FOUR
1
Today, among other junk mail, there was a questionnaire from some research outfit, addressed apparently to a sampling of senior citizens and wishing to know intimate things about my self-esteem. It is their hypothesis that a decline in self-esteem is responsible for many of the overt symptoms of aging. God knows where they got my name. Ben Alexander, maybe; his finger is in all those pies, and always stirring.
I looked at some of the questions and threw the thing in the fireplace. Another of those socio-psycho-physiological studies suitable for computerizing conclusions already known to anyone over fifty. Who was ever in any doubt that the self-esteem of the elderly declines in this society which indicates in every possible way that it does not value the old in the slightest, finds them an expense and an embarrassment, laughs at their experience, evades their problems, isolates them in hospitals and Sunshine Cities, and generally ignores them except when soliciting their votes or ripping off their handbags and their Social Security checks? And which has a chilling capacity to look straight at them and never see them. The poor old senior citizen has two choices, assuming he is well enough off to have any choices at all. He can retire from that hostile culture to the shore of some shuffleboard court in a balmy climate, or he can shrink in his self-esteem and gradually become the cipher he is constantly reminded he is.
What bothered me about Césare Rulli’s visit if not the lacerations it left on my self-esteem?
The responses that I feel more and more when we step out into the unsafe surrounding world are doubled and tripled every time we go down to the Stanford campus, as we did yesterday afternoon to hear the Guarneri Quartet. Inside. the hall, all’s well. Music is a great democratizer. There are as many white and gray heads in the audience as dark or blond ones. Attitudes are suspended in favor of appreciation, you see a few people you know, you are smiled and waved at, you feel the solidarity of common tastes and interests you have spent your life acquiring, and you participate, even though an outsider, in the community of the university.
But go outside after the concert and you step out of security into hazard, out of the culture into the counterculture. All around the terrace the young roam, or sprawl, or lounge. White Plaza has a sort of bazaar, a stretch of blankets and quilts and plastic groundcloths on which are displayed belts, handbags, macramé flowerpot hangers, and other kinds of the junk that Gertrude Stein called “ugly things all made by hand.” The wives, children, and dogs of the artists tend them and sleep among them. Students pour back and forth, or sit arguing at the union’s tables, or read propped against trees. They are not hostile and contemptuous as they were a few years ago; they just don’t see you. They will move their feet off a table if you sit down at it, or pull in their legs if you fall over them. They don’t seem offended that you exist, only surprised. It is unsafe to approach a swinging door too close behind one of them. If you get there first, and pause to hold it open for them, they bolt on through with an alert, sidelong, surprised look, both puzzled and offended, as if your act of courtesy had been a trap they had just managed to evade.
In the plaza and along the walks, their ten-speed bicycles come up behind you silently and swiftly, and without bell or warning whiz by you within two feet at twenty miles an hour, leaving you with a cold shock of adrenalin in your guts and a weakness in your knees, and in your head a vision of your humiliated old carcass lying on the pavement, pants tom, knees bloody, arms broken, glasses smashed. You wonder if they’d notice you then.
“What do you expect?” Ruth asks, getting quite exercised over my grumblings. “They’ve got their own concerns, why should they notice you or me? Do you expect them to whisper to each other, ‘Who’s that distinguished-looking couple that just went by?’ Do you think they should stand aside and pull their forelocks at you?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said.
“It’s just your vanity.”
“Okay, it’s just my vanity. The fact remains that every time I come into this plaza I feel self-conscious, and uneasy, and like a freak—an ignored freak. And I resent being made to feel like a freak by a bunch of real freaks, self-made.”
“I wish you weren’t so prejudiced,” she said hopelessly. “It would do you good to have more contact with young people. You need it even more than they do.”
“Yes?” I said. “How do you make these contacts? It wasn’t the old who declared that feud.”
“Feud! What feud? I’ll bet if you’d just accept one of those invitations to talk to classes you’d find out there isn’t any feud at all. That destructive phase is all past, everybody keeps telling us. It went out with Vietnam. These are just healthy normal kids going about their business in a place where they have every right to feel at home and you and I don’t.”
“They obviously do and I obviously don’t,” I said. “Come on, let’s get out of here and take our walk.”
“It might be good for you,” Ruth said.
Maybe good for me, but not comfortable. That spell of mucking out my culvert in the rain just about fixed me. I limped and hobbled—maybe exaggerating just a little for Ruth’s benefit, to emphasize my legitimacy as an oldster. Her response was not sympathetic, though I thought I detected doubt in her glances now and then, and caught her just about ready to ask if I felt well enough to go on.
Actually I was enjoying it, in spite of the rheumatiz. We walked all around the hill where the older faculty houses are, and all the way, in the big opulent yards, the mimosa made yellow globes among the other trees—pure forsythia-yellow, the true color of spring—and there were whiffs of daphne, and manure, and mushroom compost, and the pleasant sight of gardeners working. The briskness of the air got us to walking faster than I really wanted to. I wanted to saunter and savor, because this was clearly not the country of the young, this was civilization of a pleasant and reassuring kind, the kind I have been trying to earn citizenship in ever since I was old enough to know what I wanted.
