Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Do I physically resemble him more and more? Father, with his rimless glasses and thick hair which, like mine, grayed only after sixty, was facially regular-featured, like me, though bodily much shorter. But what he and I perceived from our twin sets of eyes was so different. He was neither a narcissist nor, he claimed, the least bit gay; indeed, homosexuality was incomprehensible to him, like being musically expressive beyond the mere notes on the staff, though he loved to sing, even as Mother loved to play, so badly, the piano. (She, meanwhile, once admitted to having certain “longings” for other women from time to time.) In many ways I was what he wanted to be; rather than stifling he encouraged me always, even when, like any American parent, he was unclear about the status of an “artist” in the family. If my work was a mystery to him, in its subjective dealing with the emotions of others, Father’s work was a mystery to me, with its objectivity, its order, its businesslike practicality.

  Next evening, from the ten-seat plane descending into Nantucket I see down there the ever-welcome presence of JH growing larger and larger, with his white shadow, Sonny.

  The New York Times, Wednesday, September 21, 1988:

  C. ROREM, 93, ECONOMIST;

  HIS IDEAS LED TO BLUE CROSS PLANS

  C. Rufus Rorem, an early proponent of prepaid health care whose studies led to the creation of Blue Cross and Blue Shield, died of heart failure Monday at the Cadbury retirement community in Cherry Hill, N.J., where he lived. He was 93 years old.

  In the early years, working as an economist for the Julius Rosenwald Fund in Chicago, Mr. Rorem was the principal author of a report on the costs of medical care that advocated group medical practice and prepayment of hospital bills.

  At the time the concepts were radical, but in 1937 he became the head of the American Hospital Association’s committee on hospital services, which fostered the first prepaid hospitalization plans in New York and other cities, followed in the 1940’s by doctors’ group practice.

  Earlier this year Mr. Rorem was one of the first people named to the Health Care Hall of Fame, which was inaugurated by Modern Healthcare magazine. He was a fellow of the American Public Health Association and the American Institute of Accountants.

  A native of Radcliffe, Iowa, he was a graduate of Oberlin College and received his master’s and doctoral degrees in economics from the University of Chicago. In World War I he served in the United States Army, rising to second lieutenant from private.

  After the war Mr. Rorem taught economics and accounting at Earlham College and at the University of Chicago until 1929, when he joined the staff of the federally sponsored Committee on the Costs of Medical Care and began his career in the health field.

  After World War II he was named a consultant to the commission that shaped the medical plans that later became the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. He served for 13 years as director of the Hospital Council of Philadelphia and, after retirement in the mid-1970s, he became a consultant to a number of local, state, and national health care organizations.

  Mr. Rorem’s wife, Gladys Miller Rorem, died earlier this year. He is survived by a son, Ned Rorem, the composer, a daughter, Rosemary Marshall of Philadelphia, six grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.

  It pleases me to think that, as with Mann’s Aschenbach, a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease. Obituaries and condolences flowed in from all over the country. Virgil Thomson, Father’s precise contemporary, sent these words, handwritten and unwavering:

  21 September 1988

  Dear dear Ned

  Your father, according to the N.Y. Times, was a great man, and I’m glad they gave him a fine obit. For you I am sorry and full of sympathy, knowing as I do how you were attached to him. Ninety-four is a good age to live to, but you’ll be missing him all the same. And now you are a chef de famille, you will be a good one. Do come to see me when you can, and tell me all, and I will hold your hand, which I am sure Jim is doing right now.

  Everything ever

  Virgil

  David Diamond, the senior colleague to whom, despite decades of hot and cold, I remain most devoted, wrote:

  It is with much sadness that I read of your father’s death. Certainly this handsome and gallant man leaves you full of memories that will often haunt you as well as taunt you in your final days, and so the sadness and loss you feel now will slowly relinquish its hold on you and become part of eternity.…

  And a day or two later:

  I find it strange that I can write about death and dying but find it difficult to talk about. Your words, “so now they’re both gone,” tell me so much of what you have passed through. But what extraordinary human beings they were! I truly feel I respected them more than anyone else, more than my parents, more than Dimitri [Mitropoulos]. Their strong quietness, their constant interest, their fairness and equanimity—no wonder they have left this world with Love floating all about them.…

