Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  In the moving premonitory memoir of his approaching death from cancer, poet Donald Hall discovers that what he will miss the most are the dailiest of things. Padding out onto his porch to retrieve the morning’s Globe; a quiet cup of coffee as he peruses the headlines; the dozen small nesting motions that bring him at last to his desk. Finally the picking up of his pen to start afresh. The things of life are so ordinary, the habits so engrained, that it’s stupefying to think of them taken away. One wonders that the universe would bother to kill off such a modestly focused life, circumscribed by hours of quiet on every side.

  Anyway, that’s how I feel about having pen in hand, gliding along line by line on the trail of something new, usually something I haven’t even dreamed of till it’s written down. Such a small business—tactile before all else, a sleight-of-hand producing a squiggling Steinberg line that flows and flows—and the best proof available that I’m still breathing.

  So even if books are not what they used to be, writing is. Of course the accumulation of pages has its own force of ego, bringing a thing to life; but every single stroke of ink feels shamelessly satisfying. Incremental, like the stitches of another sort of tapestry. Such that even if there seems to be nothing more to say—no lady, no unicorn, no ground of a thousand flowers—the needlework just won’t quit.

  A master woodworker I knew in Boston once told me that when he reached forty he found himself watching his hands all the time, alert to the merest slip of the saw that would leave him half a digit short. Till then, he said, he’d taken his hands entirely for granted, too many close calls at the jigsaw, so careless of the danger that he ought to be fingerless by now. That’s how I think about going blind, something I’d not even considered till Roger’s eyes were taken. And knowing that only a single medicine stands between me and sightlessness—a daily hour of IV drip, like a warmup to limber my neural muscles—I realize how killing it would be to have to give up my pen for a keyboard.

  I still remember Roger signing his will a month before he died—a caricature of his gentle hand, by memory alone, and wide of the line he was meant to sign till the lawyer and I guided his pen to the proper spot. Blind isn’t dead, I know that, but blind is no longer writing by hand, thus not writing at all. The pen can’t live without the eye, nor the eye without the pen—not in my cosmos anyway.

  I haven’t addressed thus far, have avoided even, the big-ticket items of ownership—houses and jewels and paintings, miles of private beach. The possessions that go with power, so mighty and so various, but that finally lie in waste and adrift with sand, like the kingdom of Ozymandias. In my twenties I was possessed by a wanton envy of the rich and their lives of seemingly limitless possibility. I took no notice of the cautions of Gatsby—neither the hollow shell of the hero as he gazed across the water at the green light on Daisy’s dock, nor indeed the uncontrollable tears of Daisy herself, burying her face in the soft profusion of Gatsby’s shirts. Virtually every book about the moneyed that drew me in—from The House of Mirth to Between the Acts—was a cautionary tale. The stiff repressive social order; Marley’s ghost dragging his strongbox behind him like ball and chain; story after story in which the possessor stood possessed, weighted with things, waiting for the glittering world of privilege to hit the iceberg.

  None of it really deterred me, though, from wanting to get in the door. But the old Brahmin rich of New England—their faded drapes, moth-eaten cardigans, chipped old dishes their ancestor captains had hauled from China for ballast, tins of Welsh rarebit from S. S. Pierce—weren’t quite what I wanted. No reckless glamour, no Bugatti with sable lap robes, no Baccarat flutes flung from the Murphys’ terrace into the sea off Juan-les-Pins. I wanted to witness Croesus-rich, robber-baron rich, fuck-you rich. Enough of these latter-day Puritan rich of Boston, born with silver spoon in mouth and sucking it ever after like a lolly.

  I had no idea what I really expected from such baronial encounters—sudden adoption perhaps, because I would prove such a perfect fit on the strength of wit and charm alone, the very frog they were looking for to elevate to prince. And when I finally stumbled on the very thing, it was by the sheerest inadvertence. A fellow English drudge at Sutton Hill School, seemingly churchmouse-poor as I, was bundling his wife and children off to Bermuda for spring break. They’d be staying with his grandmother, in a cottage behind the main house, a bare stone’s throw through the sea pines to the beach. There were plenty of extra beds—would I like to come? I think it was the “main house” part that hooked me. I accepted before he’d finished inviting me.

