My revenge comes later in the week. Tracy runs out of small pieces of wood, and asks if she can have two of our boughten shims. She blushes. I grin with malicious delight.
The many birds that live in our cove, or visit it, make up for the small number of land birds in our woods. We are going to have to put up attractive feeders to build our bird population. After the first day, even the Maine state bird, a black-capped chickadee, has deserted us. The fucking jays are here no longer.
But at the shore: There are many gulls, families of ducks, and cormorants—here called ‘shags,’ a native corrected me. I am told shags plunge into the sea at the rate of sixty kilometers an hour. Occasionally I spot a sandpiper. Loons make their august progress across the water from one shore to the other. One day, Tracy identified a mysterious (to me) bird as a plover. I have seen one eagle, gliding toward what I hope is its nest in Rebecca Peterson’s trees. I look for nests of any variety wherever I walk, having been told on early-morning radio it is a myth to think that touching a nestling will keep the mother away. But I have never seen one.
Sitting in the sun on the deck, clipboard on my lap, binoculars in hand, I am sometimes stopped cold from writing by all the winged action on the water at the end of the meadow.
At last: a hummingbird in a great hurry stops at the colored sugar water I have put out in a feeder among the new boxes of impatiens on the deck. Perpetually in motion, it drinks as it runs, and leaves in a rush. I wait a long time, not daring to move, but it does not return.
I am told, although I have not seen them, that in some parts of Maine, green stamps, long since gone from city stores, still exist. When you have collected them you take them to what is called, with no theological implication, I am sure, a ‘redemption store.’
I tend to lose sight of the unpleasant truths that lie just beyond our blessed acreage. This state is not an Eden for everyone. Thirty-seven percent of the population of Hancock County live below the poverty mark; ten percent are said to be functionally illiterate. The county is rural; its unemployment rate is thirty-one percent higher than it is in the large cities like Portland and Bangor. The high school dropout rate is very high, the number of students going on to college very low. In this week’s issue of the Weekly Packet there are pictures of the twenty-two June graduates from Stonington–Deer Isle High School. Four signify they are going to the University of Maine at Orono, one to Northeastern University in Boston, a few to the Maritime Academy in Castine; the rest expect ‘to be employed.’ A number of these specify fishing or construction as their future occupation. Some say they do not know exactly what they will do.
The great curse of the population in these beautiful hills and beside the bays, coves, and rivers is alcoholism. The newspaper reports numerous tickets or arrests each week. A large majority are for drunken driving, or OUI, as they abbreviate it, operating a vehicle while under the influence. The crimes we left behind in Washington—homicides, drug pushing and addiction, break-ins, muggings, beatings, and rapes—do not seem to happen here. Someone says to me: ‘Yet.’ So, while I feel safe in my house and on the streets, and never bother to lock my car, I am reluctant to drive the very dark roads at night.
I have been looking through a book about the work of the painter Marsden Hartley, who was born in Lewiston, Maine, and died twenty miles from where we now live, in Ellsworth. In his youth he traveled widely, to New Mexico, Paris, Bermuda, Berlin, New Hampshire, New York, unable to find a place to settle. The commentator on his paintings writes: ‘No place was his place, each proved as lonely as the last. At the end of his life he learned that man’s sole strength is in himself.’
The paintings done in and around Ellsworth are his best. His subjects were drowned fisherman, eroded shells, dead plovers left on the beach after a hurricane. Despairing, desolate, hopeless visions, they reflect his desperate desire for death and oblivion. He wrote, at the end of his life:
… And let men have the sea
Who want eternity.
Bruce Chatwin (with Paul Theroux) has a new book, Patagonia Revisited. Before I read it, I reread In Patagonia. Looking at ‘the enormity of the desert or the sight of a tiny flower,’ Chatwin writes, ‘the choice is between the tiny and the vast.’ In our landscape there is no such necessary choice. Reach and cove, spruce and small berry bushes, giant rocks and beach pebbles, meadow and narrow, beaten path, all coalesce into one harmonious whole. I cannot separate the small from the vast, the evergreen seedling from the enormous horse chestnut tree that shades part of our lawn.
I go down to the cove, carrying my beach chair, intending to work there. But I find I am restless and want to walk in one direction or the other, exploring the little inlets I haven’t seen. I think of T. S. Eliot:
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
Sometimes, when I listen to silence in the early evening on the deck, I imagine I hear the whine of police cars and the sirens of ambulances, the whirring of an overhead helicopter searching out a local miscreant, the honking of impatient home-goers held up on North Carolina Avenue by a slow driver, the shouts of teenagers ‘hanging out’ in the alley.
When quiet descends again, I know I am away from the distressed city and have conjured up the intrusive noise, perhaps so I can better relish the sensation of silence.
I am invited to a cocktail party at the Sargent House, which stands in the middle of the village. Abby Sargent Neese Kelly is a native who now lives outside Philadelphia during the winter but comes back faithfully to the house her grandfather built, and where she was born, in the summer. Her house is filled with fine possessions of her ancestors, including a ‘nurse’s chair,’ connected to the cradle so that as the nurse rocks, so does the baby.
I meet Abby’s cousin, who tells me about our house. It seems it once belonged to her great-aunt, Ella Byard, a ‘spinster schoolteacher’ who, at the beginning of this century, advertised in the newspaper for a husband. Captain Willis White presented himself, and was accepted. However, he turned out to be a poor choice, being a ‘terrible womanizer.’ Abby and her cousin were not allowed to visit their aunt in the Captain White House, as it was called even then, without a chaperon. Abby’s cousin promises to call on me and acquaint me with stories full of terrible details about the infamous Captain White.
Perhaps we should repaint the mailbox to change the name to the Ella Byard House.
An addition to my store of evidence on the longevity of Maine residents and visitors: Anne Chamberlyn, who is over sixty, tells me she owns six bicycles, some in Washington, some in Maine. Every day she rides about forty miles, wherever she happens to be.
In Ellsworth, where I go once a week for groceries, a well-tanned, slim, elderly man in a yacht club cap engaged me in conversation. We were standing at the magazine rack of a store called Mr. Paperback. I was looking at a book called Basic Sailing.
‘Do you sail?’
I admitted I was only beginning to learn. I have been out in Peggy Danielson’s boat three times and am a late convert to the art of moving across the water by wind and sail, in the direction you wish to travel.
‘I am a sailor,’ he said, with some pride. ‘Have been one all my life. Never had to work at anything, so I sailed, first my father’s boat, and now mine.’
I tell him how lucky I think he is.
‘Well, I suppose. But now I’m thinking about becoming a writer. What do you think of that?’
‘What do you want to write?’
‘Stories. I want to write stories. I read that there are thirty-eight plots. I’ll pick one, change it around a little, set it on the coast of Maine, and write it. I used to know someone who worked for The Saturday Evening Post. I’ll send it to him.’
Every time I hear the number of plots there are in the world the amount changes, covering a spread from nine to, now, thirty-eight. I refrain from saying that there are as many plots as there are writers narrating them, that the voice telling the story is what matters, and that I rarely see The Satur
day Evening Post on the newsstands.
July 4. Today there was a celebratory parade in Blue Hill. Sybil and I drove into town and stood at the edge of the road with a sparse, strung-out collection of L. L. Bean—clad onlookers and impatient children. The parade was touching. The band of the local high school led it off, there was one car carrying a very old army veteran, several groups of Girl and Boy Scouts, three or four naval veterans from World War II (no women, of course, but then, I hadn’t volunteered to march), a thin line of young children on their bikes, and, at the very end, a little boy riding a donkey, carrying a small American flag, and wearing a hat that rested on his large ears.
The parade stopped at the first bridge, a member of the band played an agonizingly off-key Taps on his bugle, and a naval lieutenant, senior grade, threw a wreath into the bay. The little girl beside me dropped her ice-cream cone and started to cry. Her father picked her up. With the other onlookers, he started walking with the parade toward the next bridge, where the same ceremony was to be performed. Sybil and I went home, feeling patriotic and chastened by the simplicity and good intentions of it all.