  • • •

  The following year my diary contains these entries:

  4 February, New York. Long talk with Rosemary. As usual the question comes up of what to do with our parents’ remains. R’s kids, who doted on their grandparents, are in turn less keen on my placing the ashes in the Nantucket plot than in having some communal ritual in Philadelphia, or chez Christopher in Maine. R feels, meanwhile, that since Mother left no testament, and never really had a say in major decisions (despite Father’s seeming magnanimity, he ran the show), she nevertheless did write down, on two occasions, crosswise in shaky script in her address book, that she wished to be cremated and flung to the Hudson River. Well, Jesus, I concur. Rosemary wants us all to gather in Battery Park, maybe board the ferry, and sing “The Lordly Hudson” while performing the funerary act. As to how simple, or indeed how legal, the act might be (the mortal dust, laced with weighty bone fragments, might blow back into our cold faces, not to mention blinding other passengers) is anyone’s guess. I do feel less strongly about their remains—and my own—than I felt a year ago.

  21 February. Proust was hardly the first to stress that our yesterdays, once lived, vanish forever—that the past exists only inside the head (even the holocaust?), and that attempts to retrieve it are current impulses which distort, of necessity, since we know now more than we knew then; so the past is by definition embellished—just as we can’t hear Haydn as he heard himself, because Ravel, whom he never knew, blocks the way. But last night I saw Jezebel for the first time in nearly fifty years and recalled each frame, each strain of music, even the sense of silliness I’d felt at sixteen, as though they’d just occurred. There rests no filmed history of Mother & Father. If one day I compose a memoir, will my recall be such that their snapshots will peel off the album page and return to life, at least in my mind if not on the typewriter?

  30 March. Rosemary has come by morning train to New York with the ashes (not ashes, really, more like hunks of dry cartilage and mineral and sharp metal slivers in gray dirt) of Mother and Father stored in two boxes of five pounds each. We mix them in an urn of biodegradable pottery fired by R herself in the kilns of Pendle Hill. We conjoin our parents (holding a bit aside which I put into two small spice jars), then tie them in an old towel. Cousin Sara joins us with her car.

  Cold, raw, gusty, rain. We get lost repeatedly, seeking possible accesses to the river between the illegal cliffs of Jersey opposite the Cloisters. But over there—isn’t that a blocked entry to the Palisades? We remove the chain, drive a descending half-mile, spot a police van. Sara, who is not afraid of people, gets out to speak with a sort of mounty, who nods, and we proceed. No one in sight for acres and acres of bleak freezing space.

  At the river’s edge we throw forth the—the what—the debris?—using as tiny shovels the sides of the now-broken urn. It takes a while. Through our tears we can scarcely read the Twenty-third Psalm, asked for by Mary, or her own brief typewritten statement sent from California:

  Your granddaughter Mary offers prayers to God that your journey may be peac
eful and full of joy and that she meet up with you again in some form, at sometime, somewhere in the universe.

  (Well, as far as I’m concerned the universe wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t imagined it. Why have we made it so unfathomably pointless?) Rosemary too had written a “dear folks” letter, chatty, wistful.

  We stroll a mile upstream through the drizzle and are met by a pair of Canada geese, later by a flock of mallards, for whom we have no crumbs.

  It is soon over. These distinguished long-lived citizens have disappeared forever in the choppy waves, and nobody knows about it but us.

  Sara had to get home, but swung down by Seventieth Street and let us out without coming up to the apartment. Rosemary and I ate cold quiche and a can of Del Monte peaches. Having accomplished what she came for, R took a cab to Penn Station, hoping to get back to Philly before dark.

  1. Baby Pictures

  I very early understood that the universe is divided between two esthetics: French and German. Everything is either French or German. Blue is French, red is German. No is French, yes is German. Cats are French, dogs are German. Night is French, day is German. Women are French, men are German. Cold is French, hot is German. Japanese are French, Chinese are German (although Chinese become French when compared, say, to Negroes, who are German). Gay is French, straight is German (unless it’s the other way around). Schubert is French, Berlioz is German. Generalities are French, specifics are German.

  If all this is true—and it is (you disagree? you’re German)—then I fall roundly into the French category. How do I draw these distinctions?

