Herma Read online

  You don’t have to be a serial sexual dimorph, or a writer, to believe that a crucial part of yourself remains forever hidden to you, inaccessible, untouchable; that you will never be whole; never cease to feel that a part of you—a crucial, defining part—is missing. That, finally, is what makes Herma important to me. With all the vigor, dry wit, madcap seriousness, perfection of sentence and obsessiveness of research that make all his books from The Balloonist onward so rewarding to read and so precious to our literature, MacDonald Harris—aka Donald Heiney, the secret minotaur of Oxley Street—managed to capture, as no other writer ever quite has, the isolation and the yearning that make freaks not just of minotaurs, writers and hermaphrodites, but of us all.

  I. SANTA ANA

  1.

  When all was ready, Papa called from the drive, and then Mama gathered Herma in her arms and came out, both of them in their Sunday best. Mama and Herma both wore white dresses, the one a tiny copy of the other. Mama’s dress had a blue ribbon worked into the hem, and Herma’s dress was trimmed with strawberry-colored ribbon. Mama had a broad straw hat of the same blue as the ribbon in her dress, and her parasol too was trimmed in blue. They all mounted into the buggy, Papa snapped the whip, and away they went.

  As for Papa, whom Herma greatly admired—wondering what it was like to be so large and calm, so knowledgeable about everything, and so hairy and fragrant in a way that was more like that of horses than of women and girls—he wore his best dark-blue suit, a starched collar, and a necktie with stars on it. His coat was open and the glittering gold watch chain could be seen hanging across his vest. His hat was a gray derby with a brim that curved down in front and back. His face was rather pale, since he worked indoors and was not able to get outside very much, and his blue-eyed glance was steady and serious. His sandy, rather wispy mustache was neatly clipped. He looked like exactly what he was—a successful young newspaper editor and also a Baptist.

  Everybody in Santa Ana was something—if not Baptist, then Methodist, or Presbyterian, or Episcopalian, or even Congregationalist—although these last were rather odd, since they had no church of their own and had to meet on Sunday mornings in a storefront on French Street. The Baptists, of course, had a proper church—white and neat, set in a green rectangle of lawn, with a sharp-pointed copper steeple on top of it. There were hibiscus bushes around it, their blossoms like red and orange flames in the glossy foliage, and a number of shaggy palm trees on the lawn. Here Papa pulled up and tied Delilah to a bush, and Mama and Herma got down.

  Herma was at the stage where she was getting too heavy to carry, and yet so small that she might get lost, or be trampled on, if she were put down among that confused and stirring mass of adult legs. On the whole she preferred to be carried. Her sense of independence preferred walking on her own two legs, yet from her vantage high up in the hollow of Mama’s bosom she could see about over the wide world, observing its customs and making mental notes about how she herself would behave later, when she was big. So down the aisle they went—Papa first, his derby off now so that the balding circle in his sandy blond hair was visible, and Mama followed with Herma, her white dress rustling in the silence. They sat down in a pew, a word that made Herma want to giggle. However Meeting was serious and Herma was not allowed to laugh, or make any other noise, otherwise she was subject to Papa’s disapproval.

  After everyone had sat down in their pews (don’t laugh) there was a long silence broken only by murmurs and rustling of clothing, and then Brother Goff appeared carrying a book. He was not very much like Papa. He was tall and craggy and he wore a string tie around his turkey neck. He had bushy eyebrows, and since he had no hips his trousers sagged a little to show a gap between his belt and his vest. On days other than Sunday he was an orange rancher. He was only a lay preacher, Mama had explained, although what this meant Herma had no idea. He opened his book and began reading out of it, and Papa and Mama followed silently along in little books of their own, as if to be sure he was reading it right.

  After this Brother Goff set the book aside, everyone else did too, and Brother Goff went on speaking without the book. He spoke of Sin and Redemption and Grace Abounding and Satan and Scriptures and Redeemer and Atonement and Eternal Torment and Calvary and Faith and Works and Total Immersion. As he went on speaking about these things he became quite agitated, his face turned red, and the little veins stood out on his neck. Herma was afraid he was angry, but Papa had told her he was not, or at least not at them or at anything specific, instead at a rather vague Thing in general. Brother Goff came to the end, still angry, and glared out at them, and everybody said, “Ah. Men.”

