Read an Excerpt

Silk Parachute

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

SILK PARACHUTE

When your mother is ninety-nine years old, you have so many memories of her that they tend to overlap, intermingle, and blur. It is extremely difficult to single out one or two, impossible to remember any that exemplify the whole.

It has been alleged that when I was in college she heard that I had stayed up all night playing poker and wrote me a letter that used the word "shame" forty-two times. I do not recall this.

I do not recall being pulled out of my college room and into the church next door.

It has been alleged that on December 24, 1936, when I was five years old, she sent me to my room at or close to 7 P.M. for using four-letter words while trimming the Christmas tree. I do not recall that.

The assertion is absolutely false that when I came home from high school with an A-minus she demanded an explanation for the minus.

It has been alleged that she spoiled me with protectionism, because I was the youngest child and therefore the most vulnerable to attack from overhead — an assertion that I cannot confirm or confute, except to say that facts don't lie.

We lived only a few blocks from the elementary school and I routinely ate lunch at home. It is reported that the following dialogue and ensuing action occurred on January 22, 1941:

"Eat your sandwich."

"I don't want to eat my sandwich."

"I made that sandwich, and you are going to eat it, Mister Man. You filled yourself up on penny candy on the way home, and now you're not hungry."

"I'm late. I have to go. I'll eat the sandwich on the way back to school."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

Allegedly, I went up the street with the sandwich in my hand and buried it in a snowbank in front of Dr. Wright's house. My mother, holding back the curtain in the window of the side door, was watching. She came out in the bitter cold, wearing only a light dress, ran to the snowbank, dug out the sandwich, chased me up Nassau Street, and rammed the sandwich down my throat, snow and all. I do not recall any detail of that story. I believe it to be a total fabrication.

There was the case of the missing Cracker Jack at Lindel's corner store. Flimsy evidence pointed to Mrs. McPhee's smallest child. It has been averred that she laid the guilt on with the following words: "Like mother like son' is a saying so true, the world will judge largely of mother by you." It has been asserted that she immediately repeated that proverb three times, and also recited it on other occasions too numerous to count. I have absolutely no recollection of her saying that about the Cracker Jack or any other controlled substance.

We have now covered everything even faintly unsavory that has been reported about this person in ninety-nine years, and even those items are a collection of rumors, half-truths, prevarications, false allegations, inaccuracies, innuendos, and canards.

This is the mother who — when Alfred Knopf wrote her twenty-two-year-old son a letter saying, "The readers' reports in the case of your manuscript would not be very helpful, and I think might discourage you completely" — said, "Don't listen to Alfred Knopf. Who does Alfred Knopf think he is, anyway? Someone should go in there and k-nock his block off." To the best of my recollection, that is what she said.

I also recall her taking me, on or about March 8, my birthday, to the theatre in New York every year, beginning in childhood. I remember those journeys as if they were today. I remember "A Connecticut Yankee." Wednesday, March 8, 1944. Evidently, my father had written for the tickets, because she and I sat in the last row of the second balcony. Mother knew what to do about that. She gave me for my birthday an elegant spyglass, sufficient in power to bring the Connecticut Yankee back from Vermont. I sat there watching the play through my telescope, drawing as many guffaws from the surrounding audience as the comedy on the stage.

On one of those theatre days — when I was eleven or twelve — I asked her if we could start for the city early and go out to LaGuardia Field to see the comings and goings of airplanes. The temperature was well below the freeze point and the March winds were so blustery that the wind-chill factor was forty below zero. Or seemed to be. My mother figured out how to take the subway to a stop in Jackson Heights and a bus from there — a feat I am unable to duplicate to this day. At LaGuardia, she accompanied me to the observation deck and stood there in the icy wind for at least an hour, maybe two, while I, spellbound, watched the DC-3s coming in on final, their wings flapping in the gusts. When we at last left the observation deck, we went downstairs into the terminal, where she bought me what appeared to be a black rubber ball but on closer inspection was a pair of hollow hemispheres hinged on one side and folded together. They contained a silk parachute. Opposite the hinge, each hemisphere had a small nib. A piece of string wrapped round and round the two nibs kept the ball closed. If you threw it high into the air, the string unwound and the parachute blossomed. If you sent it up with a tennis racquet, you could put it into the clouds. Not until the development of the multi-megabyte hard disk would the world ever know such a fabulous toy. Folded just so, the parachute never failed. Always, it floated back to you — silkily, beautifully — to start over and float back again. Even if you abused it, whacked it really hard — gracefully, lightly, it floated back to you.