  The difference between French and German is the difference between superficiality and profundity. To say that the French are deeply shallow is to allow that superficiality is the cloth of life. One’s daily routine is mostly casual, fragmented, perishable, mundane, but the years flow by, and through such give and take our little lives are rounded. Even with close friends, how often do we sit and ponder the meaning of the cosmos? Such meaning is reserved for work.

  French is superficial in the highest sense of the word, skimming surfaces to invent Impressionism, the sight of an apple-cheeked child caught for a millisecond before the fading sun shifts ever so slightly through the sycamores, the never-to-recur Debussyan glint on an unseen ocean wave at the stroke of noon. The French are not long-winded, but like cheetahs they cover distance fast. French is economy.

  German meanwhile is superficially profound, driving one spike as deep as it will go, like Beethoven’s motive of da-da-da-DUM hammered 572 times into his Fifth Symphony, devitalizing any subject by overanalyzing it, even humor. (A German joke is no laughing matter.) German is extravagance.

  The famous quip of Jean Cocteau’s (which in my presence he once generously claimed to have “borrowed” from Péguy), “One must know how far to go too far,” might be expanded: A true artist can go too far and still come back. Satie does this, Bruckner doesn’t. The secret lies in knowing when to stop.

  Cocteau in 1920 contrived the scenario for Darius Milhaud’s ballet Le boeuf sur le toit. Gide, Colette, and Proust respectively published Si le grain ne meurt, Chéri, and Le côté des Guermantes. George Santayana, already settled in Rome, issued this assessment of the period: “Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom—picturesque, passionate, unhappy, episodic—may be coming to an end.” Meanwhile, in New York that year Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence had just appeared, so had This Side of Paradise by Scott Fitzgerald, while farther west, in Yankton, South Dakota, my mother met my father at a picnic in the early spring.

  The intermediary was Father’s former college roommate at Oberlin, Art Borough, now already married to Marie, Mother’s best girlfriend. (The Boroughs were Catholics, an exciting, strange, even wicked condition when I became aware of them in Chicago. Marie had kissed the Blarney Stone. That fact plus her long hair formed a magical combination. I used to plead with Mother to let me visit Marie on Stoney Island Avenue, so that I could comb her dark Rapunzelian tresses, her Catholic tresses. Mother did not acquiesce, any more than she acquiesced when I wanted to play the role of Jo in a school production of Little Women.) On 10 August, Clarence Rufus Rorem and Gladys Winifred Miller were married.

  Clarence, as his siblings always called him, or Rufe, as all outsiders including Mother called him, was the youngest among five offspring—and the only one with a university education—of Ole Jon Rorem who had emigrated in the 1880s to become a well-off Iowan farmer until the crash of ’29. Ole Jon, born in 1854 (why, he was eleven years older than Rasputin!) in the valley of Rørhjem—meaning “mixed Horne,” and shortened to Rorem at Ellis Island—on the Isle of Ømbe in the harbor of Stavanger on Norway’s southern coast. (I’m still not sure how to pronounce our name. Father said Ror-em, Mother said Ro-rem.) Ole Jon married Sine Tendenes, a fellow Norwegian, only after reaching America. Sine never made it into the twentieth century. My father’s sole recollection of his mother was as a corpse, when he was four, with family members moaning. When he felt moved to moan, too, the infant Clarence was shushed by the grown-ups; his shock at this mean reaction was a lifelong trauma. Grandfather Rorem, whose singsong “squarehead” accent was hard to understand, remains a remote presence, as does his second spouse, whom I never cared for, Elizabeth, an American in the style of the viragos forever taunted by the Marx Brothers.

  As a boy Father had a formidable power of concentration. He was literary but not, as the saying goes, creative; about those who were, he felt wistful rather than jealous, and spoke admiringly of Thorton Wilder, a mere freshman at Oberlin when Father was a senior, who wrote sonnets in Latin. Father himself knew French, had even seen Bernhardt’s La dame aux camélias in Mason City, Iowa, circa 1915; but if he never mastered the language orally, he read it fluently and regularly throughout his life, especially Anatole France and the bathetic love lyrics of Paul Géraldy, Toi et moi, which he translated and offered as a gift to young Gladys.