We rounded the hill and came down along Frenchman’s Creek, running a steady little stream after the rains, and pooling above old weirs. There we overtook Bruce and Rosie Bliven, bundled up in overcoats and armed with canes and walking with brittle briskness.
They have lived on the campus ever since he retired as editor of the New Republic many years ago. Since retiring, he has had about three heart attacks and written about five books, and it is a cinch that at eighty-five or whatever he is he still contemplates five books more, and may be halfway through the next one. His last Christmas letter contained a line that should be engraved above every geriatric door. He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man with something the matter with him. He has a sweet humorous face and an innocent resilience that make me ashamed of myself. As an apologist for old age he is better than Ben Alexander, even. And Rosie can make you feel good at a hundred yards, just by the sight of her. Bruce says she is always trying to help old ladies of sixty down steps.
We chatted awhile under the pepper trees and parted, and they went back up along the creek with their canes, talking as if they had just met after long separation and had a lot to catch up on.
“Aren’t they a cute pair,” Ruth said.
I thought I detected a monitory tone. “Mellowed by age,” I said.
“Oh, come on!” she said impatiently. “You can admire them without getting off on the young again.”
“Brace yourself,” I said. “Here come a couple.”
They came toward us arm in arm, the girl sashaying out and swinging her long skirts as if in a square dance, and turning to look up into her companion’s mat of whiskers with a teasing sort of adoration. As we came close they both looked at us directly, and smiled, and said softly, “Hello.”
Startled, we replied. They passed on. Ruth was ready to pop with self-righteousness. “What about the surly young?” she said. “How about that feud?”
But I defused her with a reasonable response. “That�
��s all it takes,” I said. “That’s all it would ever have taken. They noticed us, they were civil, they appeared to be closely related to the human species. God bless them, if they’ll act human they can wear all the granny dresses and whiskers their little hearts desire.”
“All you need is one pretty girl to speak to you, or one boy to act respectful, and you melt.”
“Was she pretty? In that getup, who could tell? But okay, you’re absolutely right. I’m a pushover. Just let them beware of undermining my self-esteem, that’s all. Now how about heading home? I’m cold, and my toe joints are killing me.”
“Ah, poor lamb, I’ve walked you too far.” She took my arm, perhaps remembering the way the girl had swung on the elbow of her boy friend. “But don’t you like this? Don’t you like walking down here where something is going on and there’s more to see than leaves to be swept up or wood to be cut? I wish you’d talk to a class, if they ask you again. I might even try to audit something, if they’d let me.”
“The innocence of age,” I said. “If you were black, sure. Since you’re female, fine. If you were blind, deaf, crippled, absolutely. But if you’re old, you’re up against discrimination that doesn’t even know it’s discrimination. You’d just better stay out of it.”
“Oh pooh. At least I don’t go around with a chip on my shoulder.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, “did you ever see anybody put a chip on his shoulder and dare somebody else to knock it off? Where do we get clichés like that? Tom Sawyer or some place, I suppose. Maybe once, down in some Mississippi woodyard, somebody made his dare like that, and forever after we have no way to express challenge but that stupid metaphor.”
“Please,” she said. “Not another tirade about what’s wrong with the world. Can’t we just finish our walk in peace, and enjoy it, and maybe come down again? Will you? With or without a chip on your shoulder?”
“Sure, why not? So long as we stay away from that plaza.”
“All right, let’s do it,” she said. She was being bright and chatty and unchallenging, and she hung onto my arm. “What’s in tonight’s installment of the journal?”
“I don’t know. I guess the ancestral castle of Øreby.”
“Is it ... unhappy? Will it bother you? Because if it does, we don’t have to do it.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Good. Don’t you sort of like having it ahead of us? Something to look forward to in the evenings?”
“If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way I like it.”
“Just so it doesn’t depress you and make you gloomy. You scare me when you get the way you were last night, lashing out at everything, including yourself. You know you don’t believe everything you said.”
I was not so sure of that as she was, but I wasn’t in a mood to be contrary. “Put it down to historical queasiness,” I said. “I always did get a little seasick riding backwards.”
Seasick or not, we were at it again after dinner, summing up a day or a life.
2
May 21, Øbrebyslot, Lolland:
As she usually is when I get around to communing with my Geist, Ruth is asleep, this time in a canopied four-poster, a real lit du roi, the duplicate of the one I am in. The room is enormous—two rooms, actually, two of about twenty in this wing—with casement windows through which come stray tree- and cloud-interrupted streaks of moonlight and a smell of lilacs and lindens. As the trees outside move in a night wind, the moonlight sneaks across the room and touches Ruth’s bed, and then scoots back to the windows as if afraid it might have awakened her. Fat chance. As for me, I hunch here under a dinky forty-watt bulb (why are Europeans, even in castles, so scared of adequate lighting?) with no more likelihood of sleeping than of understanding what’s been going on.
