Sarah Parish has worked as a maid for the Culberton family for more years than she cares to remember. Elise Culberton considers her part of the family, and there are moments when Sarah feels that, in some skip of history, she well could be called a great aunt. But her role as employee is never forgotten, despite the lovely treatment she and her sons Rory and Sy have received from the Culbertons, particularly since her husband`s death 12 years ago. In some ways the three Culberton children are her own. She fed them, bathed them and, most importantly, she read to them.
Sarah`s father had aspired to be a teacher. He ended up working in factories, but he made certain to pass his love of books on to his children. Sarah remembers how he taught his children to turn pages without creasing the paper and how he forbade them to bend back a book`s cover in order to keep it open. Books were to be respected, cared for, read and read again. Sarah Parish passed this love of books on to the Culberton children as well as her own.
Now 14, Rory Parish happily describes his mother`s love affair with books. He tells of the way she traveled miles to the library to fetch books for him and his brother and how she forced them to read Walt Whitman aloud to her. ”I figure I got every word before it clicked in. I liked Frost a whole lot better. My mother says children have to read the classics. She says they`re classics `cause adults and children can read them.”
Sarah brought Rory ”Native Son” and ”The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”
Rory recalls reading both volumes so slowly he thought he would die before completing them. He remembers his lips moving and his mother watching him disapprovingly out of the corner of her eye. ”Good readers don`t have to say the words outright,” she chided him. ”Leave them alone and they`ll filter their way into your mind.”
He remembers, too, his mother buying books for her sons. These were special occasions, for Frederick Parish left his family nothing more than a $10,000 life insurance policy when he died and this, coupled with Sarah`s salary from the Culbertons and the few dollars she earned taking in laundry, hardly allowed for the purchase of many books. Rory was presented with
”Sylvester and the Magic Pebble” on one of his birthdays. He read it over and over again. In fact he read ”Sylvester” and the ”Curious George”
series even after he had entered high school. Sarah believed he was doing homework, but it was ”Curious George and the Man in the Yellow Hat” that fascinated Rory for reasons he never could articulate. Perhaps, Sarah conjectured, he just liked the idea of an older man helping a young troublemaker.
Then there was Roald Dahl. Among the hand-me-downs that Sarah grudgingly accepted from Miss Elise were books that had captivated her own children. Elise Culberton had grinned when she handed the volumes to Sarah in a paper bag. ”Tell your boys it`s okay to play with Dahls.”
Sy loved ”Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and wondered aloud to his mother: ”How`d he think it up? I can`t believe one man really wrote this.”
Rory, being a purist of sorts, noisily proclaimed his dislike of the book because a movie had been made of it. Sarah nodded sarcastically. ”First I had readers, now I`m raising critics.”
Some of the books Sarah brought home from the Culberton`s suburban house clearly were meant for girls. Rory adamantly refused to open anything by Laura Ingalls Wilder, but was instantly intrigued by Judith Kerr`s title: ”When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.” He described as well sitting on the floor of the school library reading Tolkien`s ”The Hobbit.” ”It`s misspelled, ain`t it?” one of his friends wisecracked. ”You`re just too clever,” Rory replied, sounding rather smug. An extraordinary athlete, Rory was the love of librarian Helen Willis: ”That boy sits on the floor and reads his Tolkien day in, day out. I see him grinning, then frowning, then furling his brows. He may not get through more than 10 pages, but he holds that book as if it had diamonds stuck in it.”
One snowy Thanksgiving at the Culberton home, the Culberton children took the Parish boys upstairs into their bedrooms. Soon, laughter was heard downstairs. Shel Silverstein, they related with embarrassment, had been the source of their uproar. Rory came home with 15-year-old Tim Culberton`s copy of ”Where the Sidewalk Ends.” The book was never returned, and the laughter, it turned out, had been mostly generated by Tim reading aloud from a volume by Nancy Friday.
Four years Rory`s senior, Tim also had recommended ”Black Hearts in Battersea” by Joan Aiken. Rory began it but never finished it. Instead, he took from the Culberton stash Norton Juster`s ”The Phantom Tool Booth.” The book was beneath him, he complained to his mother, but he confessed to feeling pride at being able to comprehend instantly something one has read. ”It`s pretty nice, all right,” he said, ”letting your eyes run across that smooth page and feel yourself drinking in ideas and images.
”Reading`s like entering the best school in the world, a school where you really want to be. Sometimes, like when I read `The Sea Wolf,` I actually believed I could feel myself changing. It was the same when my mother read to Sy and me. We`d make her read the same book over and over again. We about killed her if she messed up on a word. But I`d be under the covers feeling just so good . . . I can feel that way even when I`m reading something that upsets me. You ever read `Black Like Me`? That is one scary book. I almost sent it out to the Culbertons. I thought they ought to get something from us in a paper bag.”
Rory Parish was examining the low white bookcase that held every book he had ever owned. ”I`ve got the technique of reading down perfect. Now I`m working on the second stage, recalling knowing what I`m reading; being able to think about it. I like the sounds of the words, what I call the first effect. But after that it`s time to think about it. Like I say, I`m working on that. These books, see, took me though my childhood, now I`m hoping they`ll carry me to manhood. My mother would tell you books can take you beyond that even, because you fall smack dab in the heart of someone else`s life.
”I`ll let myself be entertained. Last week I read `Halloween Party` (by Agatha Christie). Kind of like a TV show. But in school we`re reading `The Diary of Anne Frank.` That`s no entertainment. Neither is (Mark Mathabane`s)
`Kaffir Boy.` Now those people are a part of me. I`m keeping those books. They`ll be right here on this shelf, or locked up tight in my mind. Locked up tight in my mind, most likely.”
Sarah Parish taught her children what she heard her father say many times: ”Books are less make-believe than the world you walk among. They are substantial.” ”The only sacred people on this earth,” he would proclaim in dramatic fashion, ”are authors. You got to plumb your soul and your mind to write a book. And you don`t want to meet an author `cause authors weren`t put on the earth to be met. They were put on the earth to talk to our souls, not our faces.”
Rory and Sy never fully embraced that last sentiment. Simon announced once he would love to meet any author. Rory wanted to know Jack London and Roald Dahl. He said he would settle for a telephone chat with John Howard Griffin.
Even Sarah Parish, granddaughter of South Carolina sharecroppers, who, as a girl, walked to school every day on a red clay road and quit in order to take jobs to support her family, felt sorry she had never met Ezra Jack Keats. She saw him on television and almost died discovering the man was white. How could the authors of ”Skates” and ”Goggles” be white? Still, she felt happy. As she said, ”The boundaries come down when the books go up.”
In the meanwhile, before making her daily two-hour trip to Miss Elise`s, there was time to re-read Rory`s most recent children`s story. It concerned a little boy who complained so often about the number of books in the world and how he couldn`t decide which one to read that when he awoke one morning, all the books had disappeared and the low white shelf in his room was completely empty.
