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 Kitzbühel until the middle of December-whenever the snow begins to fall-and then moves to a pension in the Estoril. She returns to Kitzbühel 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 but looking through my handbag I found an invitation to spend a weekend with Robert Frost. Of course he's dead and buried and I don't suppose we would have gotten along for more than five minutes but it seemed like some dispensation or bounty of my imagination to have invented such a visit.
"My memory is failing in some quarters but in others it seems quite tenacious and even tiresome. It seems to perform music continuously. I seem to hear music all the time. There is music running through my mind when I wake and it plays all day long. What mystifies me is the variety in quality. Sometimes I wake to the slow movement of the first Razumovsky. You know how I love that. I may have a Vivaldi concerto for breakfast and some Mozart a little later. But sometimes I wake to a frightful Sousa march followed by a chewing gum commercial and a theme from Chopin. I loathe Chopin. Why should my memory torment me by playing music that I loathe? At times my memory seems to reward me; at times it seems vindictive and, while I'm speaking of memory, I must mention little Jamsie. [Jamsie is her Border terrier.] I was waked one night last week at about three by a curious sound. As you know Jamsie sleeps beside my bed and Jamsie was making the noise. She was counting. I distinctly heard her counting. She counted from one to twelve. After this she did the alphabet. She had trouble with her s's of course but I clearly heard her go through the alphabet. I know you'll think I'm mad but if porpoises can talk why not Jamsie? When she finished the alphabet I woke her. She seemed a little embarrassed at having been caught at her lessons but then she smiled at me and we both went back to sleep.
"I suppose you think all of this foolish but at least I don't go in for Tarot cards or astrology and I do not, as my friend Elizabeth Howland does, feel that my windshield wiper gives me sage and coherent advice on my stock market investments. She claimed only last month that her windshield wiper urged her to invest in Merck Chemicals which she did, making a profit of several thousand. I suppose she lies about her losses as gamblers always do. As I say, windshield wipers don't speak to me but I do hear music in the. most unlikely places-especially in the motors of airplanes. Accustomed as I am to the faint drone of transoceanic jets it has made me keenly aware of the complicated music played by the old DC-7s and Constellations that I take to Portugal and Geneva. Once these planes are airborne the harmonics of their engines sound to my ears like some universal music as random and free of reference and time as the makings of a dream. It is far from jubilant music but one would be making a mistake to call it sad. The sounds of a Constellation seem to me more contrapuntal-and in a way less universal than a DC-7. I can trace, as clearly as anything I ever heard in a concert hall, the shift from a major to a diminished seventh, the ascent to an eighth, the reduction to a minor and the resolution of the chord. The sounds have the driving and processional sense of baroque music but they will never, I know from experience, reach a climax and a resolution. The church I attended as a girl in Indiana employed an organist who had never completed his musical education because of financial difficulties or a wayward inability to persevere. He played the organ with some natural brilliance and dexterity but since his musical education had never reached the end of things, what had started out as a forthright and vigorous fugue would collapse into formlessness and vulgarity. The Constellations seem to suffer from the same musical irresolution, the same wayward inability to persevere. The first, second and third voices of the fugue are sounded clearly but then, as with the organist, the force of invention collapses into a series of harmonic meanderings. The engines of a DC-7 seem both more comprehensive and more limited. One night on a flight to Frankfurt I distinctly heard the props get halfway through Gounod's vulgar variations of Bach. I have also heard Handel's Water Music, the death theme from Tosca, the opening of the Messiah, etc. But boarding a DC-7 one night in Innsbruck-the intense cold may have made the difference-I distinctly heard the engines produce some exalting synthesis of all life's sounds-boats and train whistles and the creaking of iron gates and bedsprings and drums and rainwinds and thunder and footsteps and the sounds of singing all seemed woven into a rope or cord of air that ended when the stewardess asked us to observe the No Smoking sign (Nicht Rauchen), an announcement that has come to mean to me that if I am not at home I am at least at my destination.