"The Broken Home," Text and Notes

"The Broken Home"

Crossing the street,
I saw the parents and the child
At their window, gleaming like fruit
With evening’s mild gold leaf.
In a room on the floor below,
Sunless, cooler¹--a brimming
Saucer of wax, marbly and dim—
I have lit what’s left of my life.
I have thrown out yesterday’s milk
And opened a book of maxims.
The flame quickens. The word stirs.
Tell me, tongue of fire²,
That you and I are as real
At least as the people upstairs.

My father³, who had flown in World War I,
Might have continued to invest his life
In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife.
But the race was run below, and the point was to win.
Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze
(Through the smoked glass of being thirty-six)
The soul eclipsed by twin black pupils, sex
And business; time was money in those days.
Each thirteenth year⁴ he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit—rings, cars, permanent waves.
We’d felt him warming up for a green bride.
He could afford it. He was “in his prime”
At three score ten. But money was not time.

When my parents were younger this was a popular act:
A veiled woman would leap from an electric, wine-dark car
To the steps of no matter what—the Senate or the Ritz Bar—
And bodily, at newsreel speed, attack
No matter whom--Al Smith or José María Sert⁵
Or Clemenceau⁶—veins standing out on her throat
As she yelled War mongerer⁷! Pig! Give us the vote!,
And would have to be hauled away in her hobble skirt⁸.
What had the man done? Oh, made history.
Her business (he had implied) was giving birth,
Tending the house, mending the socks.
Always that same old story—
Father Time and Mother Earth⁹,
A marriage on the rocks.

One afternoon¹⁰, red, satyr-thighed
Michael, the Irish setter, head
Passionately lowered, led
The child I was to a shut door. Inside,
Blinds beat sun from the bed.
The green-gold room throbbed like a bruise.
Under a sheet, clad in taboos
Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread,
And of a blackness found, if ever now, in old
Engravings where the acid bit.
I must have needed to touch it
Or the whiteness—was she dead?
Her eyes flew open, startled strange and cold.
The dog slumped to the floor. She reached for me. I fled.

Tonight they have stepped out onto the gravel.
The party is over. It’s the fall
Of 1931. They love each other still.
She: Charlie, I can’t stand the pace.
He: Come on, honey—why, you’ll bury us all!¹¹
A lead soldier guards my windowsill:
Khaki rifle, uniform, and face.
Something in me grows heavy, silvery, pliable.
How intensely people used to feel!
Like metal poured at the close of a proletarian novel,
Refined and glowing from the crucible,
I see those two hearts, I’m afraid,
Still. Cool here in the graveyard of good and evil,
They are even so to be honored and obeyed.

. . . Obeyed, at least, inversely. Thus
I rarely buy a newspaper, or vote.
To do so, I have learned, is to invite
The tread of a stone guest¹² within my house.
Shooting this rusted bolt, though, against him,
I trust I am no less time’s child than some
Who on the heath impersonate Poor Tom
Or on the barricades risk life and limb.
Nor do I try to keep a garden, only
An avocado¹³ in a glass of water—
Roots pallid, gemmed with air. And later,
When the small gilt leaves have grown
Fleshy and green, I let them die, yes, yes,
And start another. I am earth’s no less.

A child, a red dog roam the corridors,
Still, of the broken home. No sound. The brilliant
Rag runners halt before wide open doors.
My old room! Its wallpaper—cream, medallioned
With pink and brown—brings back the first nightmares,
Long summer colds and Emma¹⁴, sepia-faced,
Perspiring over broth carried upstairs
Aswim with golden fats I could not taste.
The real house became a boarding school.
Under the ballroom ceiling’s allegory
Someone at last may actually be allowed
To learn something; or, from my window, cool
With the unstiflement of the entire story,
Watch a red setter stretch and sink in cloud.

Footnotes

1. Sunless, cooler: Merrill wrote to Daryl Hine about heat and
cold being the "governing metaphor" in the poem. (Letter to Hine,
January 17, 1969, Washington University Libraries.)

2. Acts. 2.3. "They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them."

3. Merrill’s parents were Charles E. Merrill (1885-1956), co-founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm, and Hellen Ingram (1898-2000). During World War I, he enlisted in the United States Army and served as a first lieutenant in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps. "[H]e became a test pilot and flight instructor" (Langdon Hammer, James Merrill: Life and Art . NY: Knopf, 2015.)

4. Charles Merrill married Eliza Church in 1912, and Hellen Ingram in 1925. He separated from Hellen in 1937 and was divorced in 1939. The story of his "warming up for a green bride" is told in Merrill's novel The Seraglio.

5. Al Smith (1873-1944) advocated reform in labor laws and other areas and was the Democratic nominee for president, defeated by Herbert Hoover in 1928.

José María Sert was a Spanish painter (1876-1945). His mural American Progress (1934) occupies a wall in the main lobby of what is now Rockefeller Center and replaced one by Diego Rivera that had featured Vladimir Lenin. Judith Moffett recalls that when Merrill was asked why he had chosen Sert's name, he said partly because it rhymed with "skirt" (Reading at Behrend College, Erie PA, April 12, 1973).

6. Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), the prime minister of France (1917-1920), radical Republican turned right-wing nationalist, who favored more severe treatment of Germany at the end of World War I and thus clashed with Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George.

7. A mispronunciation of warmonger.

8. A skirt so narrow at the hem as to impede walking, popular in the early 20th century.

9. Merrill said in an interview "That bit . . . isn't meant as a joke. History in our time has broken faith with Nature. But poems, even those of the most savage incandescence, can't deal frontally with such huge, urgent subjects without sounding grumpy or dated when they should still be in their prime. So my parents' divorce dramatized on a human scale a subject that couldn't have been handled otherwise. Which is what a 'poetic' turn of mind allows for. You don't see eternity except in a grain of sand, or history except at the family dinner table” (CProse 114).

10. This visit to his mother's bedroom is the subject of Merrill's first recorded (in his mother's hand) poem: "Looking at Mummy." Merrill said in an interview: "I had written at least one poem when I was seven or eight. It was a poem about going with the Irish setter into my mother's room--an episode that ended up in "The Broken Home." The Irish Setter was named Michael, and I think the poem began: "One day while she lay sleeping, / Michael and I went peeping" (CProse 115). See the link to "Looking at Mommy" in the left margin. 

11. Merrill's mother died on December 18, 2000 at the age of 102.

12. In the opera Don Giovanni (1787) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), the Stone Guest is the cemetery statue of the Commendatore, whom Don Giovanni has killed. The Commendatore has his revenge when the statue delivers Don Giovanni to Hell.

13. In Merrill's novel The Seraglio (1957), Xenia, who is pregnant, cultivates avocado plants.

14. Emma Davis, African American family servant.