Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  I brought the birds to Doctor Frank’s biology class and gave a speech on their care and feeding. Could I explain their attraction then, since I can’t comprehend it now, beyond the sense of ownership, of responsibility for so many autonomous lives, of pride in a novel hobby? Yes, one of the parakeets, named Ichabod, was tamed to perch on finger and shoulder and would kiss my ear and pluck seeds from my lips. But an anthropomorphic exchange, much less affection, was absent. Yet I wept at every death, and since their life spans were brief, I wept a lot. (Ralph H. Mazure, who was also a taxidermist, taught me to eviscerate and embalm my dead pets. I did it once, against my nature, like stuffing one’s own baby.) I had no success in breeding them. But I did launch a mode—many school friends took to collecting birds, mostly canaries because of their song, and we talked about birds as much as we talked about poetry. The craze lasted for several years.

  October 13, 1934. Rufe went to a smoker for a Negro who is here as a guest from out of town. It seams that this colored man was an officer in the army during the late world war. When the war was over he returned in uniform to his native city in one of the southern states. While there he was treated courteously by every one but when he left town and he was a few miles out, the train was stopped and a delegation of white men got on and took his uniform off of him. He swore then never to put on a uniform of the United States of America again or defend it in any way. Good for him! The hysteria that the average southern white person has about the Negro is a disgrace to our country. And there are some northern white people who also have that mental disease.

  Could this “colored man” have been W. E. B. Du Bois? No, he was too old for World War I. But I do remember him in our parlor, good natured about the fauna, and Father driving him downtown to Union Station where, since sleepers were not available to Negroes, Father bought a ticket in his own name for Du Bois’s night trip back south. And I remember Ethel Waters, during her tour of Mamba’s Daughters, in our motley armchair by the fireplace, one arm thrown back, as guest of honor at Mother’s black and white tea party, and our maid Helen (Mrs. Coleman, to Mother) all agog, peeking through the same kitchen door Rosemary had peeked through at Professor Tillich, and Ethel shouting, “Hello, sister!”

  Mother involved herself with every right-thinking left-veering organization she could. The Urban League and the NAACP for works of Negro betterment, the Society of Friends, then much later the War Resisters League for works of pacifism. During and after the Second War she acted as professional advisor to would-be conscientious objectors, who could not (as Quakers could) claim legal exemption and be classified as 4-E. Even in the last years of her life, until her mind gave way, she worked with women’s groups, prochoice groups, and even marched, I am proud to state, in a Parents of Gays parade. At eighty she stood in the rain on Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue in an equal rights demonstration. In all of this she was somewhat unfocused, instinctive, the reverse of her hyperlogical spouse, especially when working with such organized persons as Grace Paley, who found her dithering. She was a pioneer, unsung but indefatigable. Her diary skims the surface of these concerns. Then on 21 October she writes:

  I have skipped a few days. Too occupied. Last evening we had eight guests for dinner at the Quadrangle club. Afterward we danced. Rather fun. I prefer simple pleasures but one must participate in some of the artificial activities if one belongs in modern society. Life is complex for me. If I had my choice I would be domestic by day—care for my family and be nice and good, then at night I would go out and get drunk and swear—maybe worse! Confessions of a Minister’s daughter above.…

  I built a fire in the grate today. I love that. Rosemary and Ned are at Sunday School. Rufe took his father to the fair. The latter is here for a couple of days. He is a dear—so serene in his old age.… It is lovely to be alone. I feel like Hamlet and like it.

  October 23. Today is Ned’s eleventh natal day. He is having a company of boys for dinner also Jean Edwards and his sister are to be present.… On Saturday or Sunday evenings there is a company of us who read plays together. It is so much fun. Last week we read O’Neill’s “Marco Millions.” This week I chose “King Lear.” … Indian summer lingers on. The sadness of autumn is not yet in the air. I long for a day in the country.

