A Memoir for Memoir Month

For September 1 2015. An old memoir, but, still true.  That’s the beauty of memoir.  This is the story–not of what my mother learned, but how she learned it. c.1450 words

ANOTHER STORY

This is not my story. I wasn’t even there. But like a stone well-worn, polished by the waters that run over it, this story has come to have a pleasing roundness in our family, the sharp edges, the pain buffed away. It is my mother’s story, how she became a convert to John Steinbeck. She tells it well, as someone might recount discovering the True Faith. Like most converts, she is emphatic, vocal, eager to spread Steinbeck’s Word. Her conversion story testifies to broadening your notions of what is relevant. Do not be narrow-minded: that’s the implicit moral in the pain-free version. Like most such time-honed tales, the story itself can be reduced to a sort of punch line. The poignancy is in the context, always left unspoken in the telling.

The punch line goes something like this: in about 1969 or 1970 my sister’s high school home tutor required her to read Cannery Row. My sister Helen loved it and she said to my mother, You should read this book. My mother said, Oh no, I don’t like Steinbeck. And my sister replied, What have you read of his that you don’t like? The answer to this was: Nothing. I have never read a book by Steinbeck.

As a girl growing up in Los Angeles in the Thirties, my mother, Peggy Kalpakian, had absorbed urban prejudices against the Okies pouring into California. Steinbeck of course was associated with them, and with other generally unsavory Not Nice people. But my mother agreed with Helen that this was an ancient, unthinking prejudice and so she read Cannery Row. Read Tortilla Flat. Read Sweet Thursday. These, the lighter, lively novels first made a convert of her, though not yet a True Believer.

My mother moved from the charms of Cannery Row to The Grapes of Wrath, and Mice and Men, In Dubious Battle, on to the tapestry of Shakespearean struggle in East of Eden. As she waded further and deeper into Steinbeck’s work and life, she quit getting the books from the library. She bought them all. Bought multiple copies. Pressed these books into the hands of unbelievers, or even the merely indifferent, saying, Steinbeck is a wonderful writer. Here is a book you will love. Read. But her conversion was not an altogether literary experience. John Steinbeck rescued my mother, as surely as if he placed his hand at her elbow and walked her through a dark time.

As I said, when she became a True Believer, I did not live there. I was 3000 miles from Southern California, living back east going to graduate school and contributing my feet, my voice, to the protest, to antiwar marches. In our family, I was the first person to go east since my mother’s parents, fresh off the boat in 1923, got on the train in New York, went to Los Angeles and never looked back. On my father’s side, the Mormon side, in the 1850’s some plucky ancestor had pushed her handcart and her surviving children westward, walking to Utah from Iowa City. She never looked back. For us, living in a dry, unglamorous California town, there was no old country. No looking back.

When I was back east, my brother Doug was 6000 miles west of California. Vietnam.

U. S. Army, Fourth Infantry. His letters home from Vietnam were erratic, erratically received and erratically written. Reading his letters, which were terrible, terrifying and enigmatic, my parents feared. They despaired when there was silence. Strange phone calls came to my parents’ house, cryptic inquiries, references to military prison from the parents of a boy in his unit. (And they were boys, make no mistake; my brother was in the Fourth Infantry, thrashing through jungles at nineteen because he’d cavalierly, or stupidly or wantonly dropped a course at the community college and was thus no longer a full time student, ripe for the draft.)

My parents woke each morning sick with unspeakable foreboding and went to bed each night sick with unspoken grief. During the day, in addition to their ordinary jobs, a secretary, a salesman, they bore these unshared, unbearable burdens. How can you tell the neighbors, the supercilious boss, the client whose business you need, that you fear for your son’s life, his health, his freedom, his sanity? In these same years, my parents trembled too at the prospect of losing my sister. At seventeen, stalked by Crohn’s disease, Helen was too frail to go to school. She underwent one massive surgery after another, none proving successful.

Into this daily vat of anxiety, dread, unexplained illness, the possibility of death in a distant jungle, there came into my mother’s life the austere presence of John Steinbeck. Steinbeck’s books, his vision, his characters, his prose spoke to her. Steinbeck stood beside my mother in the way that old gods might have stood beside sufferers, save that in becoming Californians, my family’s old gods had dissipated. Vanished. The Mormon faith that had sustained my father’s people across the plains was not my mother’s faith (nor by that time, my father’s either). The Armenian Apostolic church that had sustained her parents relied on a language she did not understand. The protestant faith of her youth seemed smug, unquestioning, unequal to the incipient tragedy that gnawed at her sleep and greeted her on waking. But Steinbeck was equal to the possibility of tragedy. Steinbeck recognized sorrow when he met it. He knew struggle. Steinbeck’s rolling prose became a kind of Holy Writ. My mother cut passages out of his books and pasted them inside the china cabinet (where presumably few but she would ever look).

Steinbeck’s characters do not (to paraphrase Faulkner) prevail. But they endure. And there are times when the enduring is sufficient. Indeed, when it is all that’s possible, when the enduring itself bestows on suffering a kind of invisible nobility, which, in turn, creates courage. My mother—her life outwardly ordinary, middle class—found herself like Steinbeck’s Okies, and like his beleaguered workers, like the limited Lennie, like farmers facing drought: overwhelmed by forces she did not understand and could not control. These characters gave her the courage to endure. Beyond his books, Steinbeck’s own life and personal struggles, his hard work, his self-doubt, all that spoke to her. When she read that his son had been in Vietnam, my mother knew that he understood. In some strange way, John Steinbeck stood at her side. A grizzled ghost.

That he too was a Californian helped. Steinbeck’s pastures of heaven were hers. He wrote of things and people, the light, the fields, the landscape, sensory experience my mother could easily picture, remember. His prose was not Shakespearean, shaped in pleasing but arcane constructions; his sentences were hewn in California, beside the Pacific, in and of the long valleys. In the winters of her discontent, dread and anxiety, Steinbeck, his characters, his words, his evocations, his tragic vision came to my mother’s rescue when she most needed rescue, when all else failed.

My brother needed rescuing. One at a time she mailed Steinbeck’s novels to Doug. Those books may still be in Vietnam.

Young and full of my own endeavors, I did not need to be rescued, but she sent me the novels too. I read them. I was a literary enthusiast, but not a convert. On reading the paperback Steinbecks (and wishing even then, hoping to be a writer myself, but not brave enough to write) his work only whispered to me that fiction could be created from the dust, the dry wind, the tumbleweed and oleander, from anonymous arroyos, the canyons of the California that I knew. Even great fiction. It’s possible. Possible. But that is another story.

All those years ago I did not know what I have since learned as a parent: what it is to love someone more than you love yourself, and the despair in finding yourself powerless in the face of that child’s peril.

All these years later, my mother is still a True Believer. John Steinbeck remains her favorite author (next to me, I think). She has since pressed Steinbeck’s novels into the hands of my sons. They have said thank you, but they are young and full of their own endeavors; they are readers, but not converts.

My sister endured and prevailed, survived, has a full life as a teacher and an excellent horsewoman.

My brother came home from Vietnam. But that is another story.