He [Merton's father] must have thought of the days before the war, when he had first met Mother in Paris, when she had been so happy, and gay, and had danced, and had been full of ideas and plans and ambitions for herself and for him and for their children. It had not turned out as they had planned And now it was all over. And Bonnemaman was folding away the big heavy locks of red hair that had fallen from the shears when my mother was a girl, folding them away now in tissue paper, in the spare room, and weeping bitterly.
They hired the same car again a day or so later, for another journey, and this time I am definitely glad I stayed in the car.
Mother, for some reason, had always wanted to be cremated. I suppose that fits in with the whole structure of her philosophy of life: a dead body was simply something to be put out of the way as quickly as possible. I remember how she was in the house at Flushing, with a rag tied tightly around her head to keep the dust out of her hair, cleaning and sweeping and dusting the rooms with the greatest energy and intensity of purpose: and it helps one to understand her impatience with useless and decaying flesh. That was something to be done away with, without delay. When life was finished, let the whole thing be finished, definitely, for ever.
Once again, the rain fell, the sky was dark. I cannot remember if Cousin Ethel (my mother's cousin, called Mrs. McGovern, who was a nurse) remained in the car to keep me from getting too gloomy. Nevertheless I was very sad. But I was not nearly so unhappy as I would have been if I had gone up to that mournful and appalling place and stood behind a pane of glass to watch my mother's coffin glide slowly between the steel doors that led to the furnace.
Mother's death had made one thing evident: Father now did not have to do anything but paint. He was not tied down to any one place. He could go wherever he needed to go, to find subjects and get ideas, and I was old enough to go with him.
And so, after I had been a few months in the local school at Douglaston, and had already been moved up to the second grade, in the evil-smelling gray annex on top of the hill, Father came back to New York and announced that he and I were going somewhere new.
It was with a kind of feeling of triumph that I watched the East River widen into Long Island Sound, and waited for the moment when the Fall River boat, in all her pride, would go sweeping past the mouth of Bayside Bay and I would view Douglaston, as I thought, from the superiority of the open water and pass it by, heading for a new horizon called Fall River and Cape Cod and Provincetown.
We could not afford a cabin, but slept down below decks in the crowded steerage, if you could call it that, among the loud Italian families and the colored boys who spent the night shooting craps under the dim light, while the waters spoke loudly to us, above our heads, proclaiming that we were well below the waterline.
And in the morning we got off the boat at Fall River, and walked up the street beside the textile mills, and found a lunch wagon crowded with men getting something to eat on the way to work and we sat at the counter and ate ham and eggs.
All day long after that we were in a train. Just before we crossed the great black drawbridge over the Cape Cod Canal, Father got off at a station and went to a store across the street and bought me a bar of Baker's chocolate, with a blue wrapper and a picture of a lady in an old-fashioned cap and apron, serving cups of chocolate. I was almost completely overwhelmed with surprise and awe at the fact of such tremendous largesse. Candy had always been strictly rationed.
Then came the long, long journey through the sand dunes, stopping at every station, while I sat, weary and entranced, with the taste of chocolate thick and stale in my mouth, turning over and over in my mind the names of places where we were going: Sandwich, Falmouth, Truro, Provincetown, The name Truro especially fascinated me. I could not get it out of my mind. Truro. Truro. It was a name as lonely as the edge of the sea.
I understand almost all of this section of The Seven Storey Mountain except one thing: Merton's awe over receiving a bar of Baker's chocolate from his father as a present. Of course, Merton is a six-year-old child, recently motherless, who is going on an adventure with his artist father. There is a great deal of bitterness, as well as sweetness, in Merton's life at this moment. Perhaps the Baker's chocolate is a perfect metaphor for Merton's journey. Excitement and grief mixing together in the same mouthful.
Isn't that pretty much true of any experience, though? I remember when I was a kid being so tempted by the bar of Baker's chocolate that my mother kept in her kitchen. It was dark and luscious and inviting, especially for a six- or seven-year-old. It smelled like Easter morning. I remember how my mother warned me not to eat that bar of chocolate. "You won't like it," she said, stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce. "Trust me."
I thought she was lying to me. Trying to save the chocolate for herself after I left the kitchen, a special treat only for her. Mother chocolate. But I played along. I left the kitchen and made plans to sneak back later, to sample what I was sure was going to be the best chocolate in the world. That would be the only reason why my mother wouldn't share it. Like the cups of whiskey and 7-Up she drank with my father in the evenings, this chocolate would be full of adult pleasure.
As a second grader, I was fascinated by the story of Adam and Eve. In particular, I was enthralled with the idea of that apple. I wanted to know what it tasted like. It couldn't be as simple as a Red Delicious, with its slightly pesticide-tasting skin and flat, sweet white inside. It had to be more exotic than that. A variety of apple that didn't exist anymore, because God hid it away from the human race forever after Eve's trespass.
That's sort of what I imagined Baker's chocolate tasted like. Full of some kind of dark, chocolaty adult knowledge, like the magazines my brothers hid under their mattresses, away from my parents' reach. So, when my mother was done in the kitchen, the pot of marinara sauce simmering for dinner, I sneaked back in, grabbed a stool, and climbed onto the counter top. I stood up, opened the cupboard, and reached to the top shelf, where my mother had stowed away her forbidden fruit.
Quickly, before anyone had a chance to discover me, I unwrapped the waxy paper from the chocolate, crammed the whole thing into my mouth, and started chewing frantically, as I'm sure the guilty Eve gulped down great swallows of that sinful apple.
And I quickly learned one of the greatest adult lessons of my life--not everything that seems sweet and inviting and irresistible is good. The Baker's chocolate was inedibly bitter. My mouth quickly filled with a thick syrup of grainy, brown spit. I felt my gorge rising. Within seconds, I was curled into the kitchen sink, heaving and spitting and throwing up.
After I was done, I weakly stood back up on the kitchen counter and placed what was left of the Baker's chocolate back on the top shelf of the cupboard. Weakly, I climbed down to the floor. I stumbled from the kitchen, full of guilt and disappointment, not understanding the adult world. How could something that smelled and looked so good taste like unwashed socks?
It was one of my first experiences with adult disappointment. I had been warned, and I had chosen to ignore that warning, like Eve. My reward? Bitter, bitter guilt. I'm sure my mother eventually discovered my teeth marks on that chocolate bar. Probably had quite a good laugh about it, maybe as she was sipping a highball with my dad.
Through the years, I've had to learn that lesson over and over. Adulting kind of sucks. It's often about having to take huge mouthfuls of Baker's chocolate and convincing yourself that it tastes good. Do you accept a difficult life situation--live with an addict, work a shitty job, take daily emotional and/or physical abuse--or do you make the scary choice to change?
It's all about choosing what kind of chocolate you're willing to eat.
Saint Marty prefers Godiva, although he seems to settle for the cheap Palmer kind a lot more often.
It's time Martin starts enjoying Godiva. He deserves it. Brilliant!
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