The Baltimore Book of the Dead

by Marion Winik

  The Baltimore

  Book of the Dead

  ALSO BY MARION WINIK

  Highs in the Low Fifties

  The Glen Rock Book of the Dead

  Above Us Only Sky

  Rules for the Unruly

  The Lunch-Box Chronicles

  First Comes Love

  Telling

  BoyCrazy

  nonstop

  For DDP, Baltimore friend through thick and thin

  The Baltimore Book of the Dead

  Copyright © 2018 by Marion Winik

  First hardcover edition: 2018

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Winik, Marion, author.

  Title: The Baltimore book of the dead / Marion Winik.

  Description: Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018012453 | ISBN 9781640091214 | eISBN 9781640091221

  Subjects: LCSH: Winik, Marion—Anecdotes. | Death—Anecdotes. | Curiosities and wonders. | Baltimore (Md.)—Biography.

  Classification: LCC CT275.W584626 A2 2018 |

  DDC 975.2/6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012453

  Jacket designed by Jenny Carrow

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in Canada

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  People do not pass away.

  They die

  and then they stay.

  —NAOMI SHIHAB NYE, Voices in the Air

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Alpha

  The Perfect Couple

  The Fourth

  The Cat with Nine Lives

  The Man Who Could Take Off His Thumb

  The Classmate

  Two First Cousins

  Their Mother

  The Social Worker

  The Mensch

  The Thin White Duke

  The Camp Director

  My Advisor

  The Golden Boy

  The Warrior Poetess

  The Jewish Floridian

  The Brother-in-Law

  Who Dat

  The Artist

  The Young Hercules

  The Neatnik

  The Velveteen Rabbit

  The Werewolf

  The Queen of the Scene

  The Volunteer

  The All-American

  The Paid Professional Codependent

  The Southern Writer

  The Belle of the Ball

  The Rancher

  The Father of the Bride

  Portrait of a Lady

  The Statistic

  Two Slips of the Knife

  The Old Rake

  The Mother of Four

  The Man of Honor

  The Little Bird

  The Montessori Teacher

  The Ambassador’s Wife

  The Playwright

  The Belligerent Stream

  The Southern Gentleman

  The Squash Player

  Her Son

  His Brother

  The Grandmother-General

  The Role Model

  The Talent

  The French Horn Player

  The Big Man

  The Assistant Superintendent

  The Very Tiny Baby

  His Dog

  The Pirate

  The Happy Man

  The Babydaddy

  The Innocents

  The Leader of the Pack

  El Suegro

  The Living

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  DURING THE SPRING OF 2007, in the dark days toward the end of our marriage, my second husband and I managed to get ourselves invited to a small house party on the South Coast of Jamaica, held over the weekend of the Calabash Festival, a major annual literary event with writers from all over the Caribbean and the world. I had just begun writing The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, the predecessor to this volume.

  The first morning, all the guests went up the road to Jake’s, the resort where the festival is held, in our hosts’ van. We heard readings, paged through books on sale, sipped frozen drinks. My husband and I sipped many of them. The group went home for lunch, planning to return in the afternoon, but storm clouds massed and broke and no one wanted to go back in the pouring rain.

  Our friends were expecting another visitor for drinks that evening. This man turned out to be a writer for the island’s main newspaper and also a native of the fishing village where the house was located. He spoke passionately about Jamaica’s history and politics. He told us about his father and his uncles and cousins, many of them claimed by the greedy sea. One story after another poured out of him, stories of people dying in boats, in hurricanes, on cliffs, people dying even at other people’s funerals.

  I asked if he would write about them, and he said he planned to, told me how it would begin with him standing on the beach with his aunt Lucy when he was very young, trying to understand the look on her face as she watched the ocean.

  After he left, we sat down to dinner: our hosts, four other friends of theirs, my husband, now definitively in the bag, and me. The rain hammered on the roof as the local women who worked for them brought dishes of callaloo and jerk meats.

  Since we were skipping the evening program at the festival, I suggested that after dinner I could fill in with a reading from the collection I was working on. The pieces were very new and I hadn’t had the opportunity to get people’s reactions. I was eager to do so. I wished that the journalist had still been there, but the other guests seemed interested enough.

  The first one I read was about my father; the second was called “The Realtor,” about the spunky Texas woman who had sold my house years back. The short piece had several scenes, one in Venice, one in her backyard, one in her bedroom when she was dying of cancer. I had barely finished it when one of the women at the table blurted emotionally, Please, I’m on vacation. I don’t want to hear this depressing stuff. She jumped up with her hand over her mouth and fled to her room.

  I wanted to go to her, but my hostess thought I should not. Well, then, I said, why don’t I just continue. My hostess didn’t think much of that idea, either. At this point, she was well on her way to regretting having invited us, and we would both give her further reasons to do so for the remainder of the weekend, the final mistake being leaving too small a tip for the staff, which I still feel bad about.

