moral force as if the world I had declared to live in was bound together by just such a length of string-cheap, durable and colorless. When the line was cleared I carried the kite to the crown of the beach and, holding it up, watched the wind lift it straight into the blue sky. The children were delighted. The stranger and his wife thanked me for my assistance. I returned to my book. The faggot had vanished but I longed then for a moral creation whose mandates were heftier than the delight of children, the trusting smiles of strangers and a length of kite string.
I was born out of wedlock-the son of Franklin Pierce Taylor and Gretchen Shurz Oxencroft, his one-time secretary. I have not met my mother for several years but I can see her now-her gray hair flying and her fierce blue eyes set plainly in her face like the waterholes in a prairie. She was born in an Indiana quarry town, the fourth and by far the plainest of four daughters. Neither of her parents had more than a high-school education. The hardships and boredom of the provincial Middle West forced them into an uncompromising and nearly liturgical regard for the escape routes of learning. They kept a volume of the complete works of Shakespeare on their parlor table like a sort of mace. Her father was a Yorkshireman with thick light-brown hair and large features. He was slender and wiry and was discovered, in his forties, to have tuberculosis. He began as a quarry worker, was promoted to quarry foreman and then, during a drop in the limestone market, was unemployed.
In the house where she was raised there was a gilt mirror, a horsehair sofa and some china and silver that her mother had brought from Philadelphia. None of this was claimed to prove lost grandeur or even lost comfort, but Philadelphia! Philadelphia!- how like a city of light it must have seemed in the limestone flats. Gretchen detested her name and claimed at one time or another to be named Grace, Gladys, Gwendolyn, Gertrude, Gabriella, Giselle and Gloria. In her adolescence a public library was opened in the village where she lived and through some accident or misdirection she absorbed the complete works of John Galsworthy. This left her with a slight English accent and an immutable clash between the world of her reveries and the limestone country. Going home from the library one winter afternoon on a trolley car she saw her father standing under a street lamp with his lunch pail. The driver did not stop for him and Gretchen turned to a woman beside her and exclaimed: 'Did you see that poor creature! He signaled for the tram to stop but the driver quite overlooked him.' These were the accents of Galsworthy in which she had been immersed all afternoon, and how could she fit her father into this landscape? He would have failed as a servant or gardener. He might have passed as a groom although the only horses he knew were the wheel horses at the quarry. She knew what a decent, courageous and cleanly man he was and it was the intolerable sense of his aloneness that had forced her, in a contemptible way, to disclaim him. Gretchen-or Gwendolyn as she then called herself-graduated from high school with honors and was given a scholarship at the university in Bloomington. A week or so after her graduation from the university she left the limestone country to make her fortune in New York. Her parents came down to the station to see her off. Her father was wasted. Her mother's coat was threadbare. As they waved goodbye another traveler asked if they were her parents. It was still in her to explain in the accents of Galsworthy that they were merely some poor people she had visited but instead she exclaimed: 'Oh yes, yes, they are my mother and father.'
There is some mysterious, genetic principality where the children of anarchy and change are raised and Gretchen (now Gloria) carried this passport. She had become a socialist in her last year at the university and the ills, injustices, imperfections, inequities and indecencies of the world made her smart. She more or less hurled herself at the city of New York and was hired shortly as a secretary for Franklin Pierce Taylor. He was a wealthy and visionary young man and a member of the Socialist Party. Gretchen became his secretary and presently his lover. They were by all accounts very happy together. What came between them-or so my father claimed-was that at this point her revolutionary ardor took the form of theft or kleptomania. They traveled a great deal and whenever they checked out of a hotel she always packed the towels, the table silver, the dish covers and the pillow cases. The idea was that she would distribute them among the poor although he never saw this happen. 'Someone needs these things,' she would exclaim, stuffing their suitcases with what did not belong to her. Coming into the Hay-Adams in Washington one afternoon he found her standing on a chair, removing the crystals from the chandelier. 'Someone can use these,' she said. At the Commodore Perry in Toledo she packed the bathroom scales but he refused to close the suitcase until she returned them. She stole a radio in Cleveland and a painting from the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. This incurable habit of thieving-or so he claimed-led them to bitter quarrels and they parted in New York. In the use of any utensils-toasters, irons and automobiles-Gretchen had been dogged by bad luck, and while she had been well equipped with birth-control material her bad luck overtook her again. She discovered soon after the separation that she was pregnant.
