The Storied Cry (1)

the cry comes first

She was a girl with 8 years behind her, bumping her bicycle across a stubble-field just outside St. Paul.

Minnesota hadn’t yet been given over into greens and their spiking up into what the light would ask of them. She’d come from her weekly hour with Sister Mary Louise, at the cloistered school that her father roused himself to pay for, the twin baby grands face to face, their keys buffed that morning while birds swooped and spluttered in the trees, new sheet music written by that Frenchman whose name she couldn’t quite manage to say sitting up straight on the music stands, as she and the woman crisped by her habit began to play, in almost unison.

She could guess at the notes, at the right hand’s group of threes rolling, lolling, up and down. Yet the bass failed to support them in a way that she knew how to hear: it kept on moving, delaying what she’d later call a cadence, as if the ground dipped and shifted, along with anything that hoped to stand on it. Though she could do more than guess at the Frenchman’s title.

In the right hand’s bouncing pitches, she found his Girl with the Flaxen Hair that rose and plunged in time with the rhythm of her head, up, down, even if now, riding home, her music stood safe in the bike’s front basket.

But safety was like dirt—it was capable of lunging away from you.

She saw a cloud in the shape of a great heel, about to thump on her and the linen-like girl and the street below them, as she wheeled back towards the city. Striking, it became fist-sized pellets of rain that made the sheet music curl, its ink leaking one pitch into another. She stopped riding. She dropped down the kickstand. She stuck the music under the warm middle of her shirt, close against her skin. And she opened her mouth to a cry larger than all of it.

Patricia Hampl tells this tale in multiple time-registers. Her recent memoir, The Art of the Wasted Day, gives readers the girl that she then was, looked on by Hampl at nearly 70, recounting this cry to her husband in their kitchen, at the yellow table that matches the light sifting through the window. She’s honed the skill of a plural focus, of attending to one event or thing from more than a single perspective, in her writing, in her teaching, and she angles it at her long-married husband. He’ll die, a little further on, unexpectedly. She puts that break into the book that she’ll write around it, in which Hampl details how there, in the rain’s fat slop, a car paused at her side, driven by the man who calls her a little girl and who asks why she cries.

Itemizing the ruin of The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, she knows that he sees her as another “crazy child.” She remembers her mother’s urgency: never talk to unknown men; never enter a strange man’s car, since at the snap of a door, you’re an outlier to prediction, to control. But, reading her hesitation, the man offers to drive the soaked prelude to her house, which he affirms is nearer than she’d thought. So, when the music arrives before the presence of her daughter, Hampl’s mother leans on the certainty that the girl with those 8 years in every bone and muscle must be dead, just as she’ll sit, later, in her failure to understand why what the Frenchman made needed to be protected, brought home.

Listening to the tale’s end, her husband insists that this compass of attention is like poetry—that poetry comes first in all our kind has found it possible to craft of voices. Hampl doesn’t know, then, now, if poetry’s blazon stood marked by its firstness or if her husband meant to say that “the cry antedates the story.” She knew, she knows, that any person should stand upright under the beat of rain and save the flaxen girl—save her counterpart— whose hair encircles everything that she can be, that the “lyrical self” and its fragility are strengths worth holding to. You extend that holding not to conceal her, not to order her, but to “keep in reserve the alert intimacy of that ardent heart.”

All this equals what the sounding cry gave way to.