pleasing shape. I like to touch it with my finger. This hat was also lovely because I wore my hair in the Russian manner with a big braid and when I wore this hat, which was nearly every day, I wound the braid into a flat plait above my ear and a number of people remarked that I surely must be a famous ballerina with my hair like that on one side and the hat pulled down on the other, and because of my long figure and long legs. I remember my dresses all had cowls to show off my shoulders and back. I have those dresses still. I never wear them.
We sat in cafés. We were waiting in Paris for the others to arrive from America. Then we would all go to Germany together, where we would finish our training in the weeks prior to the opening of the Games.
We sat in cafés. I waited for Bruno to propose. He did not propose.
One night it
was really late in the evening and there was still a little daylight we were sitting on the sidewalk in what had become our favorite café and Bruno had drunk too much, much too much beer and had to excuse himself endlessly.
I sat alone at the table, waiting. A number of people thought I was a ballerina and said so. Eyes looked at me and people smiled, and I smiled back. I enjoyed it. I knew how to behave inside the fame they gave me because I grew up with famous people and had been stared at all my life as though I was someone. All I really was was Naomi Nola’s daughter. Daughter of George Damarosch. Wally Taylor was my godfather. As a swimmer I was famous, but not in Europe. I didn’t swim the Channel (I swam Catalina instead), so I wasn’t like Alice, who did, or my teammate Katherine, whom everyone adored because she was so much like a movie star. No. I was just me and they thought I was someone else. This had a consequence. I was approached.
It was twilight, an hour of great significance for it is the one hour of the day when the shadows play the most earnest games with your appearance. There is no comparable hour in the morning. It only happens just before the sun sets. It is also the hour when certain people make their first appearance abroad in the streets. People who pretend to be someone else by daylight. I am not speaking here of criminals and prostitutes. But of a class of people who might be called martyrs. The early Christians must have enjoyed this hour of the day. Fugitives unjustly accused come out at this hour. Real fugitives (the justly accused) have no desire to join the human race, and no desire to do ordinary things, so they stay away until it’s dark, lying in rooms reading magazines and listening to radios. But these people I speak of go about in the daylight not speaking and not looking like themselves and when the evening comes they have a moment’s respite and they drop their masks.
The man who approached me wore a hat. Or rather he carried a hat. He also carried a walking stick. His clothes were stylish and well cut, a simple blazer and flannel trousers. He had a clubfoot, and consequently wore laced boots, one of which had an outsize heel. The hat was a snap-brim straw. White. Like one of Dolly’s. In some ways he was rather like Dolly—that height, and the same slimness. But his knees weren’t knocked. Poor Dolly! How I love the way he walks.