Isabel Brown is still slim and moves with the easy grace of her profession. Only her face shows her age. She is fortunate in being able to soften what must have been her unhappiness at growing older and having to retire by her pride in her children. It must be hard to end one’s career long before middle age because the most vulnerable part of oneself, the body, can no longer perform the requirements of the art. Ballerinas have inordinately short careers. They endure as long as their hips will allow for abnormal extensions of the leg and foot, as long as their toes hold their bodies aloft. Then they must retire to seats in the orchestra to watch younger women perform their roles. From star to spectator: it must be a difficult descent.
In the Parisian dampness my shoulder stiffened up, and I began to worry about whether I would be able to swim well again. I confided my concern to Bob. We talked about the pleasures of snorkeling in the Caribbean as we walked two blocks in the rain to dinner at Le Lotti on the rue de Castiglione. He tells me about a couple he watched arrive at their cabin on a beach in Rhode Island. They unloaded a great deal of gear: life preservers, underwater cameras, snorkels, fins, masks, wet suits, hand weights. The weather was fine for the week they had the cottage. Bob never saw them leave their porch until the day they loaded all the stuff back into the trunk of their car. Readiness is all, he concluded. I could not make out whether he intended this anecdote to be comforting or not.
I am a traveler who never thinks of persons I have left behind. So I spent my last day in Paris scurrying around the shops to find last-minute, ill-considered presents for friends and children. (No, not children, the foolish way I still refer to my daughters, all of whom are approaching or well over forty. Women, who are now, fortunately, my friends.) I made one stop at the great, ugly Romanesque Madeleine church. It was vast and empty. The pew I knelt in smelled of fresh urine. I didn’t move but stayed instead among the minor unpleasantness to pray for Richard, who is now close to death. Amid all the lavish display of the past two weeks, his suffering stands in clear contrast. ‘Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for him now and at the hour of his death.’
Marguerite Yourcenar: ‘If you can say “mad with joy” you should be able to say “wise with grief.”’ On the flight home I pondered the truth of this. I have seen many deaths recently, in so short a time. Yet I think I grow more foolish, not wiser, in my grief, with each one. I believed I was going home to Richard’s death. The thought reduced me to weary tears. The man next to me asked if I felt all right. I said I did.
For the flight home I saved a pocket-sized volume of Montaigne’s Essays. I spent most of the time reading one, ‘On Certain Verses of Virgil.’ Five pages into it, the flight attendant put dinner down over the book I had rested on the tray table, as though Montaigne were not there. Rude, I thought. As rudely, I suppose it must have seemed to her, I superimposed Montaigne over the aluminum-wrapped ‘hurried’ chicken, as it was referred to by my seatmate, who confided in me his deep dislike of microwave cooking. I did not open the aluminum foil to try the curried chicken. From experience (we’d been offered the same dish on the flight over) I knew it would be inedible.
How often the retired Montaigne’s views of aging and old age and mine resemble each other’s. We are both, like so many other persons in the four hundred years between his life and mine, much concerned with the changes from youth to age, with the miseries of aging, with the coming of death. But think: He was not yet sixty when he published the last edition of the Essays, his only book, one he wrote (like Whitman) over and over again.
In my youth I had need to admonish myself and look carefully after myself, to keep me to my duty; good spirits and health do not consist so well, they say, with serious and wise reflections. I am now in a different condition; the accompaniments of old age admonish me only too much, teach me wisdom, and preach to me. From excess of gaiety I have fallen into the more irksome excess of gravity.
He writes (at fifty-seven!) of what he regards as the failing of his old age, one I know, from having read the pages that precede this in my journal of the seventieth (plague) year, that I share:
I am at present only too sober, too pondering, and too mature; my years daily instruct me in insensibility and temperance. This body shuns and fears irregularity.… not for a single hour, sleeping or waking, does it leave me at rest from teaching about death, endurance and repentance.