  After Oberlin, a dignified stint in the army during the Great War, and a trip abroad, post-armistice but still in uniform with his father and my uncle Silas, he became a salesman for Goodyear. It was as a traveling salesman that he happened to be in Yankton. Though we used to kid him about it, and though they did speak of a miscarriage during their first year, I doubt if Mother was pregnant at the wedding. Except for a mournful period after their first decade their fidelity was (I believe) continual.

  Gladys, as her family called her, or Glad, as all outsiders including Father called her, was fourth of the five offspring of a dirt-poor itinerant Congregational minister, the Reverend A. C. Miller, of Dutch-German descent, and of Margery Beattie, who had been born in Newcastle, England. The esprit de corps was contagious among the Millers (my middle name is Miller) and a sense of jollity in the face of adversity as they traveled from town to middle-western town. The jollity was curtailed when the youngest son, Robert, underage and patriotic, was killed at Belleau Wood in 1918. Gladys never recovered from the news, spent a full year in seclusion, while the remaining years of her life were a roller coaster from lowish heights to darkest depths, with always a revulsion for war and any civil injustice. Judging from early photographs, however, the melancholy only added to her beauty. The silken mahogany hair, the gigantic deepset eyes, the overample bust, the firm waist and erotic hips (her legs were a sore point, but their unesthetic thickness did keep her close to the good earth and lent stamina to the long and hearty daily walks) and general stance of flirtatious vulnerability were surely traits that so quickly drew Rufus to her. Grandaddy Miller married them in a garden ceremony, after which they spent (so far as I can deduce) a year on the road, eventually taking a small apartment in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1922.

  That was the year of The Waste Land and The Enormous Room, of the Sitwell-Walton Façade and Willa Cather’s One of Ours. It was also the year of Ulysses, of the death of Proust, and of the birth of my sister, Rosemary. Father, who was permitted to as
sist as spectator at the births of both my sister and me, says that Rosemary, although the result of a long labor, emerged as daintily as a rose unfolding, and was pretty, if grave, from the very start.

  She and they removed then to Richmond, Indiana (for the record, to an apartment on National Road in West Richmond, on the second floor of a private house owned by people named Leslie), where Father taught accounting at the Quaker college of Earlham. They also renounced their former religions (Father had been raised Methodist) to become permanent members of the Society of Friends. The decision was philosophical rather than godly. Mother, especially, sought to ally herself with a group actively devoted to promoting a concept of peace in time of peace as well as in time of war.

  The year of their conversion, 1923, was the year of Huxley’s Antic Hay, of Ronald Firbank’s The Flower Beneath the Foot, which the author described as “vulgar, cynical and horrid, but of course beautiful here and there for those who can see…,” of Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, Djuna Barnes’s A Book, and Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium. Nineteen twenty-three also saw the appearance of Millay’s The Harp Weaver and Other Poems; Stravinsky’s greatest ballet, Les noces; Falla’s El retablo; and Honegger’s Pacific 231; plus Chaplin’s movie A Woman of Paris and George Grosz’s picture Ecce Homo. Hitler led his “Beer Hall Putsch” in the Bügerbrautskeller outside Munich. Katherine Mansfield died at thirty-four, as did Radiguet, age nineteen (the same age that Rimbaud “retired”), likewise Sarah Bernhardt, who in 1844 had been born, as was Franz Liszt, on my birthday, 23 October.

  Mother said I “slipped out like an eel,” easier and happier than Rosemary. I was also longer, twenty-one inches, and would grow to be the tallest of the whole clan, including first cousins on both sides. Apparently I beamed continually, despite being circumcised on the second day, like most middle-class gentiles of the period. Unlike Rosemary, who was breast-fed for a year (which left Mother’s “bosoms”—as she called them—pendulous and sacklike), I took to the bottle at six weeks, and announced each meal’s end by hurling the bottle from the cradle with a crash. Also unlike Rosemary, I was what’s known as a birthright Quaker. Again, unlike Rosemary who grew gregarious only as her years unfolded, I began by sitting on the laps of anyone who’d permit it and demanding “Rock me,” while as my years unfolded I built a glass wall around me and, grimly shy, frowned on the extroverts outside.