Taylor did not mean to marry her. He paid the costs of her accouchement and gave her an income and she took a small apartment on the West Side. She always introduced herself as Miss Oxencroft. She meant to be disconcerting. I suppose she saw some originality in our mutual illegitimacy. When I was three years old I was visited by my father's mother. She was delighted by the fact that I had a head of yellow curls. She offered to adopt me. After a month's deliberation my mother-who was never very consistent-agreed to this. She felt that it was her privilege, practically her vocation, to travel around the world and improve her mind. A nursemaid was gotten for me and I went to live in the country with Grandmother. My hair began to turn brown. By the time I was eight my hair was quite dark. My grandmother was neither bitter nor eccentric and she never actually reproached me for this but she often said that it had come to her as a surprise. I was called Paul Oxencroft on my birth certificate but this was thought unsatisfactory and a lawyer came to the house one afternoon to settle it. While they were discussing what to call me a gardener passed the window, carrying a hammer, and so I was named. A trust had been established to provide Gretchen with a decent income and she took off for Europe. This ended her imposture as Gloria. Her checks, endorsements and travel papers insisted that she be Gretchen and so she was.
When my father was a young man he summered in Munich. He had worked out all his life with barbells, dumbbells, etc. and had a peculiar physique that is developed by no other form of exercise. Even as an old man he was well set up and looked like one of those aging gymnasts who endorse calisthenics courses and blackstrap molasses. In Munich he posed, out of vanity or pleasure, for the architectural sculptor Fledspar who ornamented the facade of the Prinz-Regenten Hotel. He posed as one of those male caryatids who hold on their shoulders the lintels of so many opera houses, railroad stations, apartment building and palaces of justice. The Prinz-Regenten was bombed in the forties but long before this I saw my father's recognizable features and overdeveloped arms and shoulders supporting the facade of what was then one of the most elegant hotels in Europe. Fledspar was popular at the turn of the century and I saw my father again, this time in full figure holding up the three top floors of the Hotel Mercedes in Frankfurt-am-Main. I saw him in Yalta, Berlin and upper Broadway and I saw him lose caste, face and position as this sort of monumental facade went out of vogue. I saw him lying in a field of weeds in West Berlin. But all of this came much later and any ill feeling about my illegitimacy and the fact that he was always known as my uncle was overcome by my feeling that he held on his shoulders the Prinz-Regenten, the better suites of the Mercedes and the Opera House in Malsburg that was also bombed. He seemed very responsible and I loved him.
I once had a girl who kept saying that she knew what my mother must be like. I don't know why an affair that centered on carnal roughhouse should have summoned memories of my old mother, but it did. The girl had it all wrong, although I never bothered to correct her. 'Oh, I can imagine your mother,' the girl would sigh. 'I can see her in her garden, cutting roses. I know she wears chiffon and big hats.' If my mother was in the garden at all she was very likely on her hands and knees, flinging up weeds as a dog flings up dirt. She was not the frail and graceful creature that my friend imagined. Since I have no legitimate father I may have expected more from her than she could give me but I always found her disappointing and sometimes disconcerting. She now lives in Kitzbuhel until the middle of December-whenever the snow begins to fall-and then moves to a pension in the Estoril. She returns to Kitzbuhel when the snow melts. These moves are determined more by economic reasons than by any fondness she has for the sun. She still writes to me at least twice a month. I can't throw the letters away unopened because they might contain some important news. I enclose the letter I most recently received to give you some idea of what her correspondence is like.
'I dreamed an entire movie last night,' she wrote, 'not a scenario but a movie in full color about a Japanese painter named Chardin. And then I dreamed I went back to the garden of the old house in Indiana and found everything the way I'd left it. Even the flowers I'd cut so many years ago were on the back porch, quite fresh. There it was, not as I might remember it, for my memory is failing these days and I couldn't recall anything in such detail, but as a gift to me from some part of my spirit more profound than my memory. And after that I dreamed that I took a train. Out of the window I could see blue water and blue sky. I wasn't quite sure of where I was going
