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Wednesday
An unexpected gift of reading Swann’s Way, my Lenten project, has been to find myself plunged into memories of my own childhood. In other words, I have been inspired to go searching for my own lost time. When the narrator describes a childhood friendship he develops with Swann’s daughter Gilberte, I think of Chris Mayfield.
Chris was a friend in third, fourth, and fifth grades when her father, Judd, was attending Sewanee’s School of Theology. Despite the relatively short time period, Chris occupies an outsized place in my imagination, just as Gilberte does in that of Proust’s narrator.
First to Gilberte, whom the narrator initially encounters only at a distance. Her father regularly dines with his family in Combray, their country home away from Paris, and the narrator first sees her when he is walking past the Swann house:
Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being. A little girl, with fair, reddish hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles.
When he hears Gilberte’s mother call out her name, he feels he has encountered “a talisman which might, perhaps, enable me some day to rediscover her whom its syllables had just endowed with a definite personality, whereas, a moment earlier, she had been only something vaguely seen.”
And indeed, he will later and unexpectedly encounter Gilberte in Paris when he is taken for walks on the Champs Elysée. She invites him to join in a game she is playing with friends, and he falls hopelessly in love with her. Or at least puppy love.
The love is not, nor could it be, reciprocated since the narrator so idealizes Gilberte. As a result, for every happy moment, there are many more unhappy ones. First, here’s a memory he treasures:
We got ready to play and, since this day which had begun so sadly was destined to end in joy, as I went up, before the game started, to the friend with the sharp voice whom I had heard, that first day, calling Gilberte by name, she said to me: “No, no, I’m sure you’d much rather be in Gilberte’s camp; besides, look, she’s signalling to you.” She was in fact summoning me to cross the snowy lawn to her camp, to ‘take the field,’ which the sun, by casting over it a rosy gleam, the metallic lustre of old and worn brocades, had turned into a Field of the Cloth of Gold.
Even this happy occasion, however, only serves to accentuate the unhappy ones. As the narrator observes, “This day, which I had begun with so many misgivings, was, as it happened, one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched.”
He’s wretched in part because the relationship is almost entirely one-sided. He reports being a little boy obsessed with someone who is not obsessed in return:
For, although I no longer thought, now, of anything save not to let a single day pass without seeing Gilberte…yet those moments which I spent in her company, for which I had waited with so much impatience all night and morning, for which I had quivered with excitement, to which I would have sacrificed everything else in the world, were by no means happy moments; well did I know it, for they were the only moments in my life on which I concentrated a scrupulous, undistracted attention, and yet I could not discover in them one atom of pleasure. All the time that I was away from Gilberte, I wanted to see her, because, having incessantly sought to form a mental picture of her, I was unable, in the end, to do so, and did not know exactly to what my love corresponded. Besides, she had never yet told me that she loved me. Far from it, she had often boasted that she knew other little boys whom she preferred to myself, that I was a good companion, with whom she was always willing to play, although I was too absent-minded, not attentive enough to the game.
My own relationship with Chris was nothing like this. First of all, as we lived in the same wooden apartment building—situated where Sewanee’s library now stands—and as we were in the same class in school, I saw her all the time. In other words, I didn’t have to conjure her up in my imagination.
Nor did I idealize her, at least not then. Still, she was my best friend and I did find her remarkable. Here are a few memories that I have carried around with me in the 60 or so years since we were playmates:
–I remember her arguing loudly for women’s rights with some boy in fourth grade. I believe the issue was whether the Girl Scouts or the Boy Scouts were founded first, and while I remember asking her why this mattered, I see now she was pushing against boys with an entitled sense of their superiority. I’m sure she became a feminist, like the woman I myself married.
–I also remember her telling me, with horror in her voice, about how sometime in the future as a girl, she would start bleeding every month. She found this to be terribly unfair whereas I was grossed out and didn’t want to hear any more about it.
–Chris introduced me to the Narnia books—this when we were in third grade—and I can still remember her showing me The Silver Chair. She wanted us to put out our hands out and pray to Aslan, like Jill and Eustace, so that we would be transported to Narnia. I thought this was weird but went along.
–I believe she also introduced me to Tolkien, whose books would become the great love of my childhood (followed closely by Narnia). When I wrote to Tolkien and he sent me (along with his letter) a signature “to paste in one of your books,” I gave the signature to Chris.
–In fourth grade, when my mother was teaching our class French, Chris wrote a French version of Snow White for a play that our class performed. For having done so, she was offered any role she wanted and chose the wicked stepmother. She recognized that the stepmother was far more interesting than Snow White.
–Once, when we were building a shelter with sticks we found in the yard, I thought it would be more efficient to use boards from our jungle gym. Without consulting her, I replaced the sticks with boards. She was so furious with me that she wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the day, and I have carried that lesson with me ever since. (It’s the process, not the final product, that’s important.)
–For some reason, Chris was always late to school. I remember one morning, however, when she was proud to have gotten there before me—only to feel upstaged when I came with the announcement that my youngest brother had been born overnight.
–I also remember envying her that she had a bicycle and I didn’t. We would walk home from school together—she walking her bicycle—but she would take off down a steep hill when we reached it and then see how far she could pedal up the ascent on the other side. Wanting to experience the same thrill, I borrowed her younger brother’s bicycle (without asking) and set off for that same hill—and had a painful crash when I hit a pothole.
I regard it as primarily my fault that we lost touch after she left Sewanee, her father having become a rector in a Pensacola, Florida church. I’m pretty sure she would have written if I had, but I’m a lousy correspondent and never followed up my vague yearnings to find out how her life had gone. I have no idea how to get in touch with her now.
Proust writes that “the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment,” but I don’t know if it is regret so much as curiosity that has me thinking of Chris now. If a reunion were ever to occur, I would not be sad that she didn’t live up to certain images I have of her because I think she would be far more interesting now than she was then. After all, she’s had a whole life of experiences, as have I. I’ve heard that she has three daughters and that she edited a collection of essays—Growing Up Southern—which means that it would be fascinating to learn about how the girl I knew became the woman she became.
I’m not sure how to make it happen. But I’m open to it if it does.