“But most of the time,” I said, “the places you go are filled with light, beautiful, bright, like nothing else in the world.”
My mother closed her eyes. “That precious, precious bird,” she whispers, “that bright bird of topaz.”
She follows it into darkness. She follows it into places where nothing is familiar, no one stops to talk, and it seems she is lost. She follows it into the center of sorrow, into places of great pain. She follow s it where no one else dares to go. That’s when the men usually come.
She put her head on the pillow with me “They are dressed in white,” she said, “and they carry hypodermic needles. But even then I stay. They want me to look away, to leave the Topaz Bird behind They think they can make me see what they want. But they can’t. Even then I stay.
“You must not listen to them,” she said, and her voice was raised. “You must not look away,” my mother insisted. “There is no way to stay safe.” My mother saw that I was frightened. She sat up. “You must try not to look away,” she smiled. “You must try. Always remember, Vanessa, that the Topaz Bird is special and we are lucky to see it. Always remember: it means us no harm.”
She looked so lovely in that last moment before folding the covers around me, right before turning out the light, and I thought, falling into sleep (or was I already sleeping?), that I would not look away if I saw it. If it would make me more like her, this magnificent woman who surrounded me with her saving breath, wrapping me in it, I would not hesitate.
When I go to Paterson in my head, when I finally get to the right street, identify the house, number four fifty-eight, and open the front door, I walk down a long, dingv hallway, past the dark kitchen and left into a small bedroom. A big man sits on a chair next to the bed in his undershirt, and I know I am in the right place. In front of him the Paterson Sunday News is open to the travel section. A towel is draped over the lampshade to block out excess light. A frail, blonde woman with eyes like glass sits in the bed propped up against a pillow. She looks so tired.
As I look more closely and my eves adjust to the darkness, I see children, two children, two girls, nearly the same age, one light, one dark, huddled in a corner, their bony knees up against their chests, hair falling in their eyes.
“Where will we go today?” the woman in the bed asks; a slight smile, almost a smirk, comes to her face.
“Let’s see,” the man says in the dark. “How about Savannah?” And he begins to read.
“Savannah,” the woman sighs. This is the last thing she will say. She is too weak to talk much. This reinforces the man’s notion that women are quiet, women are always meant to be quiet. The girls, too, will just sit and listen quietly, like their mother.
Who falls asleep first, it’s hard to know. He reads until each pair of feminine eyes has closed — Lucy, the dark girl, the youngest, sometimes first; sometimes the sick woman; last of all my mother, the other little girl, the light one, safe in a dream of magnolia.
The man gets up and closes the paper, leaving the sleeping room for his second job, necessary even on Sundays for heart money — medicine money.
But in my house Grandma Alice lives. She lives to take trips on planes to Savannah and Paris. She lives to watch her daughter grow famous. She lives to work with us in the garden, to dance with us under the chandelier of the sun. She helps me to see the Topaz Bird. She’s the one I tell about the golden rectangle.
One afternoon in late October while looking for my snow boots I stumbled upon the great, mysterious shape of my childhood: a golden rectangle.
The snowstorm was unexpected and we were caught off guard. I could not immediately find my hat or scarf or boots and did not consider going out without them. My mother’s only rule, the only thing she ever asked of us, was that we be dressed warmly if the weather was cold and sometimes even in hot weather she would wrap us in sweaters, fearful of some unaccountable chill that only she could feel. Now I had no idea where to find my boots. I looked through the whole house but they remained lost.
It was one of those rare early snowstorms that, occurring out of season, last only hours, an afternoon at most, and then are gone. The air returns to the air of autumn afterwards; the colorful leaves remain on the trees as if the wind and snow had never come at all. I looked everywhere that afternoon for those boots and found them finally way in the back of my father’s dark closet.
His shoes lined neatly in a row seemed impossibly odd and large. I picked up one of his brown wing tips. The father that put on these shoes and went out into the world in them was a father I did not know. I was afraid of those shoes. They seemed to me in some way testimonies of sadness — the holes around the sole, the smell of the leather, the heels unevenly worn down. Their heaviness in my hands weighed on my heart. He must have been uncomfortable in them, I thought, fie wore those shoes when he shook other men’s hands, halfheartedly, I imagined, alone in their company, too. Each quiet pair stood like soldiers on a cliff in blue morning mist.
And then I saw it — the blue spiral notebook that would make me forget that somber line of shoes and my father’s sadness. I never reached my snow boots that day; I missed that quick October blizzard. By the time I put my father’s notebook back in the corner of his closet, a place I would return to over and over, the snow had melted and the sky was filled with stars. The snow had gone as quickly as it had come. No one would have remembered the storm at all had Hetchcr not made a snowball and put it in the freezer for proof, evidence for my skeptical grandmother who lived in Pennsylvania and would want to see it.
I could never have dreamed what was in this unlikely notebook of my father’s, dated 1958, the year I was born. It seemed amazing to me that he had a notebook of his own at all. It was my mother who kept all the journals. The only things I had ever seen him write were letters to her, which he labored over. But there it was, a notebook in his handwriting, and I was convinced that, to understand this one notebook, only a few pages of which were actually filled, would be to understand everything: my father, my mother, the world, all that would happen.
I continue to dream, even now, about the golden rectangle, which my father as a very young man surely must have believed meant something. The handwriting in that notebook was confident and convincing. There were loops and swirls in it, flourishes that have since disappeared from my father’s script. The notebook has disappeared now, too. All I have is the memory of that large, hopeful penmanship and the copies I made of those pages. This is w hat I found there:
January 1958
The Concept of Beauty, the Divine Proportion,
and the Golden Rectangle
Stravinsky discussing composition quotes Morse:
“Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands and in which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs, a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty’s sake and pulls it down to earth.”
It is not in the clarity of things but in their beauty and mystery that music and mathematics join.
Bartók—Crucial musical events mark divisions and subdivisions of the work into golden sections.
Hardy—In great mathematics there is a very high degree of unexpectedness combined with inevitability and economy.
The unexpectedness and inevitability of such math and music are not merely formal but ultimately reflect back to the real world. Music has a concrete emotional meaning with the capacity to change a listener’s feeling. Math also has a concrete meaning. In such a reordered understanding of reality, which seems both surprising and necessary, may lie some qualities of beauty itself.