  And the sadness of her own interior is not in these entries—though who am I to know? Was it this year or earlier—it was during my period of fear of repeal—that the parents went out on the town, Mother in her blue taffeta formal, a hundred glass buttons down the front. When they returned Mother’s groans lasted until dawn, she couldn’t stop vomiting, and we visualized the chore of Father disrobing her. (Cocteau in Le grand écart quotes the suicide note of an Englishman: “Trop de boutons à boutonner et à déboutonner. Moi je me tue.”) But she was not alcoholic. Over the course of her long life her norm was two drinks a day—not one, not three—just two, usually whisky with water, or maybe beer, a relaxing draft. Her depressions came and went. When they came, Olga would do all to keep her up and swimming, even into November. One saw the two women on autumn evenings walking east on Fifty-seventh Street toward the lake in their slippers, bathing suits, long robes trailing. Mother was being led then. At her lowest, she once said, everything, even the lampshade, even the bathroom, is a menace.

  October 25. I observe that some days pass and I do not put down any thoughts. Today I visited a musical assembly that Rosemary helped to “put on.” She and Miriam Carey sang a duet together by Hopkinson, “My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free,” an early American song. They were in Colonial costume. Perry O’Neill accompanied them. He is a young genius. The girls sang sweetly too. I attended an anti-munitions gathering. Gee, there is much to do there to enlighten the public. I feel that I must do something for that cause and am going to.… I was asked to direct a group of seniors in High School today in dramatics. I love that and I am hoping we can put on a play for Yule.…

  November 1. On Monday evening we had two colored couples for dinner and one white, eight of us. Dr. and Mrs. Bousfield and Mr. and Mrs. Scott were the Negroes and Michael and Janet Davis along with us were the nordics. We repaired to “Run Little Chillun” afterward. This is an all-Negro cast play now on in Chicago. This was the first night and so a little at loose ends but fun. Dr. Bousfield and Michael Davis are with Rufe in the Rosenwald Fund and Mr. Scott is an artist. Mrs. B. is a Principal of a colored school, Mrs. S. a social worker. Janet Davis manages a home as I try to do. We have one of Mr. Scott’s pictures which he painted in Haiti and it is very interesting as he is. The others were interesting too. We find it fun having these “mixed” parties.

  The hamper in our linen closet was sandalwood flavored. I would curl up in the hamper for hours, for no particular reason. Once I hid there all day. Nobody knew where I was. They called the police. Did other children gauge their value financially? When I’d been bad, the sound of my own voice to Mother returns: “Am I still worth a million dollars to you?”

  I wrote short stories by the drove, including one about a boy who lives in a hamper. I followed Mother around, reading her my stories and poems. The poems were spin-offs of Amy Lowell, the stories of Galsworthy. Once I read to her from Galsworthy’s The Apple Tree and burst into tears. She was cleaning the good silver, called Etruscan, a wedding present, because it was “tarnished,” and Adele, our maid then, was cleaning the Quimper dishware, the family’s pride. Mother understood the tears, which she always credited to Art, which left one on the edge.

  I longed for a corner of my own. But the apartment was small, and cousin Margery had the little guest room.

  November 6. Saturday evening after a church supper we had a “wild” party—another incongruous combination Rufe and I have. We took Margery and our children to the supper and had a good time. We lean toward the Friends or Quakers. The wild party consisted of Dale and Paul Cooper, Dale’s brother Stan, and some of their radio, champagne selling, car parts selling and mail order selling friends. I liked them all. We drank some, danced, played check
ers, craps, and Rufe and Doris Keane sang beautifully to my accompaniment. Jill and Davis Edwards came too. They are fun. Jill talks on the radio and teaches my daughter dramatics in H.S. Davis teaches Public Speaking in the U. of C.… Last evening while Rufe was out making a speech I finished “Seven Gothic Tales.” Great book! It was wonderful having a peaceful book-reading evening by myself.… One of our guests at the Saturday wild party has religion and after a long talk with him I nearly became a Universalist especially after both of us had had several drinks of egg nog.

