Valley of the Heart's Delight

The Walsh Family

(Horace, Natalie, Blake, and Helen Walsh)

Horace and Natalie Walsh had not only waited until their honeymoon to have sex, they had waited their entire lives. Out of a love seeded initially by Horace’s thoughtfulness and tenderness, rather than tumultuous romance, following the sudden deaths of Helen’s mother and father, quickly came Blake, then Helen. Because Horace was ten years older than Natalie, following the birth of Helen, they decided not to have any more children. The absolute private-ness of their love life, and rare displays of public affection, gave rise to fervid speculation about the lack of physical love in their marriage, a tragic, but inevitable consequence of May-December romances. Horace and Natalie are well aware of such gossip, and find that it not only adds spice and horsepower to their physical intimacy, but humor.

The only bone of contention between the two is the transformation of Natalie’s steady, measured demeanor into a wild-eyed, adrenalin-pumping Medusa when she gets behind the wheel of her massive two-and-one-half-ton, four-door, twelve-cylinder black Packard convertible. Because of Horace’s dismal depth perception which prevents him from ever driving, every ride with Natalie is the equal (in his fevered mind), to a ride on the rollercoaster in Santa Cruz (or what Horace equates to such a ride as he would not even get near that rickety, groaning, matchbox structure that seems to scream even without the riders).

While Horace truly did acknowledge Blake’s graduation from college with of a convertible, at the root of this generosity was the opportunity for Blake to take over the driving duties from Natalie.

Before Blake and Helen became teen-agers, they performed ongoing Saturday (and holiday), skits for their parents. The centerpieces of their repertoire were collisions between toy cars, trucks, buses, and trains; the smaller the car and the bigger the truck, the better (better yet, the involvement of a cliff). Natalie’s and Horace’s studied amusement only inspired the dreadfulness and bathos of each production. While it was alive, the self-rejuvenating victim in these dramas was a green parrot named Armand. Armand made it through these catastrophes with hardly a squawk, but would screech resentfully when placed inside Blake’s parrot ambulance (he had painted it green), to be driven back, siren blaring, to the green parrot operatory.

When Armand suffered a horrible death in the jaws of a neighbor’s cat that had snuck into the Walsh home during a heated performance, the show continued parrot-less, but clearly lacked verisimilitude. Helen, rather than being emotionally shattered like Blake after witnessing the literally bone-crunching demise of Armand, took everything in stride and orchestrated an elaborate burial complete with a headstone made of cardboard with Armand spelled wrong (Blake crossed out the offending vowel and replaced it with the correct one). Helen’s officiating included a lugubrious panegyric to Armand, and a surfeit of “blessed” water from Natalie’s Scottish copper watering can. Blake’s chest-heaving sobs provided the score.

When Blake was nine years old on one of the few times that the children went to Carmel with their parents, he was bitten by a deer tick, and became infected with what we now know as Lyme Disease. Back then, the diagnosis ranged from dementia praecox to Dengue fever, and resulted in Blake being treated with every potion, pill, patent medicine, and electrical device available to medical practitioners at the time. If the Lyme disease wasn’t going to kill Blake, the treatments were if Horace had not put an end to them. Natalie, still desperately worried about Blake, attended Mass every morning to a mission chapel about a mile from their home, and spent most free moments at prayer. When Blake recovered because treatment was stopped, Natalie believed fervently that it was her prayer that had cured him. It was no problem for Horace to give the credit for Blake’s cure to God. The fact that God had also created the cures that nearly ended Blake’s life he kept to himself.

Blake, totally disinterested in sports while in high school, carried a baseball glove everywhere for a number of years. The glove, one would think pristine from its lack of the use for which it had been designed, appeared to have been seasoned in the major leagues. Blake knew he could count on the lack of curiosity that installed automatically the instant his mother sat behind the wheel of her assault vehicle, so he regularly placed the glove under one of the wheels of his mother’s car in the garage. After sensing the slight bump whenever she backed out of the garage, not once did Natalie get out and look to see what caused it.