  And it was surely the grandest place I’d ever gained entry to, even if the “main house” proved something less than a mansion. A very old house with a white-limed ziggurat roof for catching rainwater, typical of the island style where fresh water was like gold. Shipshape—literally so—since most of the timbers and cedar paneling had been salvaged from ships that foundered off the point. A captain’s desk and a couple of leather-strapped sea chests, fit for Treasure Island, and a bronze ship’s bell on the front verandah to summon us in for meals.

  Not big, as I say, but grand. With terraces opening out on every side, ancient coral paving pocked with lichen and moss, shaded by loblolly pines and bowers of jasmine. To the south a panorama of the lordly Atlantic, studded with coral outcrops that had brought all those ships to their knees in the old days. To the north and east the view to Harrington Sound, placid as a salt lake because protected from the open sea. But more remarkable still was the acreage of open land all around, so the estate was as rustic as it was private. One field was planted in Easter lilies, and another served as grazing land for half a dozen cows, who lowed as if they’d died and gone to heaven.

  The “cottage” where I bunked with my friends was an old white-brick salt mill, cut from a coral quarry, fitted out now for guests and pungent with the sea—as if the walls still leached out salt, the concentrated perfume of a mid-ocean breeze. The days were casual to the point of near-delirium, swimming and walking the empty beaches surrounding the estate, exploring the caves the tide had gutted out of the coral. Three or four times we had lunch at the dock on the Sound, all of us diving like pearl fishers to bring up buckets of Harrington clams. Then each of us was given a razor-sharp clam knife and half a lemon. We sliced open the clams, revealing the meat still alive and quivering. A squeeze of lemon and we scooped them out and popped them into our mouths. Writhing against our tongues as we chewed them alive. It definitely took some getting used to.

  So this was how the other half percent lived, with customs so rarefied I’d never even heard of them. And then there were the permanent residents of Grandmother’s principality. Herself like the prow of a ship with a bun of snow white hair. Not a bit arch, though, or radiating anything like the superior air of noblesse oblige, scion though she was of near three centuries of island lineage, ancestors planted in the windblown graveyard out in Saint George’s parish. A striking beauty still, though she must have been a knockout once, the most eligible of the princess class.

  A quality she had apparently passed on intact to her daughter Margo, an Ondine sprite who must’ve been thirty that spring when I met her. Not a sprite anymore, of course, except in the portrait over the mantel in the library—but still with an orchid rarity about her even as she passed into full womanhood. With the angles and fluid grace and incandescent smile of Audrey Hepburn, born to wear designer clothes. Living that year with Grandmother, recovering from a messy divorce, with a pair of Etonian sons in short pants, Charles and Richard, whose company manners were rather too impeccable. Megs, as the family called her, always seemed to be gently teasing them to loosen up. But as they spent eight months of the year within the borders of their father’s domain, looseness wasn’t in the cards.

  A Croesus in the flesh, this man, heir to a railroad fortune and platinum mines and tracts of timberland as vast as your average banana republic. Fell head over heels for Megs in the midst of a yachting regatta, and within two weeks had married her. The bigge
st blowout wedding in island memory, three hundred guests arriving by horse and carriage, all-night dancing at the Mid-Ocean Club, and a breakfast of pheasant at dawn.

  Then he spirited Megs away from her luminous isle to the moveable feast of an entrepreneurial barony. Duplex on Fifth Avenue, an Adirondack lodge, the Middleburg Hunt in season, and a Moorish palazzo in Palm Beach. Trappings within trappings within trappings. I never heard it from Megs herself—the ennui of too many houses, the gathering panic of exile—but the family let you know. Delicate since Richard’s birth; shouldn’t have gone through it twice. A frailty that sapped her even now that she’d come home, and veiled references to surgery that mightn’t have got it all—and me too stupid with dazzle to figure out that they meant cancer.