Alone in the house (Sybil has gone to Washington and will not be back until the end of this month), I feel the extent of it, the number of rooms I never go into unless there are guests, the number of entrances and exits, the lawn and meadow and woods stretching out in all directions, the deck blacked out at night, the circular driveway, the damp, granite cellar down a flight of rickety steps, the half-foot-sized narrow back stairs. All this I inhabit, alone. It seems too much, it has far too many dark holes and ragged edges. I pull it all in around me, close the blinds, light one lamp, read a book, and wait for it to be time to go to bed.
July 12, 1989: No longer am I burdened by the weight of my years. My new age today, a year later, does not worry me. Alone for most of the day, until the promise of dinner with friends tonight, I went for a swim in the cove, conquering its temperature (sixty degrees) by thinking it was not as cold as I expected it to be.
Nor is this day as painful as I thought it might be. I seem not to have grown older in the year, but more content with whatever age it is I am. I accept the addition, hardly noticing it. There may well be the enduring challenge of the 365 steps up the face of the Temple of the Dwarf at Chichén Itzá, but the certainty that I shall never again climb them no longer disturbs me.
O’Henry’s last words are said to have been: ‘Turn up the lights—I don’t want to go home in the dark.’ I’ve begun to try to turn up the lights on what remains of my life.
Waiting on the deck for Ted, Bob, and Peggy to take me to a birthday dinner, I watch my unknown neighbor bring his sailboat to anchor in the cove, furl and wrap his sails, and stand for a moment in the prow looking out to the reach. The light is dimming, the water flattens out from grey to dark-blue calm, the sun sets, coloring the sky like an obscured klieg light, out of my sight.
Now I shall sail by the ash breeze, standing still on the deck.
Living in this beautiful place, I look forward to the solitude it affords me, and to friends to break it with. At the end of the day I shall welcome them to share my board and my luck. Who knows, I may be entertaining angels.
Unlike Anna Pavlova, I have no immediate use for a swan costume. I am ready to begin the end.
Afterwords
This memoir will make a belated appearance, in the fall of my seventy-third year. There are a few changes and developments that have occurred since I gathered together the memories and events of my seventieth year. True, I will disturb the symmetry of the book, or what Aristotle called one of the essential unities of a literary work. But then …
• The lovely campgrounds at Kailuum in the Yucatán no longer figure large in my winter plans. I have stored away my mask, snorkel, and fins in an inaccessible place. Friends Tori Hill (of the Library of Congress Reading Room) and Elizabeth Carl, now the Reverend Elizabeth Carl, ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, visited there last winter. They, and ten other campers, came down with what is referred to, euphemistically, as Montezuma’s Revenge. Then Tori contracted hepatitis, and was sick for a long time, although it is not at all certain her illness was linked to that idyllic Mexican coast. Nonetheless, my enthusiasm to return is, perhaps foolishly, diminished.…
Still, someday I want to stand at the foot of the Temple of the Dwarf and watch my new grandchild, born early in 1989, scamper up its forbidding steps. It is only fitting that her parents, lovers as I am of the great sites, have named her Maya.
• Last fall, I read of the death of Mary McCarthy, of cancer, at the age of seventy-seven. I half expected it. She had left Castine at the end of the summer and gone to teach her usual semester at Bard College (the institution she had forgiven after her satire upon it in The Groves of Academe, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it had forgiven her). There she died, quite suddenly. When we met at the Blue Hill farmer’s market in the summer of 1989, and she left me with that harsh adverb ‘unpleasantly,’, I regretted that I had not thought of some conciliatory response. Her grey, much-altered face, so beautiful in her youth and maturity, suggested illness to me. She seemed frail as she turned away from me to inspect the vegetables. I am diminished by her death, having once spent almost a year on her life. We all are.
• The Episcopal congregation in Blue Hill has finally found a churchly home for itself. Last winter it purchased, for a very modest price, a handsome old abandoned Methodist church about ten miles out of the town in North Penobscot, and worked through the winter and spring to make it habitable.
