Coming into the End Zone

by Doris Grumbach

  The church is named St. Francis by the Sea. The congregation’s style of worship might be called ‘low’; the spirit of unity is noticeable. We sit on camp chairs put up for the morning, and only a very few persons kneel, although cushions are stacked at the door for such use. Never have I heard so few voices sing so lustily, make such a joyful noise unto the Lord, as the Psalmist writes.

  Everyone seems to play some part in the life of the mission church, as it is called because it is too small to be a parish. Most people contribute to the service or the coffee hour afterwards. Unlike some congregations this one includes no children. The youngest participant is the crucifer, aged about fourteen; the oldest, Jennie Learned, is ninety-five and almost blind. She is helped to her seat by two ushers. Her small but true voice can be heard singing clearly the hymns she knows by heart.

  The congregation talks of trying to find space of its own, either by building a church, buying a building and converting it, or renting permanent space. People wonder if they can afford such a luxury, especially since the rector, whom they share with Castine and Deer Isle, is about to retire and they would like a full-time priest to replace him.

  I like this little church. Not having a consecrated space of its own, worshiping perforce in the cave of the militant American Legion (the creed of the Auxiliary, mounted on the wall and covered with a sheet during church time, promises to support soldiers and veterans in wars in which the country, right or wrong, engages), it reminds me of early Christianity under Rome when a few gathered together somewhere in His Name.…

  In Washington, the church I attend is at the other end of the ecclesiatical spectrum, very ‘high,’ Anglo-Catholic, full of lovely, almost lavish rituals, flowers, incense sprinkled at every stage of the rite, bells rung often, almost constant kneeling and crossing of oneself, music that leans heavily on chant, daily masses, all in one of the most beautiful small church buildings in the city, surrounded by a fine garden. Worshiping at St. James is an aesthetic experience. The congregation is experienced in shuffling through the many booklets of liturgy, musical-response sheets, church bulletins, and more in order to follow the complex liturgy. The priest, Father Downing, is dedicated and earnest; some of the more worshipful parishioners bow to him as he passes in procession at the beginning and end of the mass. The congregation, a heterogeneous blend of black and white faces with a liberal sprinkling of homosexuals, is active in the community, especially in serving the needs of AIDS patients in the hospital next door, the poor down the street, the homeless in the city.

  This disparity of persons, methods of worship, and physical surroundings is characteristic of the admirable variety that exists in the Episcopal Church. The clergy themselves differ on major matters, especially the pressing question of the ordination of women, and the even more distressing (to some) elevation of a woman (who happens also to be black) to suffragan bishop. When this happened, our liberal priest at St. James announced the event from the altar and asked the congregation to sing a Te Deum in celebration. Visiting that Sunday was a retired priest from South Africa. As we filed out I shook his hand and said: ‘A great day, isn’t it, bishop?’

  He responded glumly: ‘Not quite so for all of us. Good morning.’

  Sunday. A beautiful day. My resolution to be firm in the practice of my faith weakens in the presence of the sunshine on our new deck, which spreads out across the windows and door from my study and cantilevers toward the cove. So I stay home, and walk down to explore the berry bushes that are flowering in our muddle of a meadow, the little patch of blueberry bushes that hug the ground, the myriad wildflowers growing everywhere, anonymously. I have no idea what they are called, but I intend to search out their names. Could one be sleepwort? Ironweed?

  I use Richard’s ash cane to walk toward the water. Sybil follows me down with leftover pieces of treated wood from the finished deck and builds four steps into the still muddy bank to make my descent easier. We test the water and find it is still cold. ‘Freezing,’ she says. ‘Cool,’ I call it. I cannot wait to swim in it, but Sybil insists I will have to buy her a fur-lined wet suit before she will do more than test it with her toe.

  We have lunch on the deck, celebrating the new space and the absence of omnivorous black flies and ubiquitous mosquitoes. Sybil goes off to tramp around the acre that will hold the bookstore we are planning to build and a new driveway to it, while I struggle with the last pages of Camp. It seems strange to be recreating fictionally the adolescent sadness of my fourteenth year in this luminous place that has, in some ways, changed my dolorous thinking. The first drafts were finished in the winter before we found the Captain White House.

  There is a settled permanency about a completed manuscript that takes on the coloration of the place, the house, the room, in which it was written, at least in the writer’s mind. I came to Maine too late to do anything, good or bad, for Camp, except perhaps to have it keep this memoir company as it goes forth into the cold and critical world.

  I discover that Jennie Learned, the elderly presence in our church, is the mother of Anne Chamberlyn, a Washington acquaintance. Anne tells me her nonagenarian mother is taking singing lessons from a local tenor. I think of Zelda Fitzgerald’s desire to begin dancing (ballet) well into her thirties, and a friend’s sister who was still studying to make her debut in opera when she was over sixty. The tenor, who used to run the luncheonette in Blue Hill, coaches Mrs. Learned in the music being sung by her choral group because she cannot read it.