What was going on at lunch, for example? The countess promised to explain later, but we haven’t seen her since. And what aborted dinner—the, old lady’s illness, as advertised, or something else? And who is Miss Weibull? Most of all, why did I, fifty years old, out of shape, out of practice, just recovering from a long spell of illness, accept the challenge of the werewolf who runs this place, and try to beat his brains out on the tennis court? He comes on me like Sir Kay the Seneschal coming on the Connecticut Yankee, and says to me, “Fair Sir, will ye just?” and instead of saying, “What are you giving me? Get along back to your circus or I’ll report you,” I take him on. My hand is blistered, the skin is peeled off the bottoms of my feet, and I am already so stiff that if I tried to get out of bed I would break in two. I deserve a coronary, as Ruth did not fail to point out while we were eating the dinner that Room Service brought up.
But I have made my pilgrimage to my mother’s cottage. It was as meaningless as I knew it would be. The cultural vitamin deficiency is not appeased by nibbling the clay and plaster of the old home. The cultural amputee is still trying to scratch the itch in the missing limb.
Well, set it down.
We got here about eleven. The castle, to Ruth’s mild disappointment, is not Gothic, with turrets, but Dutch Renaissance, with stepped gables. Wicked brother, as promised, not at home. Greeted by his wife, Manon—tall, skinny, strained, all angles, with a sweet puckered face that looks as if she is always trying to remind herself not to forget something, and little black dots of eyes like a Laurencin drawing.
In the vast front hall, tinkling with the sound of a fountain around which Thorwaldsen-type nymphs clustered, in the presence of a brawny maid and a couple of Chinese jars that probably concealed elves, dwarves, or the forty thieves, she and the countess fell into each other’s arms. The maid picked up our bags and led Ruth and me up the stairs, while the countess called after us, “Oh, come straight down, as soon as you have finished your washings! Gerda will unpack you. I must show you this castle where I grew up!”
All pleasure for her, apparently. No bad associations, only delight at being back home in the grandeur to which she has grown unaccustomed to being accustomed. We did come straight down, after Ruth had made a quick inspection of our ducal suite, and were shown the castle, thus:
Drawing rooms, three, each grander than the last, all ornate and gilded, French as to furniture and Beauvais as to tapestries, these last bearing the usual representations of stag hunts, successful, and Arcadian picnics, topless.
Music room: square Bechstein, celestina inlaid with mother-of-pearl, gilt velvet-seated chairs, exhausted cello case prostrate on a banquette.
Ballroom: a basketball court overhung with crystal chandeliers, french doors all down one side reflecting their slant light across the parquetry and showing us reaches of lawn and roses outside.
Conservatory (orangerie?): a jungle of steamy plants from which a Rousseau tiger might have looked out—might be looking out now that everybody but me is asleep.
Billiard room: two tables. Around the room trophies of the chase—stuffed pheasants and grouse, a rhino head, a cape buffalo head, a long row of stag heads labeled as to year and slayer. Some of these the King’s and the King’s father’s. Lion and leopard skins on the floor, a narwhal horn spiraling up like some sort of rocket from an onyx launching pad.
Now the library, famous for works on horticulture and game management, here probably still called venery—everything from medieval herbals and bestiaries to contemporary learned journals in four languages. It seemed to me that these books made both Manon and the countess nervous; they stood back, politely giving me, the visiting book man, plenty of time to examine and admire, but showing a transparent willingness to pass on. Having no expertise in either horticulture or game management, and seeing them hover there trying not to hurry me, I put back the volume whose binding I had been admiring, and said, “These are impressive, but over my head. I’ve got other imperatives.” Oh, what? they said. So I plucked from the shelf a Goethe in German and read them the last line of Faust: “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.” Manon managed to take that piece of japery as a compliment to her, and the countess gave me a snickering loo
k that said Mr. Allston was sehr kavalier, and Ruth gave me another sort of look, asking me in effect who I thought I was, Little Lord Fauntleroy?
Whom we met as soon as we started out of the library—a pale, pretty, solemn little Swedish baron of about ten, a nephew of Manon’s, on his way in to read Duns Scotus or something else light. He wore blue serge short pants and an Eton collar and jacket, and he was the quietest, politest, most watchful little boy I ever saw in my life. I asked him if he spoke English and he squeaked, “Lillebit.”
Ruthie was enjoying the tour, and the ladies chattered, and I came along on my leash. Through a quickly opened door we were given a glimpse of a great pantry, with a board where lights went on to indicate what room was calling, and a receding warren of subsocial rooms and kitchens and such—the only rooms, I supposed, that my mother might ever have seen, if she had seen those. Then we tiptoed respectfully into the dining room, a hollow cave with satiny sideboards, heavy silver, a table forty feet long with three great bowls of lilacs spaced along it, and walls covered with the usual wigged ancestors and muddy Danish landscapes. I was tempted to ask why the Dutch should have produced a regiment of great painters, while their close relatives up the North Sea coast, with the same blood, weather, light, sky, and architecture, never produced a one. But since the countess is herself a sort of artist, I admired the silver instead.
The countess was happily recalling dinners in this room with a thousand candles and four wines, times when the King had come down to hunt. Then, she said to me, you would have seen some skaal’ing! Privately I thought the room too grand to have any fun in, and much too big for the present party. The table was set only at one end—seven places.
The Spectator Bird Page 12