  I remember the church suppers with pleasure because of the obligatory meat loaf with overdone scalloped potatoes. I also remember Dale Cooper, who taught us how to pedicure our toes. She was rather cheap—looked like Nancy Carroll in Women Accused—and turned out not to be legally married to Paul, who, when he left her, caused great sorrow. (Mother hoped this would teach us a lesson about the sanctity, not to mention security, of marriage.) How “wild” those postchurch parties got, I do not know. I do recall the “filthy” jokes that were told en famille by the Edwardses and the Coopers and the Rorems, and seemed no tamer than those told in the locker room. Example: “My Lord, there is a lady without.” “Without what?” “Without food or raiment.” “Well, give her food and bring her in.” Shrieks of delight.… Louder shrieks as, with the years, we graduated into dirty words with such puzzles as: “Do infants have as much fun in infancy as adults do in adultery?” Or: “What goes in hard and comes out juicy?” Answer: “A stick of Spearmint—if you think it’s something else you have a low mind.”… Later still: “Did what made Oscar Wilde make Thornton Wilder?” Language was all, blending into literature.

  I worked on my handwriting so that it would have personality, using Mother’s as a model. (Father’s was Spencerian, predictable.) For a while I dotted my i’s with wee circles, the way Edith Harris did, because Edith got the highest grades in class, while I got the lowest. (Also, her father had thrown himself from a window of the Palmer House, which made Edith a celebrity for a while.) Then I wrote in backhand. My calligraphy eventually righted itself to become what it is today. With one stopover. In 1951 Henri Fourtine said the N in Ned looked like an M. I changed it sciemment. Should my signature have been reregistered at the bank and on my passport?

  November 21. We celebrated Rufe’s fortieth natal day November 17. He doesn’t look and doesn’t seem that age. He is a dear. The other evening we attended a dinner at the Quadrangle Club—a mixed white and colored group. I was so glad to have such a group in such a club. The Club is an exclusive club at the U. of C. and not many Negroes go there I am sorry to say. We thence repaired to Mandel Hall to hear Zora Neale Hurston, a negro writer and anthropologist, give a speech. She was the guest of honor at the dinner. Quite a colorful person (both literally and figuratively speaking). I read her “Jonah’s Gourd Vine.” Rufe’s father and Elizabeth (step-mother) spent a few days with us as they were bound for Florida. Fortunately we had a tolerable time. I never can express myself perfectly with either of them. I think Dad Rorem is a dear and so kind but he retains some of the old political and social ideas that leave me cold. Eliz is hopeless in that respect. I just must say this some place. What is a journal for but that. She is stultified! [The last sentence is penciled out] I pray that I may be open-minded and tolerant as I grow older so that young people and others too will feel free to express themselves to me and that I will not be shocked. This will sound as a family prejudice but my own father is the most tolerant of individuals in my opinion (Rufe is a close second). I could tell Dad anything, vulgar or beautiful, and he “gets it.” …

  Ned and I are reading “The Three Musketeers” together aloud. Rosemary and her father are studying French together in the evening.…

  I remember deaf old Grandfather Rorem with his Acousticon, and the redoubtable Elizabeth with her grainy whine. And Father’s embarrassing us when he imitated his father, Ole Jon, in the singsong Scandinavian accent, “Vell, I tank I go to bed now,” and we’d groan and roll our eyes. We, of course, were Rosemary and myself. We looked like twins, but she said vanilla so I said vanella.

  November 28. The day before Thanksgiving “and all through the house et cetera.” We are going to La Petit Gourmant [Le Petit Gourmet], a French restaurant, with our offspring for that occasion. They are studying French in school and it will give them an opportunity to show what they know. We vetoed a big party this year.… I am busy as anything directing two plays for Yule. We will put on “Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil” … and some scenes from “Alice in Wonderland.”… Then the Friends are working up a nativity play for Meeting. The adults are more difficult to handle than the children. Some person always wishes to tell the director how to do it. There is one in every home. I’ll have my troubles but it gives me a smile too. Anyway working with plays is fun.… Am reading John Locke on Education. He is quite sound after 200 years—amusing too. We saw Reinhardt’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” with Helen and Karl Klein and it was exquisitely done. Want Rosemary and Ned to see it. Puck was played by a twelve year old boy and most convincing. He can show my players just how good a child can do on the stage. My two children and eight others are in the juvenile group which I organized and dubbed The Mimes.