Easter was celebrated there. Land has been donated for a new home in Blue Hill, and money raised to move the building, not an inconsiderable enterprise. The steeple and windows, pews and lighting fixtures must be removed, and then the building cut in half, mounted on dollies, and drawn through the narrow streets, the overhead wires suspended as it makes its dichotomistic progress. Everyone hopes the aged structure will survive this arduous journey, that it will not rebel against the violence done to its Methodist walls by the new denomination, and that, mirabile dictu, we will celebrate next Easter in the resurrected building.
• An irony: By moving to Maine, I believed I had escaped the violence and threat of the city: murderers, muggers, robbers, drug users and their suppliers, the night noises of sirens and helicopters in pursuit of culprits. I had, but now I discover, to my dismay, that fear and anger, violence and threat, belong to every landscape, inhabit even the flower beds and gardens, country lawns and decks.
Omnipresent hungry cats prevented me from having bird feeders in the city. This spring in Maine I acquired three feeders and set them strategically, under trees, on poles on the lawn, on metal arms from the house. An efficient squad of small red squirrels has managed to climb every rope and chain and pole, from the bottom up and the top down. They approach the feeders by leaping, sliding, and climbing the house shingles. They will not be frightened off by my angry, indeed even hysterical, shouts. True, they respond by dropping from incredible heights to the ground. They take up a stand on a nearby piece of granite and chatter harshly at me, the same ka-ka-ka I heard when, as a little girl in Central Park, I was attacked by a grey relative of the same family, large, stringy, and mad. Squirrels, of whatever size, color, or state of mental health, are my new criminals.
Streams of water directed at them affect them not at all. I have been able to devise no defense; I am at their mercy. At first, I took the feeders indoors, empty of seed, symbols of lost battles and ignominious defeat in the war between nature and me.
Later, I found an unattractive but efficacious way to defeat the little fellows. I greased a pole and placed the feeder, awkwardly, at the top. They never managed to ascend, and there were no nearby trees to drop from. Victory, at last? Not at all. For part of the summer they ate seed dropped by birds at the foot of the feeder, seemed to be satisfied, and then disappeared. But in the fall we discovered they had been happily engaged in removing much of the cellar insulation in order to
provide themselves with a cozy pink nest in an old wood bin.
• Wayward Books now resides in a utilitarian-looking building down a path from our house. Inside it is cozier, housing nine or ten thousand books (we’re never sure quite how many), a woodstove with comfortable chairs around it, and copies of book-review sections from around the country and England for browsers to read when they tire of buying. It has done moderately well in its first year. Its greatest virtue, for us, is its proximity to the cove, which, despite my worries, is a place of constantly changing interest.
• Fine Print, the handsome quarterly magazine about handmade books, invited me to join its board of contributors and then, two years later, announced suspension of publication, after fifteen years of distinguished production by letterpress printing of its fine issues. I begin to wonder if the name carries its own inevitable albatross.
• Aunt Bet is now 103, bright, cheerful, and quite well, living in her nursing home. Her spirits are good. She is still charming, and lovely to look at. Her eyes are somewhat improved; every evening she reads the newspaper. She still enjoys her nip of brandy.
About the Author
Doris Grumbach, author of many novels and memoirs including Fifty Days of Solitude, Life in a Day, The Ladies, and Chamber Music, has been literary editor of the New Republic, a nonfiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review, a book reviewer for National Public Radio, and a bookseller in Washington, DC, and Maine. She lives in Philadelphia.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Excerpt from “Women” from The Blue Estuaries by Louise Bogan. Copyright © 1986 by Louise Bogan. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Excerpt from “Here Lies” from Collected Poems of Stevie Smith. Copyright © 1972 by Stevie Smith. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Excerpt from “The Critic” from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Copyright © 1981 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Excerpt from “Ash Wednesday” in Collected Poems, 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright © 1964, 1963 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Excerpt from “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets, copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
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