Things like the Truth

by Ellen Gilchrist

  The first day that it snowed in Fayetteville their first winter there, last winter, they packed all their ski gear into the back of a truck, parked it going downhill Eastwood Drive, as I had told them they must do when there is a forecast for snow, woke the next morning and went out and drove down the snow covered hill to a nearby hilly park and skied most of the day. Delightful, adventurous Alaskans are among us, my house has new owners worthy of its storied past, and I have new friends who call me up and read me the mail that still occasionally comes to their mailbox. Every month or so I drive over to the house to pick up the mail and watch the amazing building projects going on around it. A brilliantly designed three-car garage with open sides and heating, a new deck with a beautiful drainage system, and a cover for the swimming pool which has lowered the gas bill by eighty percent. I wish I had thought of that.

  This is not the end of this story I’m sure but it’s most of what has happened so far.

  Plus, I adore my downsized life and wish I’d done that sooner than I did.

  February 2007, Homage to William Shawn

  I AM TEACHING A READINGS COURSE IN CREATIVE NONFICTION but it should be called a course in the editing genius of William Shawn (who was the editor of The New Yorker for many years).

  Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, The Curve of Binding Energy by John McPhee are a few examples of the perfect prose that came from his editing. Every book he edited that I teach holds up. Most of them were written in the nineteen seventies but I can find nothing written now that page after page comes up to the brilliance and perfection Shawn was able to demand and call up in his writers. After I teach the books to my graduate students they teach them to the undergraduates. Soon I will have to make up a new course as the undergraduate English majors will already have read the books I assign when they become our graduate students, as many of them do.

  A wonderful thing is happening in the English Department of the University of Arkansas. Talented students who have been brought into the college with our best scholarships are flocking to take writing classes in our English Department and many of them are so good we are letting them take seminars in our Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.

  At the same time, post–nine/eleven, we have a hiring freeze and a freeze on raises and five of our best professors have died or retired. The three who retired taught long past the time when they should have retired but stayed bravely on to help out after the crisis.

  Now we are in a situation where we have an extra-large number of students and fewer professors to teach the core subjects. Also, we have lost two professors in the Creative Writing Program and have not been allowed to replace them. We are letting extra people into all our classes, which is not good in the writing workshops. Somehow, everyone seems to want to live up to the challenge, however, and the feeling around Kimpel Hall is good. We will, by God, teach them what we know. At least that’s how I feel. It’s a good semester.

  I’m proud to be here. I still don’t like to go to department parties because I don’t drink and don’t like to talk to people when they are drinking but this week I will even go to a party I have decided. I intend to be the first one there and the first to leave, however. At least I won’t have to watch the students drinking in the presence of the professors. I think that is wrong and won’t participate in it.

  By the end of the William Shawn–influenced nonfiction class one student had a long, brilliant manuscript which won our coveted Walton Fellowship for his senior year here. He has not sent it to agents or publishers yet but will soon I hope. He keeps thinking he will find a better ending but this is nonfiction and sometimes life doesn’t give us a lot of choices in our endings.

  Neither is the mother of his child going to quit drinking and come back to him and his child. We can’t save everyone we love. Even writing a brilliant, loving, tender, dazzlingly comprehending book about what caused the problem cannot save her. But it might save him and it might be helpful to the child someday. Every day I say my crazy first and second and third star wishes for the real people and for the lovely gentle book.

  SECTION FOUR

  The Courts of Love

  An Anniversary

  DECEMBER 29, 2009

  FORTY-EIGHT YEARS AGO TODAY I MARRIED JUDGE JAMES NELSON Bloodworth of Decatur, Alabama, in the Presbyterian Church of Courtland, Alabama, underneath the forty-thousand-dollar stained glass window my father had given the church the year before.

  I was wearing a blue silk suit which my aunt Louise Hitch Gilchrist had ironed for me that morning in my grandmother’s guest room. I was drinking champagne and so was she and so were my best friends, Allison and Anne Bailey. We were giddy by the time we left for the church in my father’s Cadillac.

  I had spent the night before the wedding alone with my grandmother. I was sleeping in the iron double bed where she used to pretend to be the little people inside the radio telling their stories. “Let me out,” she would scream. “Get me out of here.”

  It should have been a metaphor for the wedding that was about to take place. To make up for my drinking too much I was marrying the most respectable man in town. Except when I was drinking, I was respectable. Since I quit drinking forty years ago I have become almost entirely respectable and contemptuous of people who are not.

  I don’t like excess. I’m a Scot. I hate waste. I like order. I like the world in which I grew up except for the problems caused by whiskey.

  Before I went to bed the night before my wedding to the judge I went into my grandmother’s small orderly bedroom and knelt beside her bed and let her bless me and wish me a happy and useful life. “He is a good man,” she said. “Be kind to him.”

  “I will,” I promised. “I’ll try as hard as I can.” I wanted to be a good wife and have an honorable life beside this fine man. He was forty-seven years old. I was twenty-four. He had been a major in the United States Army Judicial Corps. He had served all during the war and was in the army of occupation in the American sector of Germany for three years after the war.

