A Widow's Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In 1984, when we’d been in Princeton for several years, and Ray had resigned from teaching in order to be a full-time editor/publisher, we decided to expand our small-press enterprise to include book publishing. (Why? Out of some “reckless commingling of idealism and masochism” was Ray’s droll explanation.) Though neither the magazine nor the press ever made any profit, we were, resolutely, not “non-profit”; our projects were funded privately, by my Princeton University salary and other more random spurts of income.

  The 1980s was a time when libraries were still subscribing to literary magazines and buying poetry books, a situation that would change drastically in the late 1990s. In Canadian publishing circles Ontario Review soon ascended to the sort of small-press literary eminence belonging, in the States, to Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, and Ray Smith was a “major” editor/publisher in these quarters.

  Ray’s Jesuit training in adolescence had instilled in him a predilection for what is called perfectionism but which might resemble, to a neutral observer, obsessive-compulsive disorder. Thus, Ray was the ideal editor—as well as copyeditor and proofreader; though he sent out page proofs to our authors, he never trusted any eye but his own, and so he did everything except “set type”—in those days when type was still “set”—and no doubt he would have done that, if he’d been able. Apart from our domestic life, Ray’s work was his life. Most of all Ray had loved working with writers: there is no relationship quite so intimate and intense, when an editor is truly absorbed in editing, and a writer is willing to be “edited.” Enormous sympathy, tact, diplomacy, shrewdness are required—and a sense of humor. Ray took—this does sound rather masochistic, or at least eccentric—genuine pleasure in reading unsolicited submissions which numbered in the thousands, annually; he passed on to me fiction that was “promising” but needed work, so that, if I wished to, I might work with the writer, making editorial suggestions. He took particular pleasure in working with writers one or the other of us had “discovered”—like Pinckney Benedict, my prize-winning Princeton student whose remarkable senior thesis Town Smokes (1987) was one of our first OR Press books, and would be one of the most enduring.

  When Ray spoke of Pinckney it was with a special—warm, tender—intonation in his voice.

  When Ray spoke of a number of writers and poets with whom he’d worked closely over the years, you could see how much they’d meant to him—even those whom we’d never met.

  How touching it is, if heartrending—the dedication to the 2009 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson, reads:

  for Raymond Smith (1930–2008)

  Now, all this has ended. No one can take Ray’s place. Most of all, continuing to bring out Ontario Review without Ray could have no meaning, for me—it would be like celebrating someone’s birthday in absentia.

  The May issue was nearly completed, when Ray had to be hospitalized. Just a few more days’ work—which I hope I can do, with the assistance of our typesetter in Michigan. I have a dread of letting down Ray’s contributors, who are expecting to see their work in his magazine.

  I will have to pay them, too—of course. I will have to calculate what they should be paid, write checks and mail them. I will have to package contributors’ copies, and mail them. A kind of wildness sweeps over me, almost a kind of elation. If I can do this, how impressed Ray would be! How he would know, I love him.

  When I called Gail Godwin, to tell her about Ray, Gail’s response was immediate—“Oh Joyce—you’re going to be so unhappy.”

  How true this is! It’s a blunt fact few would wish to acknowledge.

  There are friends whom we see often—and there are friends whom we see rarely. My friendship of more than thirty years with Gail Godwin has been mostly epistolary, writerly. We are like cousins, or sisters, of a bygone era—the long-ago era of the Brontë sisters, perhaps. And Gail’s house on a hillside in Woodstock, New York, overlooking, at a distance, the Catskill Mountains, has something of the air of romance and isolation of the fabled Yorkshire moors.

  Many times Ray and I had visited Gail and her longtime companion, the distinguished composer Robert Starer, in their Woodstock house. Robert’s unexpected death in the spring of 2001 had the sorrowful feel of the end of an era, though I had not dared to think that my husband would be next.

  How similar our experiences have been, Gail’s and mine! It is uncanny.

  Like Ray, Robert had been hospitalized as if “temporarily”—he’d had a heart attack from which he seemed to be recovering; his condition was “stable”; then, early one morning as Gail was preparing to drive to the hospital in Kingston to see him, she received a call from a doctor whom she didn’t know—who happened to be on duty at the time: “I’m afraid Robert didn’t make it.”

  Didn’t make it! But he had been recovering . . . hadn’t he?

  So we protest, in disbelief. Clinging to what has seemingly been promised to us, like children. But, but—! But he was recovering! You’d said—he was still alive.

  Gail too had driven to the hospital in a trance. Gail too had not believed that her husband wouldn’t be waiting for her in his hospital room. Driving in the early morning along a darkened highway each of us thinking incredulously Is my husband dying? Is he dying? He can’t be—dying! The doctor has said—he is alive . . .

  Long after hope has vanished, these phantom-words remain.

  Alive, he is still . . . alive. He is recovering.

  He will be discharged next Tuesday.

  Gail has offered me sympathy, counsel. I am so very broken, I find it difficult to speak. Rarely do I speak to anyone on the telephone any longer but I am able to speak with Gail and to tell Gail that I wish we lived closer together, we might commiserate together, but neither of us is likely to move. Who but Gail Godwin would tell me: “Suffer, Joyce. Ray was worth it.”

  This is so. This is true. But the test is: Am I strong enough to suffer? And for how long?

  Did you send the rest of the copy to Doug? What about the cover art which I didn’t finish—can you prepare it and send it to him, FedEx?

  (Doug Hagley is Ray’s excellent typesetter, in Marquette, Michigan.)

  I may as well admit it—if Ray could miraculously return from the dead, within a day or two—within a few hours—he would be working again on Ontario Review.

  He was working in his hospital bed, on the very last day of his life. He’d be terribly concerned now, that the publication date of the May issue will be delayed . . .

  I am trying. Honey, I am trying!

  Like a desperate individual in a sailboat, a small sailboat foundering in a raging sea, after the sailor has died, swept overboard and drowned and the left-behind companion must try to keep the sailboat from sinking . . . It’s ridiculous to think of completing the voyage when the most you can hope for is to stay afloat.

  And so, I am trying. I will do what Ray would want me to do—if I can.

  At the moment, opening mail. The Sisyphus-task of clipping these little blue rejection slips to manuscripts. Sometimes I fall into an open-eyed trance reading lines of a poem, a short story, until my eyes lose focus.

  In the hospital, we’d read submissions together, and discussed them. I’d brought two short stories for Ray to read which I was recommending for publication—two stories about which I felt very enthusiastic—but now suddenly, all that has ended. I am distressed to think that possibly the manuscripts have been lost, were never brought back from the hospital.

  Terrible to think, things are being lost! I had tried so hard yet Ray’s glasses are gone.

  As the days—weeks—months pass, the effort of responding to OR submissions will become increasingly vexing. I’d thought that word should have spread in the literary community—through our Ontario Review Web site, and obituaries—that Ray Smith has passed away, that the magazine is discontinued—yet, with clockwork predictability, the submissions keep coming. Of course, most of these are multiply submitted, as if by r
obot-writers who begin their form letters Dear Editor and seem to have no idea what Ontario Review is. (More than two years later robot-submissions will continue to arrive in the mailbox, some of them addressed to Raymond Smith, Editor, though this beleaguered “associate editor” has ceased returning them, figuring that by now a statute of limitations has been evoked. Enough!)

  Yet, in March 2008, I am diligent—if that’s the word—about opening mail. Occasionally, there are even book-length manuscripts, unsolicited—which I return to the sender with a little blue slip Thank you for your submission. Sometimes I add a few words, and sign my initials. Even in my numbed state I feel an impulse to encourage writers, or anyway a wish not to discourage them. Thinking It would have meant something to me, years ago.

  Though nothing means much to me, now. The possibility of being “encouraged” has become abstract and theoretical to me—“encouraged” for what purpose?

