No more feed for the deer. For a while afterward they continued to show up, staring at our windows with expressions of mute animal reproach.
The strangest sight I ever called Ray to see, from my study window, will seem unlikely in the telling: a young fawn was making its way past my window and close behind it, an aggressive wild turkey was pecking at its heels. We watched in amazement as these two disappeared around the corner of the house—the fawn hurrying forward, the wild turkey close behind. Ray said, “If we hadn’t seen this, we would never believe it.”
Ray often said, “It’s very hard to get anything done in this house, with so much happening outside our windows.”
Now I am trying to recall—when was it that our poet-friend saw us, “rescuing” the fawn? Five years ago? Ten? We’d been bicycling on Bayberry Road when we discovered a seemingly abandoned tiny fawn by the roadside. Naively I brought the fawn home in my bicycle basket, wrapped in my sweater, and when we called the Hopewell Animal Shelter we were admonished for “interfering”—we should have left the fawn exactly where we’d found it, with the assumption that the doe would return, and would re-unite with her fawn.
“Yes, but what if she doesn’t?” Ray asked.
We returned the baby deer, in our car. We left it by the roadside. When we returned some time later, there was no sign of the deer.
The principle seems to be—Don’t interfere with nature!
The next several letters out of the tote bag are not so upsetting—though very kind, very thoughtful expressions of sympathy. The widow is made to know that the death of her husband is a matter of others’ concern, not just her own; this is meant to comfort, to console. We loved Ray so much. Ray was such a humane, dignified, astute, wise, and gentle man. It is a devastating loss. . . . And this, from another former Princeton resident, a writer-friend now living in Philadelphia:
I am so sad that Ray is gone. I will miss his quick, bright eyes, his humor and his large spirit. When I was around Ray, I felt a sweet comfort from his kindness.
Death is so mysterious. When [my partner] died, I felt great solace in searching for words to express what I was experiencing, which felt brand new, a place I’d never been before even with all the death I’ve seen. Knowing how you write, you may already be completing the first of many novels that will help you explore what you’ve been experiencing . . .
At these words, I begin to shake. I am actually shaking with cold, with a kind of choked fury. Knowing how you write, you may already be completing the first of many novels. . . .
Of course, this writer-friend doesn’t mean to be cruel. She doesn’t mean to seem taunting, mocking. I know that she means well—she has written a thoughtful and even profound letter which I must not judge from my own desperate perspective. Completing a novel! I haven’t been able to complete a thank-you note!
The first several letters have been set aside. I know—I am well aware—that “good manners” oblige the widow to reply to each expression of sympathy—(unless the writer has indicated Please don’t trouble to reply)—but I am not ready to begin these replies just yet.
Blindly I reach into the tote bag. Mostly there are cards, some of them very beautiful seemingly hand-crafted cards, but there are many letters, both typed and handwritten. How stunned Ray would be, at this outpouring of solicitude!
I cannot comprehend that Ray has died. And now that this terrible, sad news can no longer be denied, I do not, and will not, understand the injustice of it. I selfishly think of justice in terms of myself, and Ray was much younger than me. Also, he was unusually trim and handsome. So, I assume he always attended to diet and exercise. And then, if goodness has anything to do with justice, Ray was a good, wise, gentle and extraordinarily courteous man . . . When I think of the quality of “calmness in the face of danger,” I would think right off of Ray Smith. Suppose Ray and I were in a little boat in Nantucket and we are about to sink in a Nantucket storm. Without knowing one thing about Ray’s knowledge of seamanship, I would bet on Ray to remain calm and to always make a correct decision.
***
I can’t get it into my consciousness that we will never see Ray Smith again. It can’t be true. You have both been so kind to us, you were the first people who invited me to dinner when I was in the middle of radiation . . . You welcomed us into your home and made me feel healthy and normal. You probably don’t remember that evening but I do. I sat next to Ray and had a happy evening. We didn’t talk about illness. Ray was so happy with his birds and his flowers and with you, his beloved.
***
Kate came by early this morning to tell me that Ray had died in the night, and we sat together in the kitchen, remembering that dear man, and trying to think how we could help you, and knowing we couldn’t. Liz said, “Back home we’d bake a ham and carry it round,” but that didn’t seem right, in Princeton.
***
I’m writing to express sorrow for your loss. I know the rare kind of relationship you and Ray had (have) is the only thing that can console even as it is the source of grief. Everyone respected him. In these terribly uncivil times, he was a true gentleman . . . It was actually soothing to talk with him. And I always loved seeing the two of you together. I could see how safe he made you feel. I hope you don’t feel unsafe now. If there is or will be some memorial charity in his name please let me know.
***
I was so deeply shocked and depressed to hear of Ray’s death. It seemed only yesterday that we spoke. I admired him so much—did you know that Ontario Review published my first memoir/short story . . . ? Over the years Ray’s (and yours) support have meant just about everything to me. The next issue of the Pushcart Prize will be dedicated to Ray, as will my remarks at Symphony Space on March 26 . . . a small tribute to Ray.
From a writer-friend who’d recently lost his adult daughter:
You and I know there’s nothing to say that does much good in the face of a fathomless sorrow. But I hope you’re writing again, or will soon. It’s difficult to write when there’s no joy. (I haven’t gotten started again, myself.) Yet it’s our only way out. Isn’t it? And you bring so much joy to others. We will crawl out of this, I am certain—eventually reach a point where we can live with a deep sadness, but live nonetheless. Know, meanwhile, that you have our love which will never go away.
From a former colleague at the University of Windsor, now a preeminent Canadian writer:
I remember Ray very fondly, not only because of all the work he did, along with yourself, in bringing out my first American collection but just because he was himself . . . I am sending this Mass card because of something Ray said to me years ago. He said that his father was prouder of him when he became an altar boy than when he received his Ph.D. So this is for the former altar boy who did achieve a Ph.D. and much more.
And another Canadian colleague:
I am so sorry about your loss and hope you can grieve freely and deeply . . . There is no possible consolation, I know. You were so completely together for so long. Over 30 years ago people used to see you together walking holding hands. This can only be very hard but please do not feel alone . . . When my mother died I adopted the Gestalt technique of saying to myself, whenever there was a surge of grief, “I choose to have a mother who is dead,” and that helped . . . After a while it is self-punishing to resist or regret what’s real.
***
Ray was a perfect man—a gentle soul and honest and sweet. I often thought of him as a perfect mate. He seemed so comfortable as the husband of a . . . woman writer. Few women writers have had someone like Ray. In counseling students and even my own daughters, Ray was one of my models for the “right kind of man.” I talked to them about a man who would be able to genuinely, without jealousy or selfishness, support their attempts and achievements as his own.
***
I will miss Ray but always feel his presence. He will forever be one of the threads that have created my personhood . . .
***
I haven’t w
ritten because I haven’t wanted to deal with knowing Ray won’t be on the phone again . . .
***
I realized that I had never seen you alone, without Ray—I have seen you always together. I cannot picture you apart . . .
Letters from widows!—these, I read avidly. Here is a special language, I am coming to understand.
You have been constantly in my thoughts knowing as I do the devastation of raw grief over the loss of one’s nearest and dearest. What a privilege though in this life to have a marriage like yours combining in perfect harmony love and work. From the very first time I met you and Ray, I admired your rich collaboration and the loving way you treated each other . . . Though it may not help to assuage the sadness of your loss, I pass on to you something [my late husband] said to me in the days before his death: “You will be grief-stricken for the rest of your life, but don’t lose your vitality.”
***
There is no easy way to live through what you are experiencing. I know this so well. Nothing anyone says makes the pain go away. I forever and ever miss my life as it was with [my late husband] and to this day it is just as poignant and meaningful and monumental.
***
After nearly two years my wounds are less raw but I’m constantly reminded of [my late husband] and am beginning to find comfort in letting him live in my heart. I want his memory kept alive . . . I think I was in shock for a long time after he died—barely functional. It’s hard for me to imagine how you manage to continue teaching—being your public self . . . Please be kind with yourself. Healing will come in in its own good time. But you do need time for yourself. Oh how I wish we were closer. Please call me any time. I love you Joyce and embrace and kiss you through these miles.
***
. . . a note to say how often I have thought of you since Ray died—the absolute finality of death is both the most obvious thing about it & the most astonishing—it took me a long time to get beyond being stunned by [my husband’s] death, which was in fact quite predictable. (I see now.) I hope you are well & working—writing was at first just another hard part—there was no one to read it. But there is . . .
***
From the first e-mail you sent me that Monday morning with the shocking news, I noticed this: even though you were in a state of shock, at a time when living without Ray surely seemed unimaginable (as I would think it still does), when, if your experience was like mine, you may not have wanted to go on living—even then the words you chose showed a resilience and intention to live through it and recover your life. I noticed this, since not everyone has that—it’s quite involuntary, I think: but I felt that way too when widowed so suddenly. Then, when you were at Jeanne’s, I could see that in spite of the terrible grief you were going through, you were not depressed: you were alert, noticing, engaging the life around you. I was relieved and glad to see that. Not that one ever “gets over it.” Recently someone said she was glad I had “gotten over” the grief for my husband and I immediately asked her, “What makes you think I have gotten over it?” And [my husband died] twenty years ago.
Dear Joyce, you know that words break and slip at times like these . . .
Yes. Words may be “helpless”—yet words are all we have to shore against our ruin, as we have only one another.
An hour has passed. The sun has shifted. Both cats have left the courtyard and I am alone and the aloneness weighs upon me like something leaden. It’s a measure of my disembodiment that I have to think, to recall where I am; why I am