  I remember Edith Hamilton began to write her superb books on mythology, Rome, and Greece after she was forced, at sixty-five, to retire from her job as headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School. Harriet Doerr wrote her fine first novel, The Stones of Ibarra, in her early seventies. ‘How old would we be if we didn’t know how old we was?’ Peggy, thinking, I believe, of her good friend Lenore, the sculptor, says she thinks we die only when our work is done. I would like to think that is true. I have work still to do, I think.

  Today I was asked to be a lector in church. The prospect of it made me nervous all week. I practiced every morning, reading from the Lectionary the two epistles assigned to this Sunday. One, Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, the beginning of the thirteenth verse, I like very much. ‘Let brotherly love continue,’ he wrote. ‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ But even my fondness for the selection did not calm my usual fears about stammering. It helped a little to remember Spencer Tracy’s advice on acting: ‘Just know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.’

  I have recovered the sight of the horizon. In Washington it is invisible, sunk behind hills, houses, monuments, government buildings. But here, driving to the post office, I catch sight of it on my right because the reach runs behind the houses, the houses are far apart, and, where the water meets the sky, the horizon displays itself at every turn.

  Driving the other road, up Caterpillar Hill, I see 365 degrees of horizon, a heartening sight for a lover of that thin grey unending line. I wonder if it could be true that, as someone once wrote (I cannot remember the author), death itself is a horizon, and a horizon is only the limit of our sight.

  Some time back in this journal I berated the women on an airplane for their blue-jeaned, uniformlike clothes. Now, as I look about me on the streets and in the stores of Blue Hill and Ellsworth, I see how biased those reproaches were. Here everyone wears a discernible uniform, men and women alike. We are all dressed in clothes bought from L. L. Bean’s, with a few variations ordered from the catalogues of Eddie Bauer or Land’s End. Sweaters, pants, shoes, socks, shirts, caps, jackets: all alike, differing only in size and color, and places of origin. Our unvarying grey or white hair adds to the impression that we are all members of a platoon, marching to the same inflexibly demanding drummer time.

  Early this morning, after the post office, I stopped at the general store near our house to buy a bran-apple-raisin muffin. A chap I have never seen comes in very early every mornin
g and bakes them ‘fresh,’ as they say. It is a good place to listen to people on their way to work—carpenters, painters, ground-clearers, road repairmen (with backhoe or grader, I suppose), delivery chaps, trash removers, berry pickers, gardeners—talk about local matters, using phrases that stump me.

  Today the talk is about the weather. It has been very, very dry for two weeks, until today.

  ‘Doesn’t amount to Hannah Cook,’ I hear someone say about the rain.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I ask a handsome, elderly fellow customer who is also buying muffins. He was the right one to ask, it turned out. He is a gentleman-sailor with a boat harbored at the neck of Billings Cove.

  ‘It means worthless, the way a cook on board ship is no good for navigation. Never heard it used except in Maine.’

  When I get home I look it up in every book of idioms I can find, without success. ‘A hill of beans’ is there, but not Maine’s Hannah Cook.

  The telephone book for the Blue Hill/Ellsworth area is one-half inch thick. This includes both white and yellow pages. Washington’s population and business phones require two volumes, three inches in thickness. This is one of the differences between my life in the city, and this one here: two and one-half inches of people and places.

  Three old acquaintances of mine have died since we moved to Maine: I. F. Stone, Sidney Hook, and Howard Simons.

  Izzie and I shared an office at American University for two years. He had become known to the English department because he used the library in the preparation of his book on Socratic politics. Although he never taught, he was offered space in which to work.

  It was a fine time for me. My Attic Greek was very rusty, and here was a seventy-two-year-old fellow, with very bad eyesight and a history of heart attacks, teaching himself the language so he could approach Plato and Euripides in their own tongue. He would ask me questions of vocabulary, and I realized that forty-five irregular Greek verbs had entirely vanished from my once-reliable memory. He had the enthusiasm, pixielike grin, and energy of a boy, and a fierce determination to learn that made other academics seem weak and languid. He lived to publish his iconoclastic study of the Athenians’ treatment of Socrates, to much critical interest. At this moment he is probably hard at work learning a celestial language in order to argue metaphysics with Thomas Aquinas.

  Sidney Hook taught me in three philosophy courses at New York University. He was a brilliant teacher, persuading me that philosophy was the only academic enterprise worth engaging in. For two years I majored in his department. Then I changed to medieval literature under Margaret Schlauch’s influence. From then on he treated me with some coldness, even pointing out at the Phi Beta Kappa induction that he never knew anyone, except Maggie, who approached political thought with such complete illogic. Once again our paths crossed when I asked him to review a book for The New Republic.

  For a few years he was pleasant. Then we fell out again. A book of his appeared. He wrote, suggesting that Lewis Feuer, then in Canada, be asked to review it. Ordinarily I did not take kindly to authors who suggested their own reviewers but, still somewhat in awe of the famous professor, I wrote to Feuer. The Canadian postal service was on strike; the letter, so far as I knew, was lost. At all events, Feuer never responded, time passed, and then it was too late to review the book. Sidney Hook never spoke to me again.

