Rue Matthiessen Author

From Shape of Seas

Finally I got the reproduction from lab. It had taken weeks, first making a same size negative and enlarging it to 11X16, then getting the right archival tone somewhere between sepia and gray, then touching up the scratches and dust that were revealed on the enlargement from the original. Then, just the right matt, a light gray that corresponded with the tone of his shirt, and just the right frame, not too stuffy, but not too modern either, something that would blend and let the subtlety and the power of the image shine. I also called the archive at Harvard, and found that it had been taken by one of the photographers on that long ago expedition: Eliot Elisofon.

I lifted it from the trunk, and, carried it up to the house feeling that finally, the restored image would be on my wall, and that I would have my very favorite one, that no one else in the family had liked or even remembered. When I had taken a picture of it with my phone and showed it to Maria and Alex, Maria scoffed, said she’d never seen it before, and Alex thought it was photoshopped. I had to tease him about the photoshopping. In 1965.

But now, finally, I had it in my hands—the finished product. I tried it in a few spots in the house. It needed a lot of light to show the detail, and there was a spotlight right above in the hallway to the laundry room—the only place with the right mix of ambient and artificial light. Hah! I thought, hammering in the nail. It wasn’t exactly a place of honor, but my father, and definitely my mother, would have been amused by the utilitarian home that I’d found for him. Merete Galesi, who knew my mother better than most, told me that if Deborah had been able to know about his best selling book The Snow Leopard, in which my mother’s tragic end is the catalyst for his journey and enlightenment—she would have called it ridiculous.

I stood back, looking at the photograph through his eyes and hers. There he was, the great man who was revered by many, and had so many more years of life than she did. He is captured mid-expedition, looking like an Oliver People’s eyewear advertisement. My mother and father, in my head, were now laughing, my mother with a wide open guffaw. My father, with a scornful grin, was nonetheless pleased that I had taken the trouble over it. Unlike the other photographs from the expedition, it was centered on him, not the tribe. I guessed that for that reason, many years ago, he had rejected it for a space on his wall.

A wave of sadness then came over me. It was not him. And it was not enough. It didn’t make up for the fact I’d never see him again. It didn’t matter that it was enigmatic, and a work of art, that it was of a famous person, and was in its peculiar way glamorous. It was just paper and glass, wood and nails. There were so many selves within that one man that I felt myself standing on shaky ground, as I constantly felt with him. I was always trying to figure it out and still am to this day. I didn’t know him, I only knew the self he reserved for me, out of the multiple selves he had. No matter how artful, the image on the wall was just one tiny sliver. The entire fragmented, illusory, creative and destructive force of him was unknowable. If it could have been photographed, it would be a labyrinth with no center, a sticky web. I wondered if anyone alive or dead was ever able to pin him down for more than a moment. At the same time I was sure that my mother, with that curious courage she had, along with her devotional nature, came very, very close.

I turned back to that brownie snap shot of her on my desk, no more than 4 inches square. I knew her, without a doubt. I knew her the way I know my son Emmett, who is now twenty-two. But an elemental way of knowing is ephemeral and inexplicable. It does not really contain the actuality of a life, except in a rudimentary fashion. Though the emotional terrain between myself and my mother was crystal clear, I didn’t know what had happened to her, the nuts and bolts of it. I didn’t really understand how far away, culturally, St. Louis was from the East Coast literary milieu in which I grew up. The more I looked the more I realized the extreme differences between a life of country clubs, garden tours and cotillion balls—and the highly experimental creative scene on the South Fork of Long Island. How far she had come, in just forty-four years.

From Shape of Seas

The summer of 1941, after the red diary (winter), my mother was sent away to camp in Rollinsville, Colorado, in order to get out of the oppressive heat and humidity of St. Louis, that was thought to worsen her eczema. She arrived late, and felt out of place. She wrote of being on the baseball diamond standing at bat, in shorts, with no way to hide the red and broken area on the backs of her knees. But the worst time was after lights out.

I kept a pair of cotton gloves and four huge safety pins under my pillow. Also a jar of ointment. I would put on my pajamas and climb into my upper bunk much the same as the others. But as they drifted off to sleep, I began my nightly ritual of self ministrations. First I slid the top off the jar, a thousandth of an inch at a time. Of course, even so, I could hear the sound it made and would stop for a few minutes, lest the others hear.

Perhaps the fear of being discovered is related to a desire to be understood. Later on at the train station she was amazed when saying goodbye to the other girls, that they cried and were very affectionate towards her. She wrote of “feeling no emotion at all except bewilderment.” She couldn’t accept them, and was flummoxed that they seemed to have understood and accepted her. In her journal she acknowledged that “they might have been as sensitive as I, and spared me embarrassment,” but added that she couldn’t remember anything else about them. She spent her remaining week “sitting alone on a remote rock, weeping and writing letters to my mother.”

Back at in St. Louis, the visits to specialists resumed. The twice weekly visits to “Dr. Stinky” were for injections made from the dust out of a vacuum cleaner. No wonder she hated him. A positive test for “house dust,” led to sleeping in a tent in the yard for awhile. There was frequent fasting, there was a diet of “some grain like substance” for ten days, and a regime of adding back different foods, one at a time.

I had never gotten better with no food, and got no worse with food, even chocolate which was supposed to be villainous beyond a shadow of a doubt. All of this didn’t daunt the doctors. They kept courageously on in spite of all defeat. I suppose it was nice too, to collect on the bills, though I never changed.

After a particularly bad attack when she was fifteen, she was sent for two months to a tuberculosis sanatorium called Pottengers in Northern California. The son of the owner had had mild eczema on his hands that had been very painful to him in medical school, because of the continual washing and use of disinfectants, and, very likely, the use of Latex gloves, which was later shown to cause dermatitis. The experience spurred his interest in allergies. His theory was that the tissues in the body were renewed by animal protein. All of his patients were to strictly follow the Pottengers diet, consisting mainly raw beef and brains and liver.

My mother wrote of being in a row of cabins with other eczema sufferers and asthmatics. Each patient had their own screened sleeping porch. She began her stay with a three day long warm glycerin bath on the porch, with the flaps down for privacy. She wrote,

There were pipes draining the water and refilling it rather constantly. In this tub I ate my meals and slept for three days, leaving it only to go to the toilet. Every night before bed I had to drink a “cocktail,” made up of raw brains, raw milk and raw eggs in a milk shake container. It was strange and rather tasteless, except for the bad taste of the knowledge of what it was… At night I was disturbed by the asthmatics wheezing and choking on their porches, on their backs and weighed down with sandbags on their chests or abdomen or where ever it was thought beneficial.

The most extreme of all remedies, Pottengers produced a remarkable improvement. Not long after her return home her eczema returned, “worse than ever,” and she credited the misery and strain of living at home as the cause. To be forced to go to school even when she was in “a bad way,” fretted her nerves which she believed worsened her condition, as did her father’s constant temper tantrums. It has since been abundantly proven that eczema and dermatitis flareups can be caused by the stress hormone, cortisol. High levels of cortisol can suppress the immune system and increase the amount of inflammation in the body. However, no matter what my mother was able to observe about herself, the medical profession had not caught up. Here began a life long tendency to distrust all kinds of authority.