SEASON ON THE CHALK

The massive chalk of Europe lies below the English Channel, under much of northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and — from Erith Reach to Gravesend — under fifteen miles of the lower Thames. My grandson Tommaso appears out of somewhere and picks up a cobble from the bottom of the Thames. The tide is out. The flats are broad between the bank and the water. Small boats, canted, are at rest on the riverbed. Others, farther out on the wide river, are moored afloat — skiffs, sloops, a yawl or two. Tommaso is ten. The rock in his hand is large but light. He breaks it against the revetment bordering the Gordon Promenade, in the Riverside Leisure Area, with benches and lawns under oaks and chestnuts, prams and children, picnics under way, newspapers spread like sails, and, far up the bank, a stall selling ice cream. He cracks the cobble into jagged pieces, which are whiter than snow. Chalked graffiti line the revetment and have attracted the attention of Tommaso, who now starts his own with the letter "R."

One of the stranded skiffs is painted a bright orange, and large letters on its tilted-up side say "The Crown and Thistle Public House." A yellow skiff, also askew, says "The Terrace Tavern Public House." A red one represents "The George Inn, Queen Street." When the tide has turned and the skiffs are up on the water, the pubs race one another. This is the beginning of the Thames Estuary, where, in centuries gone, a thousand ships would be anchored, waiting to go up into London.

"O"

Tommaso is taking his time with these letters, because he is using an ambitious font. The lines that have formed the "R" and the "O" are four inches wide. An armada of swans, in single file, swims out from near shore and toward the center of the river — thirty-eight swans. Here, above the chalk, is where the Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor, waiting for the tide to turn, while

the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

Marlow then described to his friends on the yawl's deck his journey to the heart of darkness.

"C"

Tommaso goes to Fulham Prep, and recently bet a number of his classmates a pound apiece that he would not win the Form Prize. He won the Form Prize and went bankrupt.

"K"

With his rendering of ROCK, he has won the admiration of his grandfather for his evident devotion to earth science. He has also drawn a crowd. Average age: seven. Quietly and respectfully, they watch this older artist, his concentration undisturbed. He leaves some space and begins a new word, with another "O." In the Nellie's time, the last decade of the nineteenth century, the river here at Gravesend was full of troop ships, cargo ships, and emigrant ships, waiting on tides. And more than tides. They sometimes waited for weeks before sailing. On hulks and barges, boatmen serving the ships lived on the river with their families and with their cats, dogs, chickens, sheep, and cows. Now downriver comes the Tor Belgia, out of London, with a six-deck rear house, followed by the Arco Humber, spewing bilge, a floating cadaver of ulcerated rust. Pilot boats, ratlike, scurry away from these tankers. Docked across the river in Tilbury is the Russian ship Annoya, of nine Cyrillic letters and a six-deck house. A motor yacht goes by, so elegant that it appears to be lost — seems to be seeking Lake Geneva.

"N"

ROCK ON. I didn't say he was William Butler Yeats. He is Tommaso U. P. McPhee, son of Luca Passaleva and Jenny McPhee, brother of six-year-old Leandro McPhee, who is the least quiet member of Tommaso's attentive crowd. With a large white "S," a second line begins, and gradually becomes SKI- MAN, a character in a screenplay that Tommaso has written and intends to direct. Backdropping this scene, up the bank above the prams and the Sunday papers, are the parapets and big guns of an eighteenthcentury fort, vastly amplified in the nineteenth by Chinese Gordon of Khartoum, and meant to blow out of service anything afloat that might threaten London. Tommaso adds a peace symbol to his completed graffito.

