Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [4]
Beginning
Within you, your years are growing.
—PABLO NERUDA
In the cool of a June evening long ago, a man holds a child in his arms. Across the field, light is falling behind a bank of trees and resting on a water tower, a dome of red and white checks. She’s in a cotton nightgown and her legs dangle. He is wearing tennis whites, but they’re rumpled. They always are. No socks, his shirt untucked. Behind them, a shingled summerhouse rambles down to a dock and a muddy bay. Near the kitchen door, a painted trellis is heavy with the heads of pale roses bowing.
Every night they do this. He sings her made-up songs and tells her stories. Some are silly, and she laughs. Daddy, she says. Some are of women in long dresses. Some of a princess with her name and a knight who slays dragons. But on summer nights, as he does on this one, he points to the tower and tells her it is hers. Her very own. He tells her, and she believes him. His eyes, sharp like the blue of a bird’s wing, gaze into hers. She lays her head against him, hair damp from the bath, and breathes the salty warmth of his skin. She wraps her legs at his waist and curls into him as the story ends and the light dies.
My parents were married under a pink and white tent on the East End of Long Island on a July night in 1959. The tent, sheer and billowing and filled with stephanotis and daylilies, was propped for the night on the grounds of a robber baron’s estate in Quogue, New York, a resort community some eighty miles from Manhattan. The estate was not on the ocean; most of the grander homes there were set back across the canal from the spit of barrier beach that ran from the Moriches Inlet in the west to the Shinnecock Inlet in the east. There, on the eastern end—standing on the jetty past Ponquogue Bridge, looking at that wide, ancient bay and the cut where the Atlantic rushed in—you could see across to another sandy spit, and miles later, there was Southampton, where lavish shingled cottages were indeed built by the sea, on Gin Lane, on Meadow Lane, on Dune Road.
The rented house where they were married, with its diamond-mullioned windows and its graceful veranda, was close enough to the water so that when the wind changed—when dinner ended and the dancing began—the scent of the sea would have mixed with the music and laughter and the heady perfume of the sweet, high-hedged privet.
The bride’s organdy gown was from Bergdorf Goodman, her portrait by Bachrach, and the engraved invitations by Cartier, and if you thumbed through the glossy black-and-white proofs of cake cutting and veil straightening, you might think children of privilege, society wedding. But you would be wrong. My parents’ story was different.
They were both Catholic, both of German and Irish descent. They came from small towns in Pennsylvania and Nebraska. My father was the son of a railroad foreman, my mother the daughter of a rancher, farmer, wanderer, and occasional Prohibition bootlegger. They had come to New York to find their fortunes, and on a winter day, seventeen months before the wedding by the sea and twenty-six months before I was born, they found each other.
After graduating from St. Mary College in Xavier, Kansas, my mother took a monthlong TWA flight attendant’s course. When asked to put in for their home base, she and her best friend swore they’d stick together. My mother wanted Kansas City, but her friend pushed for New York. “Aim for the top,” she said. “You can always come back.” They tossed a coin, and my mother lost.
By the time she met my father, she had been in the