  Next came the Hymns, which were easy to understand, or took no understanding at all—they were just something to enjoy, like an ice-cream cone, or a strawberry from Gump & Blake’s. Sitting in Mama’s lap, Herma even piped away at the melodies herself, with a certain accuracy—she was precocious in this. Herma’s favorite perhaps was In the Garden, because of the excitement of the hanging pause that seemed to shudder for an eternity before the chorus began in earnest, authorized by a birdlike and humming B flat from the Bell Pump Organ played by Mrs. Opdike:

  “And He …. .”

  (Here the excruciating wait for the organ)

  “walks with me and he talks with me….”

  The longer this was prolonged, the greater the ecstasy of the moment when it finally broke loose. Mrs. Opdike had a knack of prolonging it extraordinarily—as though it were a warm and delicious lump of taffy that she was stretching into a string—longer—longer—until it seemed it must stretch onto the floor, whereupon she caught up the lump deftly and went on.

  Along with this, there was Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me and The Old Rugged Cross—which had a rug over it, in Herma’s vision, perhaps because it was old and they didn’t want people to see it—and Bringing in the Sheeps, of which the words were almost as incomprehensible as Brother Goff’s orations, but which had the most dashing and rousing tune of all, one to make the blood stir so that Herma bounced on Mama’s lap—Mama didn’t like that, but since Mama was kind it was Papa who told her to stop. It was only some time later that Herma grasped that the “Sheeps” were really “Sheaves,” but this didn’t help in the comprehension very much—flour came from Fagel’s in ten-pound bags, and since she lived in a land of orange groves and palm trees she had never seen a stalk of wheat in her whole life.

  More complex—so much so that it was some time before Herma grasped its full intricacies—was The Church in the Wildwood, which had a different tune for gentlemen and for ladies, and yet was arranged somehow so that the two tunes worked mysteriously together. For a while everyone sang the same thing, and then the sexes divided, and contended with each other, so to speak, but in a friendly way. The ladies’ voices were high and trilling, the gentlemen’s gruffer and deeper, with a weight to them that Herma could feel in her breastbone.

  (Ladies) Come. Come. Come. Come.

  (Gentlemen) COME. COME. COME. COME.

  (Ladies) Come to the church in the wild … wood …

  (Gentlemen) COME. COME. COME. COME.

  Herma was introduced to the mysterious world of counterpoint, which was also a world in which ladies and gentlemen were different. What would happen, she wondered, if a lady went on singing “Come, come, come” instead of going on to the part about the wildwood? She tried, in her tiny treble which was no louder than a piccolo, but extraordinarily penetrating in the small church with its bare walls:

  come. come. come. come. come. come. come. come.

  Again it was Papa who told her to stop, not by saying anything, since this was not proper during Hymns, but with a glacial look and a frown whose meaning was unmistakable. Herma switched back to singing with the ladies, who declaimed that no place was so dear to their childhood as the little brown church in the vale. This was better anyhow because, as Herma now saw, the gentlemen’s part was rather boring. Ladies were better at singing than gentlemen, and enjoyed it more, even though it was
Brother Goff himself who led in his own gruff and gravelly baritone, a delivery in which the twang of his native Kentucky was clearly audible. Herma sensed that in Brother Goff’s view of the matter, singing out loud was not really a suitable occupation for a grown-up man, but it was called for in the practice of his belief, so he did so, grudgingly, even though loud enough to shake the rafters, apologizing with a little clearing of his throat before each line began. And so they went on—Brother Goff’s half-ashamed bull-roaring mingled with the trilling soprano of Mrs. Opdike at the organ, the bashful and not very musical duet of Papa and Mama, who sang under their breath so to speak, and the braying of a brassy carpenter named Farkuss, who sat directly behind Herma and whose warm breath smelled of something fragrant and medicinal like hoarhound drops—an odor so strong that it stung. It was a disgrace, Mama said afterward when they had come home, but Papa only twitched his mustache a little.