East of Gravesend is a town called Chalk, with a thoroughfare called Chalk Road, a barber's called Chalk Cuts, and a neighborhood called Chalk Park, where mobile homes have tile roofs. In a cottage still standing on Chalk Road, Charles Dickens spent the honeymoon of his ill-fated marriage, picking at "The Pickwick Papers." The M2 runs on the chalk as far as Faversham, where the chalk drifts southeast to Deal and Dover and the Kentish cliffs above the English Channel. From the water, in the approach to Dover, the chalk cliffs under their cap of vegetation are like the filling in a broken wafer, a cross- sectional exposure of the nation's basement. More resistant than some rocks to the effects of weather, the chalk stands high, and its landform suggests on a magnified scale the swells and waves in the water beside it. This karst topography, as it is called, carries on toward London as the North Downs, and from any number of its high points the view to the south goes uninterrupted for thirty-odd miles before it is stopped by an east-west band of high chalk that more than suggests a range of mountains. The reciprocal scene, northward, from Devil's Dyke or Ditchling Beacon or almost anywhere on the ridgeline of the South Downs, was described by John Constable in 1824 as "perhaps the most grand and affecting natural landscape in the world — and consequently a scene the most unfit for a picture." Easily, instantly, your eyes take in a thousand square miles of low terrain in pastel greens and browns, a region too broad to be called a valley but known since Anglo-Saxon England as the Weald. "It is the business of a painter not to contend with nature," the surprising Constable explained, "but to make something out of nothing, in attempting which he must almost of necessity become poetical." And, true to his artistic standards, this surpassing English landscape painter sketched almost nothing of the hackneyed panorama of the Weald.

The South Downs Way, a public and ancient footpath through fields and over stiles and under notably few trees, stays up on the highest ground between Eastbourne and Winchester — a hundred miles. In billows of chalk, the Downs rise from the sea and go on rising northward to elevations approaching a thousand feet, culminating in the escarpment that plunges to the Weald. The declivity is so steep that funiculars have been built to ascend it. Spring-line villages developed at the base, where waters come out of the chalk. To the Anglo-Saxons a weald was a woodland and a mountain was a dun. Words that were good enough for Caedmon and Bede are not for recycling now. So the Downs are up and the Weald is down, beyond the spring-line towns.

East of Ditchling Beacon, where bonfires signalled the approach of the Armada, the South Downs Way passes close to Breaky Bottom. This is a small, deep, roughly circular valley countersunk in the highest chalk, walled in on all sides by rims about a mile across — an enclosed coombe. A form of dry chalk valley, it has no stream. Not many miles from Brighton and Hove, it seems nonetheless as remote as a valley in Nevada. Sequestered, secretive, sheltered from its windswept environs, it has an intimate and fairly level floor that is covered with orderly rows of vines. I would like to say that I arrived on foot, coming off the ridge, but I was actually a passenger in an aqua Audi driven by H. G. T. P. Doyne-Ditmas, of Brighton. We came up past Piddinghoe on the River Ouse and on by steep fields full of rolled hay to a whitish chalk track, pitted and rutted, extending a mile and a half beyond a sign that said "No Through Road."

We descend, helically, and park under a horse chestnut near a flint wall, a house, a flint barn. We step into a scene of utter quiet. Call this the most peaceful place in Europe — willows over the flint garden wall, a line of poplars against the sky, cattle like brown pebbles far up the circumvallate grazings, fewer than few human inhabitants, proprietor nowhere in sight. He is in his kitchen, conferring with a buyer.