  I reluctantly put aside my laptop. A debate ensued among the remaining guests about just how depressing the pieces really were, and whether the topic of death had any proper place at the dinner table.

  I suggested that, at least from my perspective, our lives are so full of dead people that any sane way of living involves constant remembrance. My days and my thoughts are shaped almost as much by people who are no longer here as those who are. That to cast this remembrance as depressing is to deprive ourselves of our history, our context, and even one of our pleasures, if a bittersweet one. Meeting the journalist earlier in the evening had been a more meaningful experience because he’d told us about his father and uncles.

  Death is the subtext
of life, there is no way around it. It is the foundation of life’s meaning and value. It is the ultimate game-changer, the shift in perspective that puts everything in its place, yet it is a part of our story we know little about and have little control over.

  So at the very least, it’s interesting.

  On the other hand, as far as death at the dinner table goes, some respectful space must be made for grief. Grief is socially awkward, if not all-out antisocial, difficult to accommodate even in one-on-one conversations. Even now, when I mention that I was widowed in my first marriage, or that my first baby was stillborn, I see people’s faces fall, and I rush to explain that it was a long, long time ago and it was very sad but I am fine now. I really am. But I am also trying to spare them the awkwardness of having to come up with some appropriate, or more likely inappropriate, response, perhaps making some well-intentioned but doomed attempt to help me get over it, possibly by implying that it was God’s will.

  Which brings me back to the time when I was not fine, after those deaths and others, as well, and there I find part of my motivation for writing these books, for dwelling so long in the graveyard, for finding a way to talk about it.

  In times of intense grief, I have tried all the usual methods of escape—distraction, compensation, intoxication; therapies and treatments and antidotes for body and soul. I once had a massage from a woman named Chaka that unleashed a hurricane of tears. Ultimately, instead of attempting to flee from the pain of loss, I decided to spend time with it, to linger, to let these thoughts and feelings bloom inside me into something else.

  Why do we build memorials, decorate gravesites, set up shrines, stitch an AIDS quilt, paint three murals for Freddie Gray; what are these ghostly white bicycles woven with flowers on Charles and Roland avenues? These are places to put our grief, places outside ourselves. And when you make a memorial object with your own hands, some of the anguish dissolves into what you are making. You are returned from the world of the dead to the world of the living.

  For example, that ex-husband of mine never tired of hearing the heartbreaking song “Sweet Old World” by Lucinda Williams. Addressed to Williams’s boyfriend who died of an overdose, the song was for him a way of connecting with his feelings about another loss—his younger brother, dead of similar causes when he was barely thirty. See what you lost when you left this world, this sweet old world . . .

  Part of the beauty of the song, like so many other songs of mourning, is that people hear and feel in it a reflection of their own grief. When my fatherless sons were teenagers, they fell in love with songs by Blink-182 and OPM about people who died too young. It takes away some of the brutal loneliness of bereavement to hear those lyrics, or to read that story, to see the monument someone else has made by hand. To join a chain of remembering. It does not make us any sadder to consume these morbid entertainments; it may even ease our hearts.

  The novelist Lewis Nordan, remembered later in these pages, has a beautiful short story called “Tombstone” about a man whose son committed suicide fourteen years earlier. The man comes across a photograph of folk-art tombstones from the South. They are blocks of poured concrete, with wings and heads projecting from the base, the wings washed white and the faces painted simply to represent the lost people. Driven to make one of these for his son, the narrator says, A joy I had not felt for fourteen years swam into my heart as I fashioned Robin’s sweet closed eyes, as I remembered having seen them in sleep, and a trace of his pickerel smile.

  The “pickerel smile” is a reference to another literary memorial, Theodore Roethke’s “Elegy for Jane, My Student Thrown by a Horse.” I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils / And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile . . .

  A pickerel, by the way, is a young pike. Apparently famous for their smiles.

  After that trip to Jamaica, 2007 went straight downhill. The marriage was almost over, and in September my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. Every time I went to visit her, we would talk about different people I wanted to include in the book; there was so much I didn’t know. Meanwhile, it started to be obvious that she could soon become one of its characters. Hell, no, I thought, quickly completing and turning in the manuscript so she would not be in it, as if this would have mystical power to keep her alive.

  Ten years later, this second book begins with her, adding people who died between 2008 and 2017, and a few others. Some of them I loved, some of them I barely knew, some I only worshipped from afar, but all of their deaths I considered a subtraction from my world. I have made every attempt to be accurate about the details of their lives, yet as in the previous volume I have omitted their names, since they had no chance to correct any errors, or even agree to be in this book.