  And perhaps Mr. Farkuss only liked to sing. Certainly Herma enjoyed singing, even when she was alone. Scarcely old enough to be out of her crib, she was able to amuse herself for long hours on end with labyrinthian sequences of melody which she had apparently invented—a kind of babyish singsong, going up and down, with syntax, semicolons, pauses for effect, and rousing climaxes which reached the C two octaves above the middle of the piano. It was not really music, perhaps, but a kind of vocalized mimicry, which at times touched the borders of the uncanny. Now and again she seemed to be imitating the cooing of the pigeons that strutted about on the back lawn; at other times one could recognize the oblique and weird intonation of Mah Song the Chinese vegetable man as he came down the street on his wagon—an oriental cadence which, through some mysterious penetrating quality, announced his coming a half an hour or more away, enabling each housewife to put down her list on a scrap of paper and collect together her coins before the two horses stopped (if all went well) at the curb in front of the house. “Children,” said Papa distractedly, having no experience whatsoever of children, “are natural mimics.” It was a long time, to tell the truth, before anyone paid any attention to this pastime or predilection of Herma, or noticed that there was anything out of the ordinary about it. Children were savage little animals, not quite human, who had not yet learned the niceties of excretion, table manners, and how and when to use one’s larynx—this was well known, even if one didn’t talk about it in quite those terms. So there was no accounting for their behavior—if they put beans up their nose, or poured out their mush on the floor, or looked inside their underwear, these were only instances of an imperfection inherent in their age, which would no doubt be self-curing with maturity—otherwise they would have to be confined in some institution or other. So Herma’s singing, if that was what it was.

  Yet what Herma was doing—still so young that she slept in, not a crib exactly, but a bed with a wooden fence around it that could be put down to take her out—in the end compelled attention. And so one day there was Papa, listening behind the door. The child was standing in her tiny nightgown, holding onto the bed fence to support herself, and singing, not loudly but persistently—she had been at it now for half an hour. She had been through The Church in the Wildwood with its iterated “Come, come, come” like an old English round, Bringing in the Sheaves, The Old Rugged Cross, and Rock of Ages. Now she had embarked on In the Garden, her favorite. A kind of shiver passed through Papa—a cool thrill in the presence of the uncanny. For Herma was singing it all. In her piping piccolo, two octaves above the rest of the congregation, one could nevertheless recognize the very intonation and personal stamp of Brother Goff’s baritone—every Kentucky nasal, even the little cough before he began each line. The voice was that of Brother Goff, elevated by some laryngeal necromancy high into the region of the tiny songbird. And that was not all. Mrs. Opdike could be heard, too, trilling away at the “And …He …” that preceded the climactic “walks!” And even, in the pause that intervened, the resonant B flat of the organ that released the Niagara of voices. Like a tiny Victrola, Herma recorded the whole Baptist church. The machine being minute, it was like the Lord’s Prayer engraved on a pin, but every nuance and throat scrape was there. The chill had left Papa now, but he felt dry-mouthed and a little faint. He went into the kitchen and drank a brassy-tasting glass of water.

  Children, he told himself, are natural mimics.

  2.

  The house on Ross Street had a white picket fence around it, and a gate in front with a tinkly bell. Older now and able to range farther, Herma spent most of her waking hours outdoors. Her preferred and private domain was the backyard. The grass there was long and cool to the feet, and around it was a jungle of lush and profuse California vegetation, all more or less getting out of hand because Papa didn’t have time to trim it: bougainvillea with flaring red blossoms, geraniums rampaging along the back fence, the hibiscus with its horn-shaped flower out of which emerged a long red pistil as stiff as a broom handle, the bird of paradise with its strange beaky magenta blooms that looked as though they might eat insects, and perhaps did. The lawn by itself was a wonderland to explore. A single square foot of grass, if Herma examined it with her nose on the ground and her rear in the air, was a menagerie of creatures as wild and queer as herself, even though tiny: plodding ants carrying packages, crickets, disreputable mealybugs, earthworms if she dug a little, bees sucking the clover, and a ladybug which she dispatched from her finger with a puff of air and the ritual valedictory: “Your house is on fire and your children alone.” And perhaps the ladybug did have a house, and perhaps it really was on fire, and perhaps the children were all alone; Herma half believed this, withheld her sympathy, and accepted it in the natural order of things; she did her part by telling the ladybug the news. Standing up again with grassy knees, she picked a blackberry off the bush that stuck through the fence from the Sampsons’ next door, turned on the garden faucet to irrigate her toes and stamp in the mud produced, ran around in tightening circles on the lawn until she fell down giddy on the grass, and threw walnuts onto the roof and waited for them to come down—finally a walnut struck her square on the head and this made her angry, and she stamped on the enemy and ate it with great satisfaction, even though it was rancid. Then she found herself all at once staring through the fence at Mr. Sampson’s Delilah. They had their own buggy but no horse—there was no need for it, Papa said—although perhaps they would have one, he hinted, when he became Editor-in-Chief. As fortune would have it, the Sampsons were Adventists, so they went to Meeting (if that was what the Adventists called it) on Saturday, so that Papa was able to borrow Mr. Sampson’s horse every Sunday and hitch it to their own Higgins buggy to go off to Meeting—in return, Mr. Sampson would sometimes borrow the buggy. Delilah was an old mare with rheumy eyes who took a melancholy view of things, and bared her yellow teeth as she cropped at the grass—what would it be like to have those huge yellow teeth, Herma wondered—what would it be like to be bitten by them? A sweet panic seized her, quite harmless since Delilah was on the other side of the fence, and she flew around the house and out the picket gate at the front, making the bell ping like a streetcar.

