1.
In those days Pennsylvania Route 30, the Lincoln Highway, went through Lancaster and Columbia without a bypass. After Gap, and the half block of fussy, oddly contemporary Amish shops that were like a five-second commercial strip tossed into a corn field, you entered Lancaster, passing by the Hamilton Watch building and WGAL TV 8.
But my mother would have already pulled over, probably someplace outside Coatesville, at a converted gas station or perhaps a simple wooden stand, to buy flowers.
One year, it was a single pink hyacinth in a pot—entirely plastic—that I held in my lap like a goldfish bowl or a delicate treasure, picturing my grandmother's face when I would hand it to her.
Together in the blue bucket seats of her Mustang, I can still hear my mother punch the cigarette lighter into the dash to get it started, and I can smell the raisiny tannin of her Viceroy pack as I fished one out for her to light. She held the metal cartridge up to her face and sucked furtively, suffocating me.
The metal seat belts lay across my lap like chrome barbells.
The drive to my grandmother's house, "100 miles!" as my mother used to say, always rounding up, as imprecise as her gift wrapping or her motley Swedish meatballs, was the greatest pleasure I knew as a child. Crossing the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge with its deco lanterns, driving by Lake Redman splashing up against the scoured-out rock of Route 83, and finally spotting the steeples—still only about as far south as Hametown—of the two facing churches at the very top of Main Street, each marker in the journey increased my excitement.
A system of narrow, angled streets—and finally alleys—led to my grandmother's large backyard. As soon as my mother had pulled into the grass drive, defined by two handsome white fences and a lonely black lamp post, I was pushing against the heavy car door, running up the long flagstone walk with its treacherous caterpillars of sod between each gray or aubergine piece.
The back door was already open, my Aunt Ada bracing it with her arm, one foot in the kitchen and the other on the top step, preparing to catch me in her arms like a runaway shopping cart.
It is a moment—for the remainder of my life—with which I compare, by which I judge, every abstract pleasure.
It is a singular, ecstatic touchstone.
Above my head, now buried in my aunt's apron, I could hear my grandmother greet my mother, her tone like contralto molasses.
Well Marion!
There was a reserved pleasure, and a hint of admiration—but nothing that you might expect toward a woman who likely predicated her much-loved only son's suicide.
My mother would stay the night and leave after coffee and toast the next morning.
The big old house, with its oversize furniture, lumpy carpets, and dark, stinky bathroom seemed stubbornly ill-suited to my mother's efficient style and constant grooming. The vanity lights on either side of the tiny bathroom medicine cabinet were never turned on except when my mother was there, applying or removing something from her face or daubing at her hair with a rat tail brush.
Ash trays were produced from deep within cabinet drawers, and my mother's cigarette smoke hung in the air above the kitchen table—confused.
The chiming clocks all had to be stopped for the night.
2.
On the reflective shellac surface of the dining room buffet there was always an Easter basket or two, their number doubled by the huge wall mirror, brimming with green plastic grass and holding a selection of hard-boiled eggs dyed by soaking them in strong tea or beet juice.
This practice I found confusing as a child, since Easter eggs were supposed to be bright and saturated, not dun colored. In what was likely the first of my artistic demands upon my environment, my grandmother was influenced to purchase a set of the tiny bottles of yellow, green, red, and dark blue dye.
And in what was likely the first in a lifetime of aesthetic boomerangs, I realized—almost immediately—that the boring eggs were in fact more mysterious, more historically interesting and culturally rich—than my garish ones.
The inevitable trip into the city of York—the two major department stores were Bear's and The Bon-Ton, words forever fused in my mind as if they were extensions of the same company—for an Easter outfit and new, uncomfortable dress shoes was rewarded with ice cream sundaes at Ramona's, a restaurant my grandmother and her sisters persistently referred to as a lunch room. These aberrations in vocabulary—the refrigerator was an ice box; television was listened to, not watched; Veteran's Day was Armistice Day—were a part of the charm of my short visits during the school year and the long summers I spent in this world of the Miss Havershams. My grandmother was 70, and her two unmarried sisters were in their eighties.
