Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
Kathleen Rooney
For Angela, my archivist always,
and
For Eric, forever my favorite flaneur
Acknowledgments
I extend more gratitude than I have the words to express to:
Anthony Antolini, Ann Greenleaf, and all of Margaret Fishback’s extended family; Lisa Bankoff, Abby Beckel, Georgia Bellas, Logan Breitbart, Mitchell Brown, Hope Dellon, Sophia Dembling, Bob Drinan, Christen Enos, Elisa Gabbert, Meryl Gross, Silissa Kenney, Olivia Lilley, Angela McClendon Ossar, Dan Nielsen, Hannah O’Grady, Jen K. Olsen, Eric Plattner, Mitchell Rathberger, Beth Rooney, Martin Seay, Rachel Slotnick, Christine Sneed, Dori Weintraub, and Becky Wills; my family; all the poets who do Poems While You Wait; Lynn Eaton and everyone at the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing at Duke University; my students and colleagues at DePaul University; and anyone who has ever taken a walk with me, literally or metaphorically.
Skiddlee bebop we rock a scoobie doo.
And guess what, America? We love you!
’Cause ya rock and ya roll with so much soul
you can rock till you’re a hundred-and-one years old.
—WONDER MIKE, SUGARHILL GANG, 1979
1
The Road of Anthracite
There once was a girl named Phoebe Snow. She wore only white and held tight to a violet corsage, an emblem of modesty. She was not retiring, though, and her life spun out as a series of journeys through mountain tunnels carved from poetry. I never saw her doing anything besides boarding, riding, or disembarking a train, immaculate always, captivating conductors, enchanting other passengers.
No, there wasn’t. She was just an advertisement: the poster girl for the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. Her unsoilable Antarctic-colored clothes were proof that the line’s anthracite-powered locomotives were clean-burning, truly—unlike their sooty and outfit-despoiling competitors: Her laundry bill for fluff and frill
Miss Phoebe finds is nearly nil.
It’s always light, though gowns of white, Are worn on Road of Anthracite.
*
I was five years old when I first laid eyes on her, on a postcard sent me by my dearest aunt, Sadie Boxfish, my father’s youngest sister, daring and unmarried and living in Manhattan. Sadie visited us in the District of Columbia, but not very often. Her rare physical presence she supplemented with correspondence in snips and flashes. After I scrawled back how much I adored Phoebe, star of the story-poems, they became the only kind of card Sadie ever posted.
The earliest ones my mother read aloud (though I could read): Miss Phoebe Snow has stopped to show
Her ticket at the gate, you know.
The Guard, polite, declares it right.
Of course—it’s Road of Anthracite.
*
Mother clutched me in her lap, talking about the image—Phoebe in a hat, Phoebe in a dining car, Phoebe blue-eyed and mannerly chatting with the engineer—and reciting the poetry: Here Phoebe may, by night or day,
Enjoy her book upon the way.
Electric light dispels the night
Upon the Road of Anthracite.
*
In her clear contralto above my ears I could hear, in her neat bosom behind my head I could feel, her disapproval: not of Phoebe, but of Sadie. My mother—who was well-educated, read widely, passably fluent in German, conversant with the works of Freud and Adler, married at twenty, and never received a dollar of wages in her life—was also a woman who took difference as a slight. Anyone not living a life that fit the mold of her own—wifedom, motherhood—constituted a personal affront, an implied rebuke, an argument against. I thought Sadie quite bold.
“What a smart girl,” my mother would say of Phoebe, who (I saw later) must have been so light and unburdened for having only air, and not one thought or care, in her golden head. Mother, stroking my own red-gold hair, meant only that Phoebe’s frock was smart, or her little white gloves. Not Phoebe herself. Not smartness of that kind.
“Aunt Sadie’s a smart girl,” I said only once. To no reply. To my mother, gritting her small neat teeth, pearly and needle-like, reading that day’s card more loudly than usual: A cozy seat, a dainty treat
Make Phoebe’s happiness complete
With linen white and silver bright
Upon the Road of Anthracite.
*
Sadie, career girl, and Phoebe, socialite, embedded inextricably into one another in my mind. Both of them expressed the inexpressible, suggesting that sex appeal existed but probably ought not to be named while one was living at home. Suggesting not so much a passenger train as speed and freedom, not so much a gown as style, not so much a hairdo as beauty.
Mother saw Sadie as wasting that last, working as hard as a beast of burden as a nurse in a hospital in New York City. Though now I know that Sadie can’t have been living the life of Riley, I wanted to move there and join her. What a smart girl.
My mother resented Sadie like a stepsister resenting Cinderella, but she was polite. She did her no social violence. Was always hospitable and gracious on Sadie’s visits, both as a point of pride and because my father would not have abided otherwise. Though he, too, a lawyer, thought Sadie’s work beneath her.
My devotion to both Phoebe and Sadie has remained constant over the decades. When I think of either, I also think of lofty mountain chains and cool delights.