Her clue to Father’s poetry writing was books. When she and her brother Bobby were quite young her father had given them a set of the twelve-volume My Book House saying rather obliquely that books had meant a lot to him as a child. She knew his own childhood library was still in his room in a glass-fronted bookcase so she wondered why he just didn’t give them his books, but stayed shy of asking the question guessing there was some kind of emotional involvement as we have for our few precious things.
The twelve volumes of My Book House were geared to gradually ascending age beginning with nursery rhymes like “Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot nine days old.” Catherine ignored the logic of this progression and read them straight through at age ten, though the late volumes were a little difficult at the time, full of involved folklore and world mythology. The set also fueled her interest in American Indians and one of her own precious things was the small collection of arrowheads and three spear points she had found on the farm. Catherine felt sure reading had fed her father’s early interest in poetry. What schizophrenia must have been involved in his later career in economics and banking, but then he had always seemed a man whose character was composed of carefully separated slices. His children and wife never received the tenderness he showed to his English setter bitches Lisa and Clare. Only once had he owned a male bird dog, named Bozo, a rambunctious nitwit who hurled himself over a line of bushes out near the quarry, plummeting downward more than a hundred feet. Father said that only a male dog would jump over something without knowing what was on the other side. After Bozo he owned only females.
But what ultimately carried a man who spent a lifetime writing poetry in secret? We are a mystery. At Barnard and enmeshed in the speedy life of New York Catherine found that around Easter she still believed in the Resurrection as if she could still see the contrail of Jesus rising from death to the heavens. And on spring vacation rather than go to a seaside rental with her wealthy friends she went home to work on her term paper on Kierkegaard and to feed chickens.
It was sheer paradise in England to be out of the Tube station and on a farm. At Grandma’s request she’d go next door nearly a mile and read to a farm couple’s son who as a Francophile had signed up early in the war and lost a hand and a leg and had his vision impaired in the defense of Paris. Catherine would read to him for an hour or so and then have a cup of tea or a glass of beer and chat for a while with him. He didn’t want to hear English classics which he knew but French and some American novels when she could find them. Luckily a rich nobleman near the local village heard about their book plight and gave them access to his library. Her wounded neighbor didn’t care for Hemingway but loved Faulkner’s Light in August or the sonorities of Absalom, Absalom which made her breathless to read. The young man Tim was understandably embittered, a farmer’s son who would never be able to effectively farm himself. One day when his parents were gone he asked to see Catherine in the nude. She was nearly fourteen at the time and had been in England for several years now. She considered his request and thought there was no reason not to so she quickly stripped but then he started crying. Later, when he had calmed down with a large whiskey he tried to explain himself, saying that he felt “dismembered” and that sexual love was forever out of his range. Catherine was a young innocent and disagreed saying, “I thought you just needed that one thing to make love, a penis,” and he laughed at her matter-of-factness. He said that losing a hand and leg meant that he could never be a real farmer, or a real lover. That was that. She could see that it was a matter of shame more than anything else.
After the bombings ended Grandma had returned to London to be with Grandfather and the years rolled on slowly with the entire world at war. It was consoling to live on the farm. Her mother would have preferred she come home, but transatlantic travel was now impossible and Catherine was enrolled in a British school and thriving. As an American she was also worried about the Japanese while the local English were obsessed with the possibility of a German invasion. At their dawn breakfast each day her great-uncle Harold, Winnie’s husband, was glued to the radio listening to war news. One morning he beamed at her and yelled, “Thank God for the Yanks.” The American forces had managed to make a German invasion of England unlikely indeed. Catherine was in love with Winston Churchill’s resonant voice whether he was saying something important or not.
One day Catherine got some mail from her grandparents in London who were so pleased to be home and out of the accursed underground. When they had reached home some squatters were in there but it was only a young teacher, his wife, and their baby. Their apartment two blocks away had been utterly destroyed so her grandparents allowed them to make their quarters in a couple of back rooms for the duration of the war. They all liked each other a lot and the young man was skilled enough to replace some windows on the east side of the house that had been broken by the blasts of bombs. The young wife was good in the kitchen, never Grandma’s strength, and Grandma loved the little baby boy. Her grandparents were able to visit the farm once in an MI5 vehicle driven by the huge Jamaican, Fred. They ate eggs for three days and returned to London with several dozen, some cleaned chickens, and a few rabbits Harold had raised. The scales finally tipped a bit with the Normandy invasion but it wasn’t until the liberation of Paris that many people felt any confidence. Catherine heard later that Hitler had demanded that his officers engineer the burning of Paris but they had refused to do it. This was a late in the game relief for her because she had wanted to go to Paris ever since she had known it existed.
Finally the war was over and it was time for her to go home. With her parents separated and divorcing there was no real home for her to go to but she intended all along to live out on the farm. Still she was reluctant to leave England and stayed an extra month in London. She liked the young couple very much and their little boy made her want to have a baby. She was only sixteen but it seemed logical, if you wanted a baby, to go ahead and have one. For that reason she made one more trip after the war out to see Harold and Winnie. She went directly to Tim’s house next door while his father was haying and his mother was in town grocery shopping. She took off her clothes in his bedroom, flopped on the bed bare-assed, and demanded sex. He was utterly surprised because she hadn’t called to say she was coming, but he didn’t seem surprised by her capricious behavior. He took a condom from the desk and came to the bed with his crutches. “I’ve been thinking about this,” he said. With only one hand he couldn’t put on the condom by himself so Catherine hurriedly helped, doing a sloppy job so it would leak and she might have a baby. His member was large and she wondered if it would hurt. It did a little but she didn’t care because this was her heart’s desire. It was over quickly. They lay around for a while and then she raised his interest with her mouth, not something she especially looked forward to but it worked. She got on him again before he could ask for a condom.