  Still, she never spoke ill of Croesus—everyone else did—civil perhaps for the sake of the boys. But then, the boys had also sealed her claim to mythic stature, a sotto voce awe that trailed her like the whispers of the Furies. When Charles was born nine years before, he was officially Charles V, inheritor of the whole gilded century past—as if the railroads and the platinum were genetic. And when Megs came out of the anesthesia—a butchered delivery, it was said, calling to mind those clam knives—Croesus appeared before her in a burst of dynastic pride, presenting to Megs a tooled leather box, black velvet inside.

  Containing a necklace of knuckle-sized emeralds, the very same that Napoleon had presented to the Empress Josephine. Josephine being Megs’s middle name, and her husband a full-fledged emperor of commerce.

  The night my friend from Sutton Hill told that story, vodka-and-tonic on the ocean terrace, his own wife piped up with the punchline: “When Richard was born, he gave her the rubies.” The Empress’s rubies, that is—a rope of blood-red stars from Burma.

  In the speechless hush that followed, all I could think to ask was, “Did she get to keep them?”

  “You mean in the divorce?” queried the teacher’s wife. “Of course. But so what? They’re just in a bank vault somewhere.”

  And that was that, the cautionary tale in a nutshell. You didn’t even get to have the things you had. For wearing in palaces only.

  “I don’t know why she’s still so sad,” the wife went on. “He was a total prick to her otherwise, and she never cared for jewelry anyway.” You felt the teacher’s wife would have loved the chance to care for some herself.

  Sad? Was that what she was? Not around me at least. We’d hit it off instantly, the two of us, because I made her laugh. Perhaps it was just that I wasn’t one of them—not Bermuda, not the family. Or because I talked about books so much, for all she seemed to do was stay in her rooms—another guest house, used to be the stablemaster’s quarters—-and read and read. Jane Austen for the second time, all of it, she who might’ve been Elizabeth Bennett herself, or Emma Wood-house, though not so willful. Party to the same invitations, same social order, same intrigues. I’d never really thought of them as guidebooks before.

  Megs loved to talk about the moral ironies of that other age. She would come down to the beach with the rest of us, but always in a kind of sarong, because of the scars. (She swam in the Sound by herself late at night, the family said.) We’d sit in the shade of a coral arch and gab. Not gossip, not anything terribly personal—which was fine with me, as deep in the closet as I could get, Houdini chained in a trunk underwater but with no incentive to escape. No, books were the safest thing by far; except of course they lead in the end to matters philosophical.

  The sun was nearly down, and everyone else had gone up to change. We’d reached a sort of companionable silence, Megs and I, as if all talk were taking a vespers break for the gold and lilac lightshow in the West. But then out of nowhere she spoke with a slow-burning passion: “Sometimes I wish I were anywhere else but here.”

  It took me a moment to parse it, unsuccessfully. “Here?” I echoed. “You mean the beach?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She was scoffing at herself already, the moment’s glimpse into her heart about to be over. “Bermuda, I guess. These stodgy old colonels. The wives as brittle as teacups. Full of these hairline cracks.”

  “But where would you go instead?” I asked. She’d been everywhere else with Croesus, hadn’t she?—everywhere else that was suitable for the princess class. And hadn’t she left all that behind to come back here like a lost Miranda to Prospero’s island? Too fragile for the world out there.

  She laughed. “You know, my family used to be pirates. Generations of them. Buccaneers—what’s a buccaneer, exactly? Maybe I should go into the family business.”

  And the moment passed, before I could even form the question, ask what it was that had trapped her so. The cancer? But the only time she ever made mention of the gutting of her insides was to toss it off lightly. “That was before they took out all my ulcers,” she said one day. “So now I never worry, because I have nothing to worry with.” With a quarter smile that belied it all, even as she declared it. I was rendered mute in the face of such crossed signals, rather like Mr. Knightly himself.

  It was the last full day of our two-week Easter break, with nothing planned but a final scorch on the beach, to send us home just a shade short of mahogany. We were all at the breakfast table on the Harrington terrace, scarfing down Grandmother’s waffles swimming in Lyle’s Golden Syrup. All except Megs, who ate off a tray in her own quarters, at least in the morning.