  Ross Street was not paved; nothing was paved in those days, except the two blocks of Fourth Street in the center of town where the stores were. There were cement curbs—the optimistic founders of the town knew that one day Ross Street should and would be paved—but for now there was only warm, soft dust in the summer, and a smooth and sensuous mud, as fine as potter’s clay, in the winter when it rained. But it was summer now and Herma set off, with this luxurious talcum sifting over her toes, under the sycamores that arched over the street on both sides and lent everything a dappled greenish light, wavering slightly like the sea. Three houses down, she knew, she would encounter the Hickeys’ old English bulldog, Dr. Johnson, lying asleep in the dust squarely in the middle of the street—this was his place and everybody knew it—the boy with the milk wagon and Dr. Violet in his buggy would steer carefully around him. Drooling from the jaw, senile and potbellied, Dr. Johnson ope
ned one red eye, no more, and regarded Herma as she passed. Yet even in his sleep Dr. Johnson, like everybody else, could recognize the distant incantation of Mah Song and would get up grumpily, in due time, and limp over to the curb to let the vegetable wagon pass—for like everybody else he knew that Mah Song did not understand horses and could not steer them, even to go around bulldogs.

  Proceeding thus down Ross Street, past the house of the Kessler Girls who had never married and were as queer, people said, as Dick’s hatband, past the sagging bungalow of Mr. Farkuss from which loud hymns could be heard even when it was not Sunday, she arrived in due course at Fourth Street—not yet paved here, but it was if she turned and walked east only a couple of blocks. Herma knew the names of the streets by heart—Ross, then Birch, then West, then Sycamore, then Main. At West the dusty street burst all at once into pavement and the stores began. Anything in the world could be bought in those two magical blocks of Fourth Street from West to Main.

  Still too young to read, she knew the stores already, some on account of their odor or by the things in the windows, others because the proprietor whom she knew would be standing in the doorway. First came Feeley’s Book Store, which in addition to books also displayed an Edison phonograph and a number of photographic devices—these latter strange machines with red bellows, gleaming rings and levers, and square or oblong black bodies. Herma stared down each of the Cyclops eyes, one by one, before she turned and went on. In the window of Hickey’s Hardware and Plumbing there was a model windmill, no larger than Herma herself, the blades of which revolved by some mysterious force even though there was no wind behind the glass. From the open door of Fagel’s Family Grocery came a tantalizing odor of chocolate, coffee, and spices. Next came the Blade office where Papa worked (“all day long,” as Mama said, attempting to evoke Herma’s sympathy; but Herma thought it would be better than languishing in the house all day as Mama did). Over the Blade and up a dusty stairway was Dr. Violet’s office; but no one ever went there, since it was only a tiny cubicle with hardly room for a desk and Dr. Violet himself preferred to “come to the house.” Dr. Violet had a number of silver instruments which he applied to various parts of the body when he examined Herma. He tickled, but not in a friendly way, instead with a malicious grin, and Herma didn’t care much for him.