Still, the possibly of attending the 5:30 a.m. Easter dawn service was kept open for a handful of those years, although I remember joining my grandmother only once.
Only for one or two long drives to Maine with my mother had I ever been roused from bed while the sky outside the windows was still dark. The large house itself seemed still asleep, and the scent of my grandmother's Coty was stronger than her whispered instructions and mute, indulgent smiles.
Christ Lutheran Church of Shrewsbury was one block up and one over from our backyard—an imposing, Queen Anne brick structure painted oxblood with elaborate white trim; multiple entrances and passageways; a handsome tower; and narrow, tall stained glass windows that seemed to reach up, longingly or ambitiously I could never tell, toward a sky-dwelling god Himself.
Like a wedding rehearsal or a matinee, this dawn service was conducted on a folksy, intimate level. An upright piano was brought from the Sunday School building and positioned just beyond the front pew—a proximity that would have been deemed unacceptable for the 9:30 service. A woman I had never seen—our organist, Helen Bricker, apparently resting her arms for the big show—hauled the keyboard through "Up from the Grave He Arose." The notes of the refrain, beginning low, tone by tone mimicked the rise of the savior. It was great fun. So much fun, in fact, that it was tactfully omitted from the church's official Service Book and Hymnal.
The thundering chorus of Da Palestrinia's "Alleluia" or the Lyra Davidica "Easter Hymn" were reserved for the Easter service proper, a pageant that has no equivalent in my life's experience.
3.
The Lutherans, who seemed to observe some fussy, inscrutable schedule of changing colors throughout the year for the robes and various bolts of fabric dangling from altars and lecterns and tables now brought out their most passionate purple and elegant, silvery white. Against these, the winks of reflective light from the gold Coptic crosses and the yellow-orange anthers bursting from the throats of the potted lilies—each in a crinkled diaper of purple foil—crowding the window sills ravaged the eye.
Here, indeed, was majesty.
In this setting, if you arrived in good time, a small door in the wall of frosted glass to one side of the mahogany-enclosed choir discreetly opened, and Helen Bricker nee Blosser strode out and took her seat at the keyboard of a magnificent organ, her lower lip permanently jutting out, her hair a barely-tamed auburn bird's nest, her deportment slovenly.
In simple fact, she was an artist. She had been considered, among two others, as a possible piano teacher but my grandmother chose instead a more refined, older woman from one of the farms close to the Maryland Line, citing Helen's flamboyant "banging" and upper body swaying. She was generous with the wrong notes, too—and she remains for me today, with Horowitz, so physically restrained by comparison, a symbol of the expressive possibility of instrumental performance.
High above the sanctuary floor, her head and shoulders weaving to the phrases, drawing the music out of the massive paraphernalia that seemed a giant, paneled engine room with gilded pipes leading out and up, all the way to the ceiling, her preludes were almost always Beethoven or Franck, athletically—gorgeously—played.
The Zeck family always sat on the right side, fifth pew from the front, since the early 20th century, and from this spot, for so many years of my childhood and teens, I sat in the bright filtered light of a Sunday morning facing the altar's deep cove or glancing up at the impossibly high suspended lanterns, gnawing through my allotment of Chiclets. The dullest seasons carried the promise of fashion and gossip, shocking proofs of failing health and secondhand accounts of hospitalizations, recoveries, and deaths. Queuing up to the foyer to shake Pastor Horn's hand as he stood in the freezing doorway, the same hand that you shook last week, was still a tiny thrill of celebrity.
But Easter was heightened, embossed, it stood out from the remainder of the year not only for the beauty of the church but because of the bonus crowd, all wearing their most expensive clothes, flanked by every single natural and adopted and step-child defiantly dragged from bed; and the cheeky, self-assured, party-like celebration of a faith built around a savior once again risen from the dead.
It was an equinox of new hats and matching shoes and bags.
At the close of the remarkable service, my child's nerves inspired and agitated and finally numbed with emotion, grouchy and hungry, I stood with my grandmother as she waited to claim one of the lilies she had prepaid to decorate the church.
I carried it home, its long neck bobbing above my shoulder.
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