Montaigne’s view of bad days are mine:
Formerly I used to mark dull and gloomy days as unusual; these are now the usual ones for me, the unusual are those that are fine and cloudless. I am ready to jump for joy as for an unwonted blessing when nothing pains me.
Probably he was one of the first of the ‘free’ (as he terms it), honest and entirely outspoken confessional writers (after St. Augustine). To withhold the unpleasant truths of his character and his life seemed to him the worst possible sin:
The worst of my actions and conditions does not seem to me so vile as I find vile and cowardly the not daring to avow it.
Just before I put up my reading table and return my undisturbed dinner to the flight attendant, I read:
I have determined to dare to say everything that I dare do, and I dislike thoughts even that are not fit to publish.
Strange, to encounter again, and accept wholly, the relevant thoughts of a sixteenth-century philosopher as I cross hemispheres in a Boeing 747 airplane, while rejecting sustenance prepared in three minutes in a microwave oven. Things and methods change, often for the worse, valuable ideas remain the same, or grow richer.… The flight landed uneventfully, and we were thrust back abruptly into the ‘new world’ of American English, dollars, customs, and reverence for youth and physical beauty.
November
Washington is cold and windy, remnants of fall leaves still blow along the dusty streets on the Hill, and my carriage-house study is a refuge from the sounds of helicopters searching out criminals in the southeast and sirens rushing to fires. My daughter, Barbara, calls to ask about the Paris trip. At the end of the conversation I find myself beginning a narrative I have already told her. Horrified, I withdraw as inobtrusively as I can and say goodbye.
Repetition: Why is it the elderly tell their stories again and again, in the same company, to the same person? Forgetfulness? I suppose. Finally, a limited supply of stories? The need to hold up one’s end of conversations? I have caught myself, too many times, in mid-narrative, realizing, by suddenly noticing the inattention in my companion’s eyes, that she has heard this before. Embarrassed, I search for a way out, a phrase that will excuse my tedious rehearsal of events. ‘As I told you before’ or ‘I know I’ve said this already, but …’ and then I seek desperately for some new material to add to the old story.
A long, thin box arrives by United Parcel Service. I had forgotten that Richard Lucas told me he had fallen in London when he went abroad in July for Wimbledon. He had bought a cane, ‘a nice one,’ he said, ‘made of ash and wonderfully light,’ to help him to get to the courts.
‘Now my legs are failing me,’ he told me when he called from California in September.
‘Oh, I know,’ I fill in awkwardly. ‘I turned my ankle this winter and fell and broke my shoulder.’
‘Well then,’ he said, with what sounded like delight, ‘I know what I want to send you. A cane like mine.’
The cane is fawn-colored and delicate, ends in a black rubber tip, and still has the natural marks of the tree on it. At the top it curves gracefully. Just below its turning point there is an engraved gold band which reads: ‘By Appointment/To H.M. Queen Elizabeth/The Queen Mother/Umbrella Makers/Swaine Adeney Brigg/and Sons Limited.’
The card says: ‘Love Richard.’ No comma. I love Richard, I mourn the loss of function in his legs, I cry as I stroke the smooth, lovely surface of my clone to his cane. I know he is near death and, once again, as I have for the others I cared about, I rail against the terrible injustice of his premature end.
I take my new cane and walk through the alley beside the carriag
e house, cross Independence Avenue to Seventh Street to Provisions, where I buy two coffees and two pieces of coffee cake ‘to go’ (a truncated phrase I find ugly). I continue my walk, swinging the cane, to Wayward Books. Sybil is glad to have the coffee to keep her awake during the hours she must still ‘man’ the store, and very pleased at the idea of my using a cane. ‘Oh, Richard,’ I think, ‘would it were you walking with it.’ My throat aches at the thought. I can see in Sybil’s face the same unspoken sorrow.