  He had been Phi Beta Kappa and Law Review at the University of Alabama School of Law. Later he would sit on the Alabama Supreme Court.

  At the time of our marriage he was serving his second elected term as circuit judge of Madison County, Alabama.

  I was a beautiful, rich, spoiled girl with two beautiful, small sons. They had hair the color of sunrise and wild black eyes and were powerful and strong and big for their ages. They were fearless and always in motion. I adored them as long as I didn’t have to take care of them by myself. I had left my husband and come home to live with my family because they had maids and babysitters and my parents adored my little boys because they were the only grandsons. There were a lot of granddaughters but my father and brothers didn’t want granddaughters. They wanted a dynasty and that required male children. They let me have or do anything I wanted as long as I kept having sons.

  I loved my little boys. They were exactly what I had wanted except I didn’t want them when I was twenty years old and twenty-one. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted the big world. I wanted to finish college and go to New York City and work at a publishing company and publish poems and magazine articles. I didn’t want to spend my life taking care of small children.

  In Praise of the Young Man

  WHERE IS HE NOW, FOR WHOM I CARRY IN MY HEART THIS LOVE, THIS PRAISE?

  —Edna St. Vincent Millay

  HE WAS TWENTY-SIX AND I WAS FORTY-FOUR. HE TOOK ME DOWN rivers in canoes and built fires in the woods for me and taught me not to be afraid. I followed him places I had always dreamed of going. When I was a child my father and my brothers would strike out for the woods, leaving me behind. This time I was not left behind. I was the cause of the expeditions. I was the girl sitting on the floor of the canoe reading fashion magazines while my beautiful lover guided the canoe over treacherous waters. Could I have resisted such seduction? Could anyone have resisted it?

  I lost t
en pounds the first month I knew him. I lost twenty years. At a time when most women my age are worrying about menopause, I thought I was pregnant when I stopped menstruating. That was completely impossible since I had had a tubal ligation years before; still, the idea was exciting, and later I wrote a novel out of the fantasy and made a lot of money from it.

  He taught me to shoot pool. He bought me a baseball shirt with blue sleeves. He made love to me one afternoon in the backseat of a car. I had never made love in an automobile. I thought it was hilarious. I thought it was the freest and funniest thing I had ever done. Beside a lake, in a remote part of a national park, I took off my underpants and made love in the backseat of a car.

  He taught me to sing. He taught me that if you know the words you won’t forget the tune. He taught me to sing “Mommas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” He would let me sing it over and over again when we went on car trips.

  He sang to me. He would take his guitar out of his guitar case and sit on my piano bench tuning it and playing chords for a long time before he began to sing. He would sing songs he was composing and songs he was practicing and finally, because he knew I was waiting for it, he would sing, “Dance with me, I want to be your partner.”

  It was the first song he had ever sung to me. On the day we met he played it for me on a balcony at sundown. An hour later, when the world was dark, he asked me to marry him. This is the way to win a woman. This is the way a woman wants to fall in love. And he did dance with me. He danced with me in my living room and in nightclubs and on sidewalks at dark in distant cities. He danced with me as if I were an extension of his own body, and his joy in dancing made me graceful.

  When I met him I had just moved to a small town in the Ozark Mountains. One reason I had moved there was to be near the woods. I longed for woods, for rivers and wilderness. After I met the young man, he became my guide.

  He would drop anything to go camping. It would pour down rain for several days and he would turn to me and say, “This rain is going to fill up all the rivers. We should go down one while we can. When they’re full the sissies won’t be in the way.” Then we would throw a change of clothes into a plastic bag, grab the tent, and be out the door. One morning we set off down the Buffalo River when the water was two feet above the bridges. I don’t know how we talked the canoe shop into renting us a canoe, except the owner knew the young man and trusted him not to get us killed.

  He could guide a canoe down the river without seeming to move a muscle. His old Cherokee grandfather had taught him to fish and hunt and live in the woods. He didn’t like equipment. A cigarette lighter and a sack of crackers and cheese was all he needed to enter the woods and live for days.

  What did we talk about during those long days and nights when we were alone on rivers and riverbanks and in woods? I think we talked about ourselves, telling the stories of our lives, laughing about what people were saying about us behind our backs. We thought it was hilarious that people thought I was old and he was young. We were not old or young to each other. We were in love and had been since the day we met.

  Perhaps we only imagined that people were talking about us behind our backs. The people who were interested in us were over at my house talking to us and listening to us talk about ourselves. A passionate love affair is a strange attractor. People cannot stay away from happiness and joy.

