Elly knew the whereabouts of every cookie shelf in every supermarket in the North Berkshire area of Massachusetts. There was not a location, not an orientation in her world that she did not have memorized. I knew, then, that I would not have to create a memory. She remembered her room, her house, her neighbourhood, her town. The experiences I wanted to make available were not lost; inaccessible to words, they must be there.
How certain that sounds! The certainty is false. With Elly I was never sure even of what I knew I knew. That she remembered home might be an intellectual certainty, but the emotions counsel differently. These show you not the child you construct out of your rational knowledge of what she has occasionally done, sometimes seemed to know, but the child you see every day who does little and knows nothing. It is this child, wrapped in veils and mists, that one is working with; the mind inside it, however impressive it appears when all the instances are put together, seems at any given moment a figment, a creation of the wishes. The child has memories of home and we can unlock them? What optimism! The child is complete and untouchable, and has no past at all.
Yet I began to think what I could do. Elly had a puzzle. It represented a large house, with four oversize windows in each of which a smaller puzzle could be assembled, the sub-puzzle showing four appropriate rooms and their furniture — kitchen, living room, bedroom, bath. Simple nursery ideas are hard to come by if you aren’t trained to the work. I had looked at that puzzle for weeks before it occurred to me: I would draw our house at home on a large sheet of paper, and see if through pictures I could bring Elly’s memories out where they could be shared.
Together, as so many times before, we sat on the floor. I drew the house. Elly watched with quiet attention; her empty stare was growing rarer now. It had not, of course, occurred to me to bring a photograph. Uncertainly I reconstructed the facade in my memory, so much less sure than Elly’s. What was the pitch of the roof? Should I make the chimney visible? What was the orientation of the windows and their relative size? While I thought, I had to be drawing, steadily and confidently even if incorrectly. Elly was watching and I must not dissipate her attention by fumbles. I had no time, even if I had had the skill, to make a convincing architectural rendering. I settled for a schematic roof and the right number of windows and put my best efforts on the porch, which I did remember. Three steps, two columns (Doric), a plain pediment, a door with four panels, a mail-basket. I drew the shrubs and flowers. I made it spring and drew daffodils, a word which Elly knew. Elly watched with noncommittal interest. Following the lead of her puzzle, I started to fill in the downstairs window with the furniture of our living room, coffee table, couch. The window grew crowded, perspective was abandoned. I didn’t know whether Elly saw picture-perspective anyhow. Why should she? People in the Middle Ages didn’t. At last, deep inside the room, floating above the other furniture, I drew the record-player — the sliding doors, the turntable, the tone-arm, the needle, the record itself. Now Elly was more than attentive. Tense and excited, she began to jump up and down, her sign for approval and delight. She got down again and put her finger on the crude circle that represented the turntable and moved it round and round. Then she began to sing. At first I scarcely recognized the song, it was so many months since I had heard it — the song ‘Instead Of’, from The Three-Penny Opera.
It was almost a year since Elly had heard that music. She had been obsessed with it; for two months and more she had asked for the record every day. Then, like so many other things, she had abandoned it altogether. No one had sung it since. We had left the record behind in America, and there it remained and the music with it, dissolved, extinguished, part of the irrecoverable past. But it was not wholly irrecoverable. We had recaptured a minute part of it. We could find more.
Many of the things I drew evoked no reaction. Oddly enough, Elly showed little interest in her crib, however lovingly detailed the drawing. Instead it was the rocking chair that excited her, and again it was music that let me know she shared my memory, for as I drew she began to sing the melody of ‘Rockabye Baby’, which she had first learned as I rocked her, so many times, in that very chair in her old room at home.
After that, I knew the way. Elly was happy when I drew a separate large rocker outside the house, and a mother with glasses to sit in it, and an Elly with straight hair and bangs to put in the mother’s arms. I would not only retrieve the house; I would try to put into it the human relationships, which Elly had tried so successfully to deny. I made crude portraits of the family, a face at each window, a figure standing at the door, and although Elly’s real interest was still in the house and furniture, the details of the bathtub and washbasin, she accepted the figures with placid attentiveness. We drew often, several times a week, and time passed.
We left England, put the Microbus and our eight selves (my mother had joined us) into the Channel plane, then into a train for Munich, then into the car for the ultimate destination, St Gilgen, an hour beyond Salzburg. Austria’s mountains and the unreal blue lakes were paradise for us after the flats of the English university town, but I had never seen any signs that Elly cared for scenery. How would the new upheaval affect her? As we settled into yet another orientation of rooms and fixtures, we watched Elly for any signs of shock. Would she be sick again? stop walking? refuse to go outside?
The day after we arrived I started drawing. I drew the house in England (prepared for this, I could do a reasonably accurate job). I drew the bus with our eight heads looking out. I made the little plane with its open maw, and the bus going in. I made us all go in the door, and Elly recognized herself and jumped and squealed. I made the train with the eight heads at the windows, and Elly, who had never responded to a picture of a train before, was beside herself with delight. I made the Wagon- Lit, three beds, one above the other, and me and Elly’s grandmother and Elly each in one. Elly’s eyes shone, she laughed, she said ‘choo-choo’, and she had to have all the pictures again, people and things — all summer long.
She was never sick again. She was perfectly natural outdoors. We had a wonderful summer, and at the end of it, just in time for the ten-day trek to Le Havre, Elly began spontaneously to use the pot. All of which, like all negative evidence, proves nothing. We might have had no trouble in any case. I do not know. But the human being is human in that he has a usable past. All human societies are built upon it; in even the most primitive cultures the poets and artists, the keepers of the memory, have an essential place. To be fully human, a child needs a past to which it has access. Even now, Elly and I have not reached a level of verbalization which would enable us to say ‘Do you remember?’ But one of her favourite pastimes is to watch while I draw her three houses — one in Austria, one in England, one in America. There are six pictures, for she insists on front and rear views, appropriate furnishings visible at each window. She can put in words now questions which before went unformed: ‘Becky’s bed?’ ‘Daddy’s bed?’‘St Gilgen House?’ Austria is almost four years behind us, already growing dim. Recently, however, I thought of a new possibility: I added a rough rendition of the lovely onion dome of St Gilgen, saying to Elly, ‘downtown’. Each onion dome has its own individuality; only charity would have recognized this one. But Elly did. She squealed ‘St Gilgen church!’ and I had to add, that very minute, the appropriate churches to accompany my pictures of Elly’s English and American homes. It was not a very skilful Perpendicular Gothic. But the New England neoclassical, luckily, is just down Main Street, so my memory can be daily refreshed. Elly’s does not need it.