Mentor: A Memoir

by Grimes, Tom

  In a sense, I was also wrong about the amount of time Frank spent with his sons after his divorce. It “would be limited to three months each summer,” I’d written. “Otherwise, he was absent, mimicking his own fatherless childhood.”

  Which was not entirely true. Will wrote:One thing I need to say—although you’re absolutely right that Dad’s time with Dan and me was essentially limited to three months a year after the divorce, and technically it’s true that he was ‘absent from our lives,’ as you write, I promise you it didn’t really feel that way. We spoke on the phone all the time and wrote letters and he was always very carefully attentive and respectful and helpful with regard to any of our little worries or problems. He was great about that—made it feel like he was there, still, in Brooklyn. It always seemed like he was coming to NY for a visit within the next few weeks or we were visiting him somewhere or meeting for Thanksgiving or something like that. I missed him sometimes, of course, but it always felt, every day, as if he was very present and accessible. In fact a joke I had with Dad was that, in contrast to his own situation in which that wall of books became (replaced) his father, I had such a great father that I never had to read a single book (!).

  Our feelings, perceptions, and imaginations create the constantly changing mosaic of those we know, but know incompletely.

  Once cancer reaches stage four, nothing, not chemo, not an operation, will halt its metastasizing. Yet, after reconsidering the test results, Frank’s oncologist changed his opinion. “Now he says I’m a three,” Frank told me, “or more like a three and a half.”

  The operation, on a late-winter afternoon, lasted four hours, maybe five. Frank’s entire colon and all malignant tissue surrounding it were removed. Before Frank had fully recovered, he began chemo treatments. “And let me tell you,” he said, “they’re no fun.”

  Before his diagnosis, he had signed a contract to write Time and Tide for Crown, which published a line of “walk” books in which famous writers described the places where they lived, at least part of the time. When Frank’s agent, Neil, broached the idea, Frank immediately said, “Nantucket.” Like other “walk” books, Frank’s paperback-sized volume would be short—140 pages—and it would blend the island’s history with Frank’s history. It’s a somber book, at times, and its audio version, read by Frank, weakened by chemotherapy, is haunting. A sense of letting go—of his work, of his family, of his life—permeates the memoir. And, after thirty-five years, certain regrets remain vivid. “I don’t have much nostalgia for Nantucket in the seventies,” he writes. “Personally, it was a tough time both emotionally and economically. I was a writer, after all, and, to make it worse, a literary writer. I left Brooklyn with three hundred dollars, no job prospects, and an unheated, unfinished barn on a remote island as my only possession.” He scraped by, “living on the cheap,” as he put it. “I installed electric heaters in the bedroom and kitchen, but the barn hadn’t been built with winter in mind and I spent a lot of time in the crawl space underneath working on frozen pipes with a propane torch, or installing new ones with an instruction book lying open in the dirt in front of me. My mortgage was $600. I discovered anew how claustrophobic and narrowing it is to live with little money. (I’d known it in my childhood, too, although in a different way.)” But he noted the farcical, as well. During the nineteenth century, when most of Nantucket’s male population was out to sea, whaling, lonely women managed the island. Frank unearthed a newspaper ad that read: “Nervous? I will spend the night with thee. 25 cents.” He also discovered that “a type of ceramic dildo imported from Asia called ‘He’s at Home’ was a common domestic item.” Wanting the fullest sense of Frank’s mood while he worked on the book, I asked Neil for his impressions. By e-mail he replied: The diagnosis threw him, and he talked about canceling the contract, or not taking the money until he was done. But in fact writing was a joy for him (not common to writers, as you know), and I think it gave him a pleasurable task to distract his mind. Frank didn’t overlook other treasures, either. “The kids discover the joys of clamming,” he writes, “and of the fact that you can bring something back for dinner even if you’re seven years old, let’s say. We always went out to a tidal flat near the entrance to Polpis Harbor in our boat, with the dog. Maggie and I might swim while Tim, my youngest, went off with a bucket for an hour. We could see him in the distance, hunkered down, his small form bright in the stark sunlight, elbows akimbo, digging with purpose. Or on a foggy day, he would simply disappear as the sound of buoy bells rang muffled in the air. We call it Tim’s Point, and we go there often.”

  Eighteen months later, the New York Times announced Frank’s semi-retirement. He would continue to teach but resign as the workshop’s director in August 2005. Asked to “reveal the secret to his success” as director, Frank answered, “I wing it.” He didn’t discuss cancer or chemotherapy. Instead, “he said now it was time for him to get on with his own writing.” Then, as if this were more important than his health or his work, I can hear him saying, “And I’ve found an ‘angel’ who has offered to give the workshop $1 million for its own library,” adding, as a casual aside, “if I can match the funds,” which Frank blew off as a minor inconvenience. The important thing was, he’d won another game. “A million bucks!” he would have told me. But when the reporter asked Frank about his new book, he reiterated advice he’d given me years earlier. “If you talk about it,” he said, “it will disappear.”