Today, twice, modern technology has failed me. I called a local hospital to protest a bill I have already paid. Before the mammogram pictures were even taken, I had been required to write a check. Nonetheless, the hospital’s computer insists I owe the hospital money. I will wait for my check to be returned by the bank.…
And then, the bank! At noon I stood on line waiting my turn for a simple transaction. I needed to know the state of my checking account. ‘Not today,’ I was told. ‘The computer is down.’ Of course, this is nothing new. It has happened in other places—a department-store business office, a newspaper subscription department. My view of computers has become jaundiced. I left the bank feeling like a disgruntled curmudgeon, if that is not a tautology.
Driving home I suddenly was put in mind of Sister Joseph Clare, the registrar at the College of Saint Rose, where I taught in the sixties.
The college’s enrollment was small and homogeneous, about nine hundred Catholic young women. Its faculty was drawn heavily from members of the founding order, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. A few ‘lay persons,’ as we were called, filled positions for which no nuns had been ‘developed.’ Theology and philosophy were taught by three priests. The staff and administration were all ‘religious.’ (The vocabulary quoted is that of official Church nomenclature.)
Sister Joseph Clare was a college administrator. A pale, small, unsmiling woman, she was so slight that she seemed to disappear into her voluminous black habit. She occupied a narrow office lined with filing cabinets. At one end, under the window, was her small desk containing a pristine blotter on which I rarely saw any accumulation of papers. On one corner stood a plaster statue of St. Joseph, and before it a low vase of always fresh flowers. St. Joseph held his carpenter’s tools in his hand. He was her patron saint. She, like him, was a tireless worker.
The college’s record-keeping system had been devised by Sister Joseph Clare. It was simplicity itself. When a student registered, she filled out a 9 × 12 yellow card, ruled down the center front and back, a quarter designed for each year. Grades were handed in by instructors on long white sheets she had typed up with the names of students, a column to enter absences, another for grades, and a space for ‘Comments (if any).’ She noted the grade and course number on the student’s card, and placed it in its proper place in a file cabinet labeled for that year. At the end of four years, she would record, in her minuscule, neat handwriting, the date of graduation, grade-point average, class standing, and honors received (if any). The record was regarded as complete when (as inevitably she did) she received news of the student’s marriage. The new name would be entered in brackets beneath the maiden name.
Once, while I was on the evening faculty in the late fifties, I was in her office when a portly, middle-aged woman came in. Sister looked up from her desk, smiled, and said:
‘Well, Margaret-Mary O’Donnell. Class of, let me see now, ’47? Yes, I believe so. You married, I remember. It’s now Margaret-Mary Kelly. How nice to see you again. What can I do for you?’
Visibly taken aback to find she had what she must have thought was a unique place in Sister Joseph Clare’s memory, Margaret-Mary O’Donnell Kelly stammered out her request for a copy of her transcript. She was planning to apply to the State University at Albany for entrance into its Master of Teaching program.
‘Yes,’ said Sister. She rose from her desk, with the sort of flowing motion that only nuns in full habits are able to effect, and went directly to the drawer of a file cabinet at the other end of the room. Without hesitation, she pulled a card from the drawer and brought it to her desk. In five minutes—perhaps less—she had copied the material from the card onto a piece of typewriter paper, signed it, stamped it with the seal of the college, and handed it to Mrs. Kelly.
‘There you are,’ she said. ‘That will be fifty cents, please.’
Mrs. Kelly thanked her, paid the money, and left. Until Sister Joseph Clare died of what the nuns always called ‘a wasting disease,’ she retained her prodigious memory for the records of the College of Saint Rose. Never, as far as I knew, did her retrieval system fail her.
In the years that followed her untimely death (that is a clichéd, foolish phrase. All death is untimely except one entered into by one’s own hand), a downstairs classroom under her office was converted into a computer center. If the machines down there in any way resemble those in banks, hospitals, and libraries, I am willing to wager they are often down or out. I have a suggestion for IBM about this state of affairs: I think it ought to abandon its manufacture of computers and start developing nuns.