While we wait, we walk among the grapes — Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Seyval Blanc, as Doyne-Ditmas is aware, because he discovered Breaky Bottom some years ago, and tasted the still and the sparkling wines, and later rang up a former colleague of his who had become Deputy Private Secretary to the Queen, and suggested that Her Majesty's government buy and serve this patriotic wine, especially the generic champagne. Think of it — English champagne! From the Palace, the former colleague said thank you very much but the government already are a Breaky Bottom customer, and the champagne — or, strictly speaking, the méthode champenoise sparkling wine — is much in use "for government entertainment, including entertainment by the Queen."

Doyne-Ditmas has a fraternal niece named Caroline, who was Princess Anne's head groom during Princess Anne's competitive equestrian years and is now one of Anne's ladies-in-waiting. At the equestrian events, Caroline was sometimes asked by Special Branch police officers if she was "related to Mr. Doyne-Ditmas of the Box." She affirmed that she was. The Box is MI5.

Peter Hall, proprietor and viticulteur, comes out of the house, says goodbye to his customer under the chestnut, and turns to us. He is wearing a white T-shirt, and he's a man of middle height, with friendly eyes, an intelligent pate, a fringe of white hair, a tanned face, a white beard, and a talent for non-stop talking. First off, he orients us to our surroundings by quoting "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Demetrius to Helena: "I'll run from thee and hide me in the brakes."

Next he tells us that his mother was French, his father English, and his brother died of AIDS in New York. His father was the author of a memoir on fly-fishing in Scotland. His brother is commemorated on the labels of Breaky Bottom's Cuvée Rémy Alexandre. Peter Hall says "vinn yard," accent on the "yard." "I've always liked small scale," he continues. "I'm happy to be the owner-driver of what I do." At the moment, he has only about fifty thousand bottles laid up in various stages of development. Recent government orders have brought him "thirteen thousand nine hundred pounds of taxpayers' money." We go into his flint barn. His fermentation tanks are from Italy. His wine press, French, looks expensive and a great deal less nauseating than a stomp of bare feet. It is a stainless cylinder with an interior bag. Come harvest, grapes go into the cylinder. The bag swells with compressed air and squeezes the grapes. The air goes out; then the bag refills, and squeezes the grapes a little more. How much did the thing cost?

"Twenty-five thousand quid," Peter Hall says.

Nobody says "quid" anymore, Doyne-Ditmas is silently reflecting.

The Breaky Bottom cave is not down in the chalk, as one would expect. It is a large space in the barn — sealed, insulated, firmly kept at twelve degrees Celsius by a pricey air-conditioner. How pricey?

"Ten thousand quid. To burrow into the chalk would have been a hundred thousand quid."

Peter Hall came here in the nineteen-sixties on an internship after taking an agricultural degree at Newcastle University. Breaky Bottom was a wheat and cattle farm. He lived "in a tiny cottage and worked for the farmer." After his year was up, he asked if he could stay another year. "As long as you don't talk so much," the farmer said. Peter married the farmer's daughter. They produced four children, and the farmer offered him a tenancy. Now the marriage is in the past, Peter has a different companion, and the farmer is dead.

On the six planted acres at the bottom of the dry chalk valley, the behavior of water is unpredictable. The coombe is, in effect, a giant cistern collecting rain, of which there is no shortage. But chalk is porous, and, in Peter's words, "the chalk takes all the water." When it receives so much that it can hold no more, this streamless basin develops a full-bore flood. Such an event occurs roughly once in five years, leaving almost enough time for a vintner to become complacent.

"I've flooded five times," Peter says.

What does that do to the vines?

"It buggers them up. Vines like their feet dry." Just as vines do around Reims and Épernay, in the province of Champagne, in northeastern France, where the wines owe their speciality in large part to the chalk that holds the roots of the vines. Chalk, like limestone, endows a fertile soil. The province has two principal areas, with differing bedrock — Wet Champagne, on sands and clays, and Dry Champagne, on younger chalk — and the Taittingers, Mumms, and Piper-Heidsiecks come off the chalk of Dry Champagne. Relatively dry Champagne. The chalk feeds water to the vines.

---

Excerpted from Silk Parachute by John McPhee. Copyright © 2010 John McPhee. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---