  But Frank and I knew he’d never write another book. From the day he finished Time and Tide, his relation to books would simply be to read them like a boy “seeking only to escape from [his] own life through the imaginative plunge into another.” And his temperament changed. “He was so gentle with everyone,” Maggie said, referring to his sons and grandchildren. No matter how trifling their questions or concerns, they had his full attention. After all, how long would he be able to offer it? Frank knew he’d cheated time. He should have been dead a year earlier. So, regardless of his treatment’s continued success, he expected to die soon. For the moment, though, being surrounded by his family constituted a miracle, and he lived exclusively for them. Once, Maggie said to me, “I told Frank I thought chemo agreed with him.”

  Which seemed to be the case. Whenever we spoke, he was buoyant. But, despite his upbeat mood, I decided not to visit. Sitting beside each other would have wrapped us in a funereal cocoon, and I didn’t want to face the fact that we’d never see each other again. Instead, I needed my image of Frank to remain intact. But he was already becoming a memory. Like a magic wand, his cane irrevocably separated the past from the present. Frank had been in my life for fifteen years, and when he died my past died, too. Without him I can no longer be the boy seeking his approval, and worrying that I might not receive it. Instead, I was forced to decide who I am. And I have. I’m the man who wrote this book. I can’t ask Frank if he thinks it’s good, but I don’t have to; this book is one thing alone: necessary.

  Late one November afternoon, I called to ask about his health. Astonishingly, he sounded lighthearted, his voice strong and clear. He’d quit smoking, and his speech was silky and soothing. Happy that I’d called, he seemed carefree. We talked about Charlie’s recently published New Yorker story. “Did you read that?” he said. “I mean, the language, holy shit. How’s he doing, by the way?” Good, I said. “Well, send him my love.”

  We discussed books until Frank said, “You understand, the day I can’t read, it’s all over. And between us, if it weren’t for these chemo treatments, I’d keep directing. But let’s not kid ourselves, this is going to kill me.”

  Then, imagining our futures, he added, “You know, running this place will be easier than running your place in Texas. We both know that Connie does everything.” True, some people expected me to succeed Frank, but he and I had never discussed the matter and I thought we had a tacit understanding that we never would.

  Surprised, I said, “They need someone with a big name, and that’s not me.”

  F
rank disagreed. But I directed an MFA program and I knew that if I were running the search, I wouldn’t hire me, either.

  I had other concerns, though. To inherit Frank’s job, his office, and his desk would have been like inheriting his ghost. I loved him. But attempting to extend his literary legacy would have diminished it. And Frank’s career deserved a full stop, not an ellipsis.

  Shortly after New Year’s, Frank’s new regimen of chemo treatments began, and I called to see how they were progressing. Frank answered, but I was no longer Tom! or Professor Grimes! Those words were already memories. I detected no fear in his voice, no grief or despair, only exhaustion. We spoke for less than a minute. I told him to take the fall semester off, stay on Nantucket, and then drive Tim to Wheaton in September to watch him enter college. “We’ll see.” Frank said. “We’ll see.” He lacked the strength to say good-bye, and I wouldn’t say it for us both.

  On February 8, 2005, he walked into Connie’s office and said he had to leave. He never saw the Dey House again.

  Frank had arranged to die at home, not in a hospital. “He planned it all,” Maggie said. Frank spent his days in the upstairs bedroom in which I’d spent two hundred nights. He permitted few visitors. James Salter, his closest friend and the workshop’s visiting writer the semester I entered the program, traveled to Iowa City to have a final lunch with Frank. A photograph shows them smiling, their arms around each other’s shoulders, each holding a glass, Frank’s filled with clear liquid and curiously resembling one used for drinking a martini. Otherwise, only his sons and grandchildren came and went whenever they could.

  As for Dad’s last days and the hospice care, Will wrote to me, I’ ll say two quick things about what I experienced firsthand:First, Dad stayed cool. And he didn’t ever complain to me (nor, to my knowledge, to anyone else) about his fate, and in fact when the end was near he once quietly mentioned to me—as far as longevity—that he appreciated his 69 years. I’ll always remember how well he handled himself in his last days, and I’ll always be grateful to him for it.

  Second, there was only one time I saw him discouraged. They were still saying he had a couple months left, and since he’d been beating their projections for a few years there was no reason to think it would be less. I was visiting him in Iowa City. Late one afternoon I jogged upstairs to ask some little question and I found him sitting on the edge of his bed, looking ashen and staring out the window at nothing in particular. I understood right away that something new was wrong. “I can’t read,” he said, sounding sort of amazed by the fact. I guess he and Maggie had thought maybe there was something wrong with his glasses or something, but Dad had quickly realized it was his mind. The meds, the illness, whatever, he could no longer process words on a page. That was a hard moment, I’d say. He didn’t apparently dwell on it, but he put down whatever book he was reading and from then on I think he just wanted to get things over with.

  Frank couldn’t read the card I mailed to him; Maggie had to. I remember writing, You changed my life and I hope that in some small, happy way I’ve changed yours. After that, there’s nothing I can say or send but love, love, love. When he heard what I’d written, Maggie said, “Frank gave a little smile.” It was his final gift to me.

