In the Temple of Vesta

IN THE TEMPLE OF VESTA



It seemed to Marvel that from the moment she was born, she was cut loose to drift in the universe alone, unrecognized and perpetually asking, why?  What is life?  Why do I breathe and move?  Is there any purpose?  One day, when she was six, she determined that the answer was this: To find out that which was true, and eternal, and good, and to say it, and to tell the children, so that they might lead noble lives.  By the time she was ten, she knew that she would go to Normal School, that she might become a real teacher.  She received her diploma in 1913, when she was only 18, and was hired by a school district in the Red River Valley.  She boarded with a farm family that lived several miles from the tiny schoolhouse.  Twice each day she would undo her long black hair and ride her horse Dolly across the plains, as free and powerful as the great goddess Diana herself.  And each night in her in her little room on the third floor of the farmhouse, she would write in her journal.



“Though these children are thirsty for truth and beauty and need me desperately, I know that these dusty, empty, treeless plains are not my real home.  For I know deep in my heart that I belong in the Eternal City of Rome, with its pine-covered hills, its springs, grottoes and gardens, and, most especially, its gods and goddesses.”



Marvel had first come to know this in the library at normal school, reading the archeology reports and gazing for hours at blurry photographs of the Roman Forum, with the row of lovely Vestals, pure and noble, standing outside the ruins of their Atrium. “My truest self is that of a Vestal Virgin, a citizen of Rome!” she wrote.    “I look just like them, and I understand them perfectly!  I do not belong with these ill-mannered northern folk—they will never even begin to understand my feelings and aspirations!  My hair is black, my eyes are brown, and my heart is fierce and wild!  How could cruel fate have gotten it so WRONG?”



Marvel knew the tale of the Vestals better than any other.  Roman girls of impeccable patrician birth are taken from their fathers between the ages of six and ten by the Pontifex Maximus, the high priest.  From that moment the girl is emancipated from patriarchal power, independent, and can even make a will.  She now belongs, for the next 30 years, to no one but herself and the great goddess Vesta, the guardian of the sacred fire, the very source of life and power and beauty, chaste and pure for all eternity.  The girl takes her own vow of chastity and for the next ten years studies the proper ways to tend the fire.  At the end of the 30 years, she is free to marry, but few do.  If the virgin should break her vow, by lying with a man, the punishment is indeed terrible—a small room is prepared below the ground, with only a tiny entrance hole at the top.  In it are a bed, a lamp, a bucket, bread, water, milk and oil, enough for only a few days.  The miserable maiden is bound, covered, and carried through the street, where she is let down into the room on a ladder.  A great pile of earth is placed over the entrance, so no one can hear her cry. 



In her diary Marvel wrote:

“I have a great lifework!  I shall tend the fires of truth and beauty here, right where I am, surrounded by sluggish clods of earth, which the rude swains turn with their shares.  Can I indeed transmute this offal into gold by the sacred alchemical fires of my pure desire?”



And so it was, then, one June night, the air as dense as velvet, the lightning strikes in a perfect bowl all around from sky to earth, like a great circular temple filled with flames, that Marvel sat on the porch of the farm house.  She put down her book of poetry to chat pleasantly with the farmer’s son, and share lemonade and oatmeal cookies.  He was a lively red-haired boy, with at least a million freckles, and so pungently present she could barely stand to breathe.  It was, she reckoned, some admixture of cow manure, chewing tobacco and a week’s worth of man-sweat.  But she continued to chat, because she wanted to know these people, else how could she teach them?  He touched her hand, casually, as she poured the lemonade, and allowed that he would like to, if she were willing, make a regular thing of their evening chats.  She was willing, and presently, as June days went by, the red-haired boy began to bathe more frequently and the hand contacts became more deliberate, and Marvel’s innocent, friendly intentions became transformed into something she did not recognize, something that came up like a prairie wind and snatched away her will and blew it about as if it were a mere tumbleweed. 



It was in July that the stomach sickness came.  She could not bear the smell of cooking food, and could not eat, and the knowledge and the shame of her condition tightened around her heart like iron claws.  She did not, could not, love the red-haired boy—he was foul-tempered and cruel—but the not-marrying was not only even more distasteful, it was unimaginable!  Her teaching job would not survive even the tiniest hint of scandal, and where would she, and her innocent babe, be then?



And so it was done.  Lines from one of her favorite poems, Bryant’s Thanatopsis, rang in her ears:  “Yet a few days, and thee the all-beholding sun shall see no more in all his course, nor yet in the cold ground, where thy pale form was laid, with many tears, nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist thy image.”  Where am I, then, she asked?  What am I now?  The only answer that came to her was this: I am buried alive, suffocated, starved, yet I move, I even speak!  It is death-in-life, life-in-death.