  A famous scientist in town became the mentor of our love affair. He was seventy years old and had degrees from Oxford and Edinburgh. He loved to be around the young man and me. He would sit in my living room and watch us interact and later he would talk to me about it. Once, when I said I thought I should end the relationship and force the young man to find a woman his own age, the scientist said to me, “Why are women always thinking they can tell men what to want? All men don’t have to want the same things. Men are as complicated as women are, although women don’t want to believe that’s true. Why do you keep questioning and probing the happiness you have? Why can’t you just be content with it?”

  “They aren’t all as complicated as women,” I replied.

  “The good ones are,” he answered. “The only ones you would be interested in knowing. The ones who write songs about you.”

  The young man had been writing a song about me. He had taken the central premise of a book I had written and turned it into a beautiful, small lyric. The song was plaintive, simple, clean. It said the thing he never said to me. I love you and I will lose you because this is a land of dreams.

  What were people saying about us? Young artists around town were basically tolerant. The older male writers wanted to think it was a joke and talk me out of it. The women mostly understood or else they thought it was good revenge on older men who go out with younger women. I thought all of their reactions were interesting insights into their own needs and personalities. To tell the truth I didn’t give a damn what any of them thought.

  A journalist in the town where I live says I used to wear the young man like a bangle on a bracelet. I did occasionally like to take him around people my own age and watch him charm them. He was a charming man, intelligent and well read, with a deep feeling of goodwill toward other people.

  There are deeper truths to what went on between us. On the day I met the young man I had just learned that my daughter-in-law was carrying my first grandchild. I was in ecstasy at this news. Perhaps I fell in love with the young man to be part of all that fecundity and life. I had these two great happinesses at the same time.

  I would wake from sleep during those months in a state of bliss. Every shaft of light seemed intense and beautiful. The taste and feel of water was almost unbearable in its beauty, clarity, purity. Every tree and flower and change of weather seemed charged with meaning and with purpose.

  There were darker truths to the relationship. There were things about his life I could never understand or accept. There were dark, controlling parts of my personality that surprised and wounded him. I was full of old selfishness, anxieties, and fears. He was full of old resentments. When we would try to live together, these elements would ignite and burn.

  This was not a small fling. It lasted on and off for many years.

  My oldest son was enraged by the affair. He thought I should be content to be a grandmother. By the time he met the young man, my grandchild had been born, and my son thought I should follow in my mother’s footsteps and devote my life to my progeny.

  The young man’s family was probably equally unhappy about the love affair, but I never knew the details of that. As much as we could we stayed away from our families. We tried to protect each other from their intrusions, and I think we did a good job of that. Once, after we had known each other for many years, I took the young man to Mississippi to meet my parents. They called me up two nights later. They were eighty-two at the time. I was fifty-seven. “That won’t do,” my father said when he got me on the phone. “This business with the young man has got to stop.”

  My mother got on the phone. “You will have to get rid of him,” she added. “I’m sure your children are embarrassed to death by this.”

  “Nothing I could do to them would be as bad as the things they have done to me,” I answered in the nasty tone I reserve for talking to my mother. “I am fifty-seven years old, Mother. I am hanging up.”

  The young man and I were always hanging up on the world. Nothing the outside world did seemed to be able to harm what went on between us. We made each other happy and we made each other laugh and we made each other strong. When we were together love was its own protection, a barrier against reality.

  Of course it had to end. I told him in the beginning I would be his girl until I was fifty years old. I was almost sixty when it finally really ended. We had broken up and made up many times during those years but always without rancor or ill will. The truth was we couldn’t stay away from each other. We had created a paradise when we first met, and when we were apart we would long to have it back. He would call me or I would call him and within
an hour we would be in bed. We would lie in each other’s arms and tell the story of when we met and fell in love and told the world to go to hell. We shared a fabulous story of who we had been together, of what we had dared and what we had created.

  I have been in psychotherapy for many years. I know that the young man was a surrogate for my sons who had grown up and gone off to have lives of their own. I know that for him I was the mother all men dream of having. The mother who is their sole possession. The mother who adores them without question. I know that these psychological realities were the grounds for our disagreements and the reason the relationship could never last. I knew this while it was going on but it did not change a thing.

  Love is a goddess. It is the honey to end all honeys. No one turns down Aphrodite when she comes to call. The old Greeks knew how to create a metaphor. The goddess of love with her satisfied, enigmatic smile. Her little son beside her with his quiver of arrows. He lifts his bow, he takes aim, he shoots, and a man or woman falls into a spell from which there is no escape.

  Perhaps I loved him because he was different from the other men I had known. He never turned on a television set. He was a smalltown boy and read the local newspaper and liked knowing what was going on in the place where he lived. He didn’t care what was happening in New York City or Washington, D. C. He wanted to know who was running for sheriff and what was on at the movies and who won the high school football games.

  He taught me to love. Not just romantic love, and God knows it was romantic, but love of place. He would drive me around and show me places that he loved. He took me to see the place where his mother taught him how to swim. He was very sentimental about that small, weed-bordered lake. He always spoke of his mother with love and praise and because of that I knew I was safe to believe he loved me. A man who resents his mother will sooner or later resent you if he loves you.