  In early April, he asked the hospice staff to stop his morphine. For three days, his body curled and twisted, spastically, like a helpless infant’s, as his organs died. Then his heart stopped, and he no longer belonged to time.

  I spent sixty hours writing and revising what became my 1,019-word eulogy. I printed pages, spread them across my dining room table, circled sentences I wanted to keep, and struck those I didn’t. Jody assembled the survivors. And Charlie said, “You have to say something about a public man who was also your friend, so which side of that do you address for such an occasion? Both, I guess. You don’t have to sum him up for all time, though. Just stick with what you feel is truest and you’ll do great. Go the Whitman route—what is true for you will also be true for the rest of us. I think you can trust that.”

  When I finished writing the eulogy, I read it aloud until I’d numbed my emotions so I would be able to read it to others.

  For Frank ’s memorial service seven hundred people packed a campus auditorium, and a three-page program was printed. A photograph of Frank, taken when he was in his mid-fifties, appeared in the center. Below it, his name and the span of his life, 1936-2005.

  To Frank ’s right was a photocopy of a handwritten manuscript page of Stop-Time. Three paragraphs described his decision to leave his New York high school and return to Florida. His first draft began: It might have been the thought of school that crystallized me. Frank scratched that. It might have been the thought of school that changed me, the impossible prospect of another day inside that soul-destroying prison. Frank blacked out several words, then wrote, That might have been what did it—the stillness inside me, the thanatoid silence frightening me into a last-ditch effort. Or the thought of school, the prospect of another day in prison crystallizing my formless mind as the pencil tap crystallizes a super-saturated solution. The paragraph ended: I turned from the window, walked down the hall and went out the door. It was as simple as that. Then he blotted a phrase and added, I disregarded the pounding of my heart.

  To Frank ’s left, a list of his memorial speakers’ names. Marilynne Robinson and I would offer “Reflections.” Then John Irving and T. C. Boyle would read from their work. I’d taken two milligrams of a tranquilizer, but my hands still shook. Five feet from the podium, I sat in the first row beside Marilynne, who stood up to speak. She hadn’t written what she wanted to say and, at one point, her eyes moistened and her voice faltered. Terrified, I don’t remember a word she said. Once she finished, I walked to the podium and adjusted the microphone. I saw Maggie and the three boys seated in the second row, behind T.C. and John Irving, and, for a disorienting moment, I was a waiter again, watching writers gathered on Sam Lawrence’s deck. My life’s arc, from waiter to writer, and from cursing Frank to reading my eulogy at his memorial service, seemed improbable, and, in that respect, utterly like Frank’s. Returning to the present, I cleared my throat and said, “I dedicated my second novel to Frank. This is my final dedication to him.” Then I slipped on my glasses, looked down at my typed pages, and said:Literature was Frank’s school, his salvation, and his joy. One can’t separate Frank the writer, from Frank the reader, from Frank the teacher. Each aspect of his personality was of a piece. Forget for a moment any one of them and you’ll remember and cherish him incompletely.

  As a boy Frank read his manic-depressive father’s entire library, which became his refuge. “Safe in my room with milk and cookies,” he wrote in Stop-Time, “I disappeared into inner space. The real world dissolved and I was free to drift in fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful and more real than my own.”

  Ultimately, reading turned him into a writer. As a genre, the memoir barely existed before Frank published Stop-Time, which, he once told me, was completely out of sync with its era. Yet the book became a classic because the purity of Frank’s perfect prose not only stops time, but renders time timeless.

  Writing the book exorcised and, at the same time, celebrated his childhood; and by age thirty Frank had fulfilled what Susan Sontag deemed to be the sole responsibility of a writer—to write a masterpiece.

  I paused for a moment, then continued:People speak of great writers, but few people speak of great readers, and Frank was one of them, perhaps the best reader I’ve ever known. He took genuine pleasure in the act of reading and somehow he was able to retain his complete innocence as a reader, to read as the boy he once was, alone in his bedroom, keeping his anxiety about his complicated childhood at bay by turning the pages of a novel.

  Yet for all of Frank’s innocence, he never failed to pluck from each great book a master’s lesson, which he then selflessly passed along to his students. Frank read great writers without any fear. He didn’t worry about imitating them; he didn’t worry about bei
ng overwhelmed by them. Instead he took pleasure in them and learned from them, and by doing so he elevated reading to the level of art, which Picasso described as “serious play,” a phrase that captures Frank’s relationship to reading literature and to teaching it.

  Frank was also a generous reader. Recognizing that his escape from his own Dickensian childhood had depended on chance, unexpected benefactors, and good fortune, he repaid the pleasure and enlightenment Dickens had given him by writing Body & Soul, a novel that astonishes us because it’s a truly happy book. For a second time, Frank had composed a work that was completely out of sync with its age. Not a single word in the novel is tainted by cynicism, postmodern game-playing, or lyrical pyrotechnics. Over all of Frank’s prose, from the books right down to his essays, there hovers an Olympian calm. He could even write about seven days on a cruise ship and make the experience seem somehow sacred.

  Yet the boy in Frank never entirely vanished. Last fall, when I called to ask him how his summer had been, he said, “I read a book a day. It was heaven.”

  I turned a page.