  But I remember him with gratitude. He taught me how to think about a question, how to state a thesis, how to know what evidence I would regard as disproof of the proposition, how to argue logically. I remember the admirable words he wrote after his entry in the latest Who’s Who in America: ‘Man’s vocation should be the use of the arts of intelligence in behalf of human freedom.’

  And Howard Simons: a lovely, intelligent, gentle journalist in whose parents’ house I and my children lived during the Berlin Crisis so we could be in Albany while my husband was ‘called up’ into the Medical Corps. I looked Howard up when I came to Washington. He had become a noted science writer for the Washington Post and then its even more famous managing editor, the fellow who sent Bernstein and Woodward to the Watergate to look into a break-in at Democratic national headquarters. He was a lovable, witty fellow who once wrote a parody of a scientist’s research paper that proved heaven was at least seventy-five degrees Celsius hotter than hell. I trust he is up there now, preparing to investigate the truth of his mockery.

  And yet: Izzie was almost eighty, Sidney Hook was eighty-six, Howard Simons was sixty. This spring we invited David, a friend and one of the finest hairdressers in Washington, to lunch on our deck. A slight, sweet-natured fellow, he spent an afternoon a week at Capitol Hill Hospital cutting the hair of AIDS patients. Now, he told us, he was struggling with the terrible affliction. His hope was that his new doctor, with an ‘innovative’ treatment, would be able to help him.

  The last time I saw David, when I stopped into his shop to tell him we were going to Maine, he was standing quietly behind his chair cleaning his instruments. He said he was leaving his job. Now we hear he is in the hospital, very ill. Sybil says she will call when she gets back to Washington next week. David is thirty-four years old.

  The town of Blue Hill had a Thomas Jefferson–like early settler. Jonathan Fisher, whose house is now a historical memorial, came to Blue Hill at the very end of the eighteenth century. He had studied at Harvard, both liberal arts and divinity, and established the Congregational church in the town. He and his parishioners built his house, which he designed. He read Hebrew, Latin, and Greek and taught these languages to students who boarded with him. He was a skilled painter, draftsman, and wood engraver. To augment his meager pastor’s salary, he farmed his own acres, braided straw hats, concocted ‘medicinal remedies,’ carved buttons out of animal bones, made pumps, chairs, chests, combs, tables, bureaus, and drumsticks for the local militia. He wrote poetry and several books, founded a school and a library, went on missionary journeys, spoke out for bettering the lot of Negroes, surveyed property, and fathered seven children.

  All these facts are taken from a brochure the novelist Mary Ellen Chase compiled for the use of the museum. She was an inhabitant of Blue Hill, was proud of the town and of Jonathan Fisher. The town seems to be proud of them both. It is good to think that men like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Jonathan Fisher are our true ancestors, Renaissance men who, more than generals, politicians, and ‘developers,’ represent the early American love of art and learning we seem now to be losing.

  The postmistress, Frances, says she noticed a road had been cut into our property. Frances misses very little that happens in Sargentville. I tell her, yes, we are preparing to move Wayward Books up here into a new building on the acre within sight of our house. Perhaps we will call it Wayward Books Downeast, I tell her. She seems pleased.

  She gives me a huge bundle of mail. In it is a letter from a friend in Los Angeles, to whom I wrote about my new house. She sends me a clipping about Dylan Thomas, who spent the last four years of his life in the tiny seaside village of Laugharne in South Wales. He lived in a boathouse, which he called ‘my seashaken house on a breakneck of rock,’ now a museum. Above it is a small shedlike building, which he called his ‘wordsplashed hut.’ It overlooks the bay and, according to the newspaper report, is in danger of sliding off the cliff into the sea. Dylan wrote to his friend who had rented it for him: ‘This is it, the place, the house, the workroom, the time. Here I am happy and writing.’

  In his hut, after a morning spent at the local pub, as his wife, Caitlin, described it, he would ‘bang into intensive scribbling, muttering, whispering, intoning, bellowing and juggling of words.’ Laugharne is an English-speaking town, whose mayor goes by the ancient title of ‘portreeve,’ and whose inhabitants distrusted outsiders. ‘We used to throw stones at him,’ one resident said. ‘Why?’ the reporter asked. ‘Because he came from Swansea.’ Swansea is twenty-seven miles away.

  So Dylan too was from away. But he loved the place. It was, he wrote, ‘the best town, the b
est house, the only castle, the mapped, measured, inhabited, drained, garaged, townhalled, pubbed and churched, shopped, gulled and estuaried one state of happiness.’

  My friend must have thought my new place resembled Dylan’s. In some ways it does. But the distance from the sea is greater and there seems to be no danger of my study falling into the sea. True, mine is a place where juggling of words takes place. True, for me ‘This is it: the place, the house, the workroom, the time.’ Sadly, I doubt I shall ever achieve, as he did, what he called ‘the mystery of having been moved by words.’

  None of the bookcases in our house stands erect. The floors are all uneven. So we buy what are called ‘shims,’ wedge-shaped pieces of wood to insert under the bookcases, making them level. Tracy, the frugal carpenter, laughs at our purchase—‘You actually paid money for those?’ We are embarrassed. People from away do that sort of thing, buy what prudent Mainers acquire from the land or from construction leftovers.