Sybil and I go to Great Falls across the river in Virginia for our last, winter look at the rushing water and violent swirling eddies, inhabited even this late in the year by devoted kayakers. The falling water is wild and beautiful. The leaves on each side of the Potomac are red, gold, brown, yellow. We stand at a lookout point beside two teenage girls.
One says: ‘I saw a doe drinking at the edge as I climbed up here. And of course I forgot to bring my camera.’
The other: ‘Too bad. Let’s go. What’s there to see up here?’
At the end of the stairs in my study I have posted a memory sheet, to remind me that I must pay attention to the tyranny of machines and other devices. It reads:
TURN OFF
PC/Printer/Surge Control/Lights/Coffee Maker/Overhead Fan/Thermostat
TURN ON
Answering Machine/Outside Light
When I get to the house the unwritten but no less demanding list is: TURN OFF outside light/oven/stove gas jets/power to VCR/television/radio/fans/air conditioners in bedroom and kitchen, und so weiter. At the time I bought these things, or installed them, they were intended to add to our comfort and ease in living. Now they have mounted up, to the point that we do not ride on them, as Thoreau said of the railroads he disliked, they ride on us. I try to take a stand against still another of them by steadfastly refusing the gift of a microwave oven someone wishes to give us. Sybil believes the instant, or almost instant, cooker will improve the quality of our suppers, so I will probably give in, add ‘TURN OFF microwave’ to my list, and sink deeper under the Rule of the Machine.
I am reading a collection of John Cheever’s letters, edited by his son. They are wonderful. Cheever wanted his correspondents to destroy his letters. ‘Saving a letter is like trying to preserve a kiss,’ he said. Fortunately few did. ‘I am much less afraid of burglars when I am busy,’ he wrote. When last did I hear the word ‘burglar’? It has begun to sound old-fashioned. Now we talk about muggers, break-in crooks, thieves. A burglar has the ring of Conan Doyle and Poe: archaic. Cheever’s language gives these honest, sometimes painfully revealing letters a curiously decorous sound.
I am sent in the mail a glossy magazine, thick almost as a Sears catalogue, called Museum and Arts. It is published in Washington. There is a slip in it that says it is being sent to me because I am mentioned in it. Snare. Trap. Hook. I go carefully through the damned thing, reading here and there, when I can bear its fancy, overheated writing and unreal colored photographs, and of course, I am not. I realize I have been suckered into wasting an hour in an egotistic search for myself.
An editorialist on the radio begins his lecture with ‘A thought I want to share with you.’ ‘Share’, of course, is not what he means. Listen to me, he is insisting. There is not the slightest chance that you can reply. ‘Share’ is a misused verb these days.
Back from Paris for some weeks, I find I often think of those exciting days and n
ights. Reliving a trip is an added virtue of travel, just as preparing for it is sometimes better than the journey itself. (Sybil’s delight is more often in the planning stage. The actuality for her often falls short of expectation, which nothing, of course, can diminish.) To my surprise, looking back, it was very good to have the company of the Emersons. Indeed, my well-being depended on them (a reliance I have always resented in my early years). Bob took my arm through all the always-being-repaired streets of Paris; Jane helped me bathe and dress. Hooking one’s bra is an impossibility with a broken shoulder.
MARK TWAIN: ‘I have found out there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them, than to travel with them’ (Tom Sawyer’s observation when he goes Abroad, 1894).
Traveling alone is curious. One experiences new things more directly but quickly tires of it when one has no one to tell about it. William Hazlitt thought otherwise: ‘One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself.’
I remember one January in the late sixties in London, when I was preparing to write a biography of Mary McCarthy. I found the month at first a welcome escape from the constant presence of family and the world of academe. But after a week of frigid, raw streets and a cold desk in the library of the British Museum, solitary poor meals, good but lonely teas, walks, queues, theaters so cold I had to wear gloves through all the performances, I grew tired of myself, and then of the city, and then of Hazlitt’s vaunted pleasure in solitary travel.
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