They moved further east, the three of them, having received as wedding presents fifty head of beef cattle and enough cash to build a fine house.  Times were very good then for ranchers, and nursing the red-haired baby girl and choosing lavish furnishings and appliances for their new home made her resting-place, though ultimately dead as a tomb, quite comfortable. She bought a fine Victrola phonograph, and listened daily to the young Italian beauty Amelita Galli-Curci in the role of Gilda in Rigoletto, singing the sublime aria “Caro Nome,” (Carved in my Inmost Heart).  As she gazed at pictures of the lovely raven-haired girl costumed for the role of the tragically betrayed and murdered virgin, she was touched to her soul, an electric thrill.  The identification was complete and delicious beyond imagining.  She even allowed herself to think that perhaps the gods had granted her some tiny portion of pardon for breaking her vows, for she had not only the finest home in three counties, but her own motor-car, as fine as any Vestal in her private chariot going about the city of Rome, enjoying great financial security and social prestige.  In spite of all this, Marvel knew that she was still mostly dead, because although the red-haired beast would often scold and shout at her, she did not really feel it.  There was just enough life left in her body to make the red-haired babies, one every year, and by 1922, there were five more of them.  Seven years passed, pleasantly, unpleasantly--she could not say.



Marvel was in the kitchen one afternoon roasting a turkey when the red-haired beast came in and said that they would all have to go away by the end of the week.  The bank had plundered the ranch like a swarm of locusts, and left them with just enough cash for a month’s rent on a tiny place in a hardscrabble part of the state.  The bank even took the chariots, and so the eight of them had to take the train.



Thenceforward, she knew that the true name of her dwelling-place was the Kingdom of Pluto, the underworld.  It was filled with gray mists rolling off the River Lethe and the strident voices of Di Manes.  Di Manes.  The “good people,” in the ancient language.  But she never trusted them.  They came to her at midday as she toiled at her wood-burning stove, and ruined her good work.  They came at night in a cacophony of doom—all is lost, blighted, and cold.  Di Manes whispered in the ears of the neighbors and even of the red-haired children, and turned them all, all against her.  They even poisoned her chickens and stole her raspberries right off the bushes.  There was only one good, true and pure thing left to believe—that she must never let the fire go out, so that she might nourish the ones in her care by the only means left to her—through food.  Roasts, stews, soups, pies, muffins, cookies, cakes, breads, crullers.  Carefully, to preserve the recipes for the ages, she wrote them all out on white 3x5 cards in black India ink, with a fine fountain pen in a flowing, classical hand.  This practice served her well for those months when her daughters had to tend the fire in her stead, when she had to go away for rests at the state hospital.  As the years passed and the fire burned, the lace curtains, table linens and lamps she had rescued from their first home grew gray with cooking smoke, dust, and the tracks of flies. 



# # #



The red-haired children grow up and move far away. The red-haired beast files for divorce.  She does not resist, and goes to live in a faraway city, in someone else’s home.  But he is lost without her, he does not have a home without her.  So he calls her back.  Again she does not resist.  They remarry on March 1, 1944, Roman New Year’s Day.  But she is not renewed, for she still wanders homeless in the Kingdom of Pluto, the underworld, where time has no meaning.  Each Christmas the children send her new curtains, linens and other furnishings.  She piles them away unopened in a corner upstairs as soon as they arrive. This house was never good enough to decorate, she says to herself.  It is merely shelter from the prairie winds as they howl so cruelly around the corners of this dusty tomb. 



The vows of chastity are kept, foursquare.  She goes to her room at night, the red-haired beast, to his.  She unbinds her long black hair, brushing, brushing, as the last rays of the sun slant through the marble columns of the Atrium Vestale, casting her lovely shadow against the temple walls.



On March 1, 1965, Roman New Year’s Day, a tiny spark of life flares up, the mists part, and she realizes that the thirty years are up, have been for some time! “I must celebrate, for I am free!” she cries, feeling stronger than she has for years.  As she was taught so carefully in the temple concerning the proper way to celebrate this day, she puts out the fire in the stove, saving only a tiny spark, cleans the stove thoroughly, and then fans the relit flame high with pine boughs.  She goes out for eggs to make a cake, trips over a half-wild cat, so like the ones that to this day run loose in the streets of Rome, and falls down the porch steps.  A month later, in the hospital, the children come, and she greets them all, sweetly, calmly, and tells them that she always loved them, no matter what.  The blood clot that had formed in her hip goes to her brain, and in that instant, she becomes fully ALIVE.  As the last breath leaves her, the poet Bryant’s words fill her ears:  “The golden sun, the planets, all the infinite host of heaven, are shining on the sad abodes of death.”  Vesta reaches for her, Vesta is a mighty flame, purer and brighter than a thousand suns in the month of Caesar Augustus.  The incandescent light fills Marvel’s body, her body fills the universe, and Marvel is finally home.