  Other than Six Who Pass and Alice (in which I played both the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse), she directed A Christmas Carol (I played the cruel Scrooge) and a version of Oscar Wilde’s Birthday of the Infanta (Rosemary played the cruel Infanta). Of the eight others I remember Jean Goodman, Miriam Carey, Robert Kincheloe from the fifth floor (he was the dwarf in the Wilde play), David Fox from the fourth floor, and of course Jean Edwards.

  December 10. We had an interesting experience the other night when we dined with Flora and Walter Hendricks (two young poets). As their other guests were two other young people, also poets, one a man and one a woman. The young man, Elder Olson by name and an excellent writer of lyrics, is very temperamental but sweet. We chatted for some time before dinner and then when we sat down to consume the food he suddenly jumped up (after one bite of radish) and dashed upstairs. I thought that perhaps he had a stomach ache but he did not come down for some time so Flora went up and he was having nervous indigestion. He braced up and returned to the table, took another bite (this time of celery) and once more repaired to higher regions. I sat beside him at table and thought mayhap I was offensive in some manner. But anon he appeared again. This time he snatched his coat, hat and scarf and dashed out wildly into the night. After the young woman poetess had departed Flora, Walter, Rufe and I tried to unravel his condition.… Gertrude Stein was speaking that night to a select few and he and the girl each had a ticket (the rest of us did not). We concluded he did not wish to make an appearance at her speech with this young girl because he feared what his friends and acquaintances might say or think, not being especially interested in the girl and being in love with a married woman in Evanston. It was a real mad tea party!

  The Hendrickses and the Rorems were cofounding members of the Fifty-seventh Street Meeting of Friends, which hived in John Wollman Hall, along with the Unitarian Church, between Woodlawn and University. Walter was a Leslie Howard type with blond hair and a handsome worried look; Flora a Pre-Raphaelite beauty with raven tresses done up in a bun. Two daughters, Hilda Marie and Cynthia, inherited their parents’ gentle sober beauty. We saw the Hendrickses often, especially during summers in Vermont, where they bought a house with a good tract of land near Marlboro. The girls were younger than us, mere charming scamps. But the parents interested me, not least because they gave me pointers on my own poems, and because in the thick mock orange about their home were robins’ nests from which I could filch blue eggs, which looked like Father’s eyes, for my collection. One winter in Chicago, Cynthia died. Her doctor was also our doctor, Dr. Carey. Rosemary and I didn’t learn about the death until the next morning, but all night long there was a coming-and-going, with Walter staying on our living room sofa. A decade later Walter founded Marlboro College, from which, after five y
ears, he was, in 1951, summarily fired. The house in which they lived all those summers is today the central bureau of Rudolf Serkin’s Marlboro Festival. How many months after Cynthia’s death did Dr. Carey commit suicide? His daughter, Miriam, a Ginger Rogers type, was Rosemary’s best friend. She was “fast,” she necked, and at sixteen lost her virginity with young Sam Norwood, intern. Sam lived in the Carey’s house on nearby Kenwood Avenue. There was a shed behind it. After Cynthia’s death, Dr. Carey grew increasingly depressed and, according to Sam Norwood, gave himself a hypodermic, then took a butcher knife to the shed where he stabbed himself. Miriam married Sam, moved to Atlanta, raised a family. She too killed herself. She had a lovely voice and emulated Jeanette MacDonald.

  … A few nights later we heard Gertrude Stein speak (as members of the Renaissance Society). She isn’t bad. We sat at a table with some North Shore socialites. Awful bores! The most fun of that occasion was afterward when we went to Fred and Francis Beisels (young artists) and heard two of our young colored friends sing and play. John Greene and Margaret Bonds.

  Very engrossed directing my two plays, working in school’s Christmas Shop, attending music recitals of the children, going for walks with friends, going to a party now and then and doing a little reading. I just finished James Stephens’ “Crock of Gold” and like it.… Esther Johnson (my coloratura soprano) asked me to accompany her in practice. I should love to but must wait until after the holidays. She is the only woman friend I have at present with whom I can giggle. I do appreciate that.