by Grimes, Tom
His other heaven was Maggie and his three boys. In his life as a husband and a father, Frank composed yet another masterpiece.
“How odd it is,” he said to me in his car one morning, “to find the perfect woman just when you think the possibility is gone forever.” Wistful as he could sometimes be about the great bliss Maggie brought into his life, he was also proud of the fact that he’d picked her up on Nantucket while he was headed to the garbage dump. “Her face seemed to radiate vitality,” he wrote, “an almost shocking kind of aliveness that laser-beamed its way through the dirty windshield and my gloom-obsessed, three-quarters shutdown consciousness.” “Dickensian coincidence!” he gleefully shouted when he told me the story. But he was somewhat cooler on the page when he wrote about it. “She got in and sat in the backseat. ‘Hi,’ she said cheerfully” (using an adverb that in workshop he likely would have told one of us to cut). “I accelerated and glanced in the rearview mirror, tilting it.” (Good detail, the tilting it, he would have said.) “Yes indeed, I thought. Most particularly her eyes. Hope—like some glaciated mammoth slowly stirring in the heat of a miraculous arctic thaw—revived.” (I’d watch the “slowly stirring,” he would have warned the writer. “It’s a bit . . .”). And then he wouldn’t say anymore, yet every student in the room would know exactly what he meant, just as I knew exactly what he meant when, late one night, Frank and I were leaving his house, bound for the Foxhead, and he reached down and shook one of Maggie’s bare toes as she sat with her feet up on the couch, reading. I knew in an instant, by that simple gesture, how deeply he loved her.
In each of his boys, Frank was reborn, and the pleasure he took in each of them overflowed until their simple presence became for him a palpable joy.
One day, while Frank and I were talking on the phone, he said, “Tim just came into the room; he’s beautiful.” I told him that Tim had always been good-looking, and Frank said, “No, I don’t mean looks. I’m mean, he’s beautiful. Just him being there makes my heart leap.”
Silence.
Everything, by this point in Frank’s life, had become a gift, and through the final days all the gifts he’d been given were transmuted into an unexpected and unbidden sweetness. The disquiet Frank had carried in his heart ever since childhood had been stilled by the birth of his oldest son, Dan. Afterward, it was impossible for him to let his love for his boys remain unspoken.
Years ago, Frank and I were standing on the front lawn outside of his and Maggie’s old house. His son Will had just left, and we watched Will’s car drive away until it disappeared. Then Frank looked at me and said, “You know, it’s amazing when they’re here, unfathomable when they leave, and unbelievable how much you miss them once they’re gone.”
CODA
Last night in the woods, at dusk, as I walked through a dim, gray light, I knew I would finish the book tomorrow. I needed one or two more sentences and I realized that I would type them on August 28, the day Frank and I first met at Iowa, when he was fifty-four as I am now. I hadn’t expected to write this book, but, in a way, our memoirs form bookends. His about childhood, adolescence, and a lost father; mine about writing, teaching, and a father found. Our story has come full circle. The story’s meaning mystifies me, yet if Frank were alive he’d agree that neither of us would choose to live in a world that was unmarked by the passage of time, and anything other than inscrutable.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Deepest thanks to Jody Grimes, Charles D’Ambrosio, Connie Brothers, Janet Silver, and Lee Montgomery, who suggested that I write this book when I didn’t know there was a book about Frank Conroy and me waiting to be written, and to all the great people at Tin House Books—Deborah Jayne, Nanci McCloskey, Janet Parker, Tony Perez, and Meg Storey.
Copyright © 2010 Tom Grimes
All rights reserved. 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 or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and New York, New York
Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley,
CA 94710, www.pgw.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grimes, Tom, 1954-
Mentor : a memoir / Tom Grimes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-0-982-56910-8
1. Grimes, Tom, 1954- 2. Conroy, Frank, 1936-2005. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Authorship. 5. Mentoring of authors—United States. 6.
Creative writing (Higher education)—United States. I. Title.
PS3557.R489985Z46 2010
813’.54—dc22
[B]
2010007124
First U.S. edition 2010
An excerpt from this work appeared in Narrative Magazine.
www.tinhouse.com
The publisher is grateful for permission to reproduce excerpts of Frank Conroy’s work from Stop-Time, Viking Penguin; Body & Soul and Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Time and Tide, Crown Publishers; as well as Fritz McDonald for his essay that appeared in The Workshop: Seven Decades from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, edited by Tom Grimes; Brady Udall for his introduction to “Buckeye the Elder,” which appeared in The Workshop: Seven Decades from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, edited by Tom Grimes; e-mail from Neil Olson; and, with the author’s deepest gratitude, letters written to him by Will Conroy.