  Your writing will not save you. Managing to be published—by Ontario Review Press!—will not save you. Don’t be deluded.

  As with the trash, I dare not allow this mail to accumulate; you might (almost) say, the mail is the trash. Most dreaded, beyond even the Harry & David sympathy baskets, is that particularly nasty sub-species of ridged cardboard book-package in which a few publishers persist in sending books, bound with metal staplers thick as spikes. To try to open one of these monstrosities is an exercise in masochism—hurriedly I discard them with the dispatch with which one would thrust away a venomous snake.

  Pleading No! No more of this! Please have mercy.

  Each week the trash cans are so filled that their plastic covers fall off, and clatter to the pavement as I wheel the cans to the road.

  Why would Sisyphus push a boulder up a hill?—much more likely the poor accursed man was hauling trash cans up the hill, day following day, in perpetuity.

  Amid all this, what a joke—a cruel joke—that publishers continue to send me galleys and manuscripts requesting blurbs—yet more mail, packages to be torn open and recycled. In my state of absolute lucidity—which might be mistaken for commonplace depression—nothing seems to be so pathetic as these requests. Nothing so sad, so futile, so ridiculous—a blurb from me.

  If the name “Joyce Carol Oates” affixed to her own books can’t sell these books, how can the name “Joyce Carol Oates” affixed to another’s book help to sell that book? This is a joke!

  My heart beats hard with resentment, despair. Though my effort seems so futile, like cleaning all the rooms of the house in preparation for my husband’s return from the hospital, turning on all the lights—or, turning them off—yet I can’t seem to stop, and the thought of hiring someone to help me, or even bringing anyone into the house for this purpose, is not possible. All I know is—I can’t let Ray down. This is my responsibility as his wife.

  I mean, his widow.

  I feel trapped. I am trapped. On the far side of our pond once we’d seen a young deer, a buck, shaking his head violently—his slender horns were tangled in what looked like wire. This is how I feel—my head is tangled in wire.

  The reptile-thing—the basilisk—has been regarding me all this time with its glassy-bead stare, the bemused saurian eyes that penetrate to my very soul. You know you can end this at any time. Your ridiculous trash-soul. Why should you outlive your husband? If you love him, as you claim? Don’t you think that everyone is waiting for you to die, to end this folly? Outliving your husband is a low vile vulgar thing and you do not deserve to live an hour longer, you are the very trash you need to haul away.

  Part IV

  Purgatory, Hell

  Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell.

  — Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost

  There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

  —Albert Camus, “An Absurd Reasoning” from The Myth of Sisyphus

  Chapter 44

  “Neither Joyce Nor I Can Come to the Phone Right Now”

  Hello! Neither Joyce nor I can come to the phone right now but if you leave a detailed message and your phone number, we will get back to you soon. Thank you for calling.

  This phone message, recorded by Ray several years ago in a somewhat subdued voice, greets everyone who calls, since these days—in the late winter/early spring of 2008—I rarely pick up the phone.

  Yes I hear the phone ringing and—can’t move to answer it.

  The ringing phone paralyzes me, I can barely breathe until it stops.

  I have to resist the impulse to run, when the phone rings.

  To run away, to hide. Somewhere.

  It’s true, we have caller ID—Ray installed it, in my desk phone—and so I should be able to screen unwanted calls and speak with my most cherished friends but often I am nowhere near this phone and my instinct is to back away, not hurry forward.

  Often I am not in a mood to speak with even my most cherished friends.

  Fear of breaking down on the phone.

  Fear of draining friends’ capacity for sympathy.

  Fear of useless behavior, futile & embarrassing.

  No one has chided me for continuing to use Ray’s phone message, quite yet. Though several individuals have remarked upon it.

  One has said it’s a “comfort” to hear Ray’s voice exactly as it has been in this phone message, for years.

  One has said—delicately—it’s “a little jarring, distracting.”

  One has said—“The voice on the answering machine is the uncanniest abstraction to deal with.”

  To these remarks, I have said nothing.

  In time it will be suggested—tactfully, delicately—by my closest friends, that I should change the recorded message. One woman friend has volunteered her husband, to do a re-recording.

  This is sensible advice, but I seem not to hear it. I never respond to it, I simply seem not to hear it.

  Though in a rage wanting to cry Would you erase your husband’s voice from your phone message? Of course you would not!

  It will be well over a year and a half before Ray’s phone message is finally erased, to be replaced by a (female) computer-voice that chills the blood. But through this hurricane-year 2008, Ray’s voice will prevail.

  At the university, in my office at 185 Nassau I call our home number frequently. First I dial 9 for an outside line, and then the number. A curious sort of solace—that the ringing at the other end of the line is indistinguishable from the ringing I’d heard for years, when I called Ray from this phone. Usually I called my husband at home for no particular reason but to say hello, to murmur Love you! and hang up and now that it is futile to call, I am calling the number anyway.

  Five or six rings and then a little click—and there is Ray’s voice—exactly as I recall it—as it had been in all those years I’d taken the recording for granted as if it were a permanent feature of the very landscape, or the oxygen surrounding me—Hello! Neither Joyce nor I can come to the phone right now but if you leave a detailed message and your phone number, we will get back to you soon. Thank you for calling.

  Sometimes, I call this number more than once. My fingers move numbly like fingers “saying” a rosary.

  Ray’s words have become a kind of poetry—the kind of point-blank plain-speech heart-rending American vernacular poetry perfected by William Carlos Williams in simple columnar stanzas. Keenly I attend to the accent of Ray’s syllables, the pause between words—almost, I can hear him draw breath, I can envision his facial expression as these several so-precious seconds out of his life of seventy-seven years, eleven months and twenty-two days is recorded—

  Hello!

  Neither Joyce nor I can come to the phone right now

  But if you leave a detailed message

  and your phone number

  We will get back to you

  soon

  Thank you for calling

  But quietly then, I hang
up.

  No message.

  How many widows have made this futile call—dialed numbers which are their own numbers; how many widows have listened to their dead husband’s voices again, again—again . . .

  As you will too, one day. If you are the survivor.

  Chapter 45

  The Military Order of the Purple Heart

  Keep in motion. Don’t break promises. Grieving is self-pity, narcissism. Don’t give in.

  Each day I set myself a modest goal: to get through the day.

  Isn’t this the fundamental principle of Alcoholics Anonymous? One day at a time.

  My friend Gloria Vanderbilt has consoled me One breath at a time, Joyce. One breath at a time.

  Gloria Vanderbilt, whose son Carter died in an unspeakable way, virtually in her presence.

  Soon after Ray died Gloria came out to Princeton to spend some time with me—to commiserate, to give hope—and left in my keeping a small statue of St. Theresa which had been left to her by her beloved nanny many years ago when, as in a cruel fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm, Gloria Vanderbilt was a child-pawn in a luridly publicized custody suit played out in the New York City courts.

  This statue of St. Theresa is on our bedroom bureau. On my bedroom bureau. Where I can see it easily, from my nest in my bed.

  Jesus! What on earth is a statue of St. Theresa doing in our bedroom? Ray would cry in startled exasperation. I’m gone a few days and—a statue of St. Theresa in our bedroom?

  Like all permanently lapsed Roman Catholics, Ray much resented any incursion of his old “faith” into his post-religious life.

  Yet: like all former Roman Catholics, Ray would know to distinguish between St. Theresa and the Virgin Mary.

  How can I explain this statue of St. Theresa in our home, I can’t explain. Except that the statue is facing me, in my nest, across a distance of less than six feet.

  March 3, 2008.

  To Gloria Vanderbilt

  The St. Theresa statue is astonishing in our bedroom. It exudes an air of antique calm and beauty. I can’t believe that you have given me such a precious part of your life. I told Elaine (Showalter) and several others who’d come to see it that I did not feel worthy of this gift and one of them said, “It speaks of Gloria’s love for you” which left me stricken to the heart.