  I moved from rural Pennsylvania—Glen Rock—to Baltimore in February of 2009. So like its predecessor, this book is named for the place I wrote it, rather than the stories it includes. But you can’t call a book The Baltimore Book of the Dead without creating certain expectations.

  This city has a vexed and unnaturally intimate relationship with death. In Bodymore, Murderland, as the poets call it, people will sometimes refer to their relative who was a homicide victim as “Number 146,” meaning he was the 146th of the people murdered this year. Last year, according to the Baltimore Sun, the number got to 343. Back before these official counts were so widely publicized, I taught a student in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore, a young black man who grew up here. He had filled a shoebox with obituaries of friends and family by the time he was in high school. You’ll meet his brother in a little while.

  Well before the death of Freddie Gray and the uprising that followed, people who came to visit me would ask if it is very frightening and dangerous to live in Baltimore. They wondered if they would be safe. Well, of course, they had seen The Wire. Has any other television show so shaped the reputation of a city?

  I would explain that the Baltimore they were visiting is a narrow strip of relative privilege and safety, a column of nice neighborhoods through which the more privileged citizens oscillate, dropping our kids at school, heading to our offices at Hopkins or MICA, drinking microbrews in converted mill buildings, tooling down to the Inner Harbor in hybrid cars to openings at the Visionary Art Museum.

  To the left and right of this spinal cord of gentrification is another Baltimore, the stubbled flanks of the city: crumbling projects, blocks and blocks of boarded-up row homes, crowded bus stops, street-corner car washes, churches, hairdressers, liquor stores, and chicken shacks. There are people who live two miles from the glitzy Inner Harbor who have never seen it, and we won’t be visiting their neighborhoods, either, unless the GPS screws up. It is a loss for all of us.

  During the chaos of May 2015, friends all over the country checked in to make sure I was all right. I’m watching it on TV, I told them, just like you are. The day our city schools were closed, a few of us moms organized a little peace march with the kids in our neighborhood, parading down the main avenue with brown-paper signs, banging on pots and chanting slogans. Public life has only gotten more alarming and alienating since then, and Baltimore remains two cities, not one. No matter what happens, there will always be as many books of the dead as there are people remembering.

  MARION WINIK

  Baltimore, Maryland

  March 2018

  The Baltimore

  Book of the Dead

  The Alpha

  died 2008

  ANYONE WHO WAS AT Camp Nawita in the late 1930s can tell you, she was queen of the baseball diamond. The tennis court, the hockey field, the horseshoe pitch, and the lake. Too bad she beat Title IX by forty years. It wasn’t exactly the heyday of female business majors, either, nor women in the workplace, and for a really bad idea, try sending a young woman on a business trip by herself, wedding ring or no. Enough already. She got pregnant, moved to the Shore, took up golf and gin. She won her first club championship in 1966, just as I began my poetry career. I raced into the
dining room where she was drinking her martini, ode in hand. She had a bad lie in the weeds of sixteen / Ere she lofted and landed her ball on the green. Now I haven’t set eyes on that place in ten years, and when they say everything is different, I believe them.

  Everyone’s mother is mythological: her body the origin of existence and consciousness, her house the pimped-out crib of Zeus, her mistakes the cause of everything. Holy her rosebushes, holy her blackjack system, her London broil holy. My mother, the godhead of 7 Dwight Drive, rose daily from her bed to quaff her Tropicana orange juice and to slay the New York Times crossword puzzle. She survived a difficult childhood, my father’s high jinks, two heart attacks, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, surgery for diverticulosis, and the many poor decisions and inappropriate outfits of her daughters. She certainly did not believe a clot in her lung could bring her down, that smoking for sixty-five years would actually cause lung cancer, or that lung cancer was definitely fatal. The last thing she did before she took to her bed was win a golf tournament. Clearly the subprime crisis, the market crash, Hurricane Sandy, and even Donald Trump were biding their time until she was out of the way.

  And then she was. Imagine Persephone coming up from hell and Demeter not there. Strange cars in the driveway, the rosebushes skeletons. You stand there at first, uncomprehending, your poem in your hand. Then you go somewhere, call it home. Call it spring.

  The Perfect Couple

  died 1991, 2011

  IT IS 1956 AT the beach club, the whole crew lined up on lounges like glamorous crayons. She’s the one with the legs, the baby, just back from boring old freshman year. Have you two met? someone asks, and she looks up from her Bain de Soleil. Why, that’s the sweetest smile she’s ever seen. Poof, there goes college.

  In 1965, she was the prettiest mom at my seventh birthday party, with her long, swinging hair and white patent leather belt, her third little bundle in the stroller. She wanted more but the doctor said no. Too many miscarriages, and this guy came two months early and almost didn’t make it. Then there’s the problem the doctor doesn’t know about.