  “It takes me an age to get going in the morning,” she told me once with characteristic breeziness. “Noon is about my speed.”

  So imagine our collective shock when she appeared on the terrace at nine A.M., and dressed to the nines besides. Chanel suit, Ferragamo heels, and even a broad-brimmed linen hat—she who usually stuck to sarongs and a cocktail shift for the evening; never any jewelry at all, not even earrings—sporting a diamond tennis bracelet and a black pearl choker with earrings to match. Even Grandmother looked suitably nonplussed.

  “Megs,” coaxed the teacher’s wife, “come have a waffle.”

  Megs shook her head, smiling all the while in my direction. “But this one’s going with me,” she announced, crooking a finger to beckon to me. “Can you bear to put on a tie?” I jumped up, prepared to put on three if necessary. “Meet me out by the garage,” she said, “and I’ll go see to lunch.”

  She drove an old wood-chassis Morgan—got it on her sixteenth birthday—its body mottled with rust and corrosion under its original racing green. The tattered top was down, Megs at the wheel. As I climbed in the other side, I saw in the space behind the bucket seats … the picnic hamper from the dairy auction, surfaced from a childhood cave of dreams. Not the very same, of course, but like enough that I told her the story, 157 and all. She responded with a sympathetic cluck and then a burst of laughter as the wind whipped through the car.

  “Well, it’s time you had a proper picnic, then.”

  We turned up the hill that looked out on Hamilton Harbor, the hill that held the manors of the old-line rich, the colonels and their teacups, pirates long expunged from the family tree. I thought, we must be going to a brunch or something, but then why the picnic finery? Megs turned in at a pair of cedar gates, with the drive parked up on either side with cars. At the crest of the rise she maneuvered the Morgan through the hedges and parked on the lawn. A trifle brazen, even for a princess.

  As we got out, nearly trampling a bed of prize begonias, she murmured behind her hand: “Mother wouldn’t come with me. They used to play bridge together. Every Friday, for decades.”

  Then she led the way round the side of the house, the opposite way from the front door. More hedges, and an overgrown arbor out of Edward Gorey (or Edward Lear), and we came out onto the sloping lawn in front, which proved to be chockablock with things—upholstered chairs, an elephant’s foot umbrella stand, a rococo mirror leaning against a white-flowered tree, end tables and Tiffany lamps, armoires and steamer trunks—a total hodgepodge of life among the carriage trade.

  Nailed to a column on the white veranda was a s
ign that pulled no punches: AUCTION BEGINS PROMPTLY AT ONE P.M. NO BIDDING WITHOUT A NUMBERJED PADDLE.

  So I wasn’t a step behind anymore, except for trying to keep up with Megs, who drifted from piece to piece distractedly, running her fingers along the grain. When I caught up with her, she was standing next to a card table with a faded green baize inset. We whispered at the same moment: “The bridge table.”

  Then we made our way up the wide teak steps to the veranda—fifty more lots of bibelots, kitschy Dresden milkmaids, Waterford vases, that sort of thing. Megs cast a brief glance from thing to thing, then said as we passed inside: “This is what it all comes down to, you know. For all of them.”

  Of course she recognized several of the browsers, and they her. But there was a certain downcast look they shared, not quite catching one another’s eyes—as if they’d been caught with their pants down, or their manners anyway. In the parlor above the fireplace was a portrait just like Megs’s, a girl whose cheeks were flushed with running or riding or a morning’s sail. I blurted out, unthinkingly: “How old was she?”

  “When she died? Just turned eighty. Never sick a day in her life, till last year.” She shook her head. “The end was torture.”

  And then we trailed up the circular stairs to the bedrooms. Stacks of old embroidered sheets, and table runners and doilies by the gross. In the master bedroom, with the balcony view of the harbor, silver brushes and beaded bags, onyx compacts, tortoise combs, each with a numbered tag. And medical gear besides: a walker, a nest of canes, a hospital bed. “Pathetic, isn’t it,” Megs declared, and we walked out onto the balcony. Gazing down at the yachted harbor, she began to recite, so softly I could hardly hear: