All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner

Author:Wallace Stegner [Stegner, Wallace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-27T10:22:03+00:00

Nel mezzo? Quasi alla fine. I was more than sixty, past the age when I should have had to settle ultimate questions. But ultimate questions were the only kind I wanted to ask, such questions as might divert my attention from Curtis, who was past hurt or help, and onto myself, who felt ambiguously but bitterly responsible.

It may have been only Ruth’s insistence on a trip that got me to believing the cure for my unease might lie in a place. I had never had a place of my own, I had spent my life in motion even while I persuaded myself I was domesticated. A housebroke vagrant. Call me Ishmael, but add, Jenny kissed me. I had an alley cat’s appreciation of stability without having a place either of origin or of domicile. We had camped in Manhattan for thirty-seven years, with at least one trip abroad during each of the thirty-seven. When I began to wonder if it might be possible to go back and find where the road forked (Che la diritta via era smarrita!), I couldn’t think where I might go.

If I had had a home town, I would have gone straight back to it on one of those middle-aged pilgrimages to search out the boy I was, the man I started out to be, and I might have half expected to find myself barefooted and with a fishpole, like a Post cover by Norman Rockwell. Young America, freckled and healthy, the finest crop grown in the soil of democratic institutions. But I had been raised on the run by an unfortunate woman whose first husband, my father, shot himself in the barn, and whose second, a drunken railroad man with D.T.’s and periodic paralysis, was finally backed over by a switch engine in the Saint Paul yards. After he died, when I was six, we moved from place to place. My mother, with a thick Danish accent arid no education beyond her twelfth year, had no skill to sell, and no beauty, only her hard hands. She kept other people’s house and tended other people’s children.

We lived in shallow, laborious, temporary ruts, and over their rims she was always seeing some dawn or rainbow, the kind of rainbow that had brought her to the States, only now it was one that always promised something better for me. Generally she waited until the school term was over, and then we were gone to where a letter or a rumor or a chance conversation over coffee had persuaded her she must go—another town, another house, another job, strange faces, strange rooms, strange smells, strange streets to be learned. Sometimes I have felt that I could smell my way backward down my life from stranger’s house to stranger’s house, like a homing dog, by little tokens left on maple or elm or light pole. I would know one place by the smell of crushed mulberries, another by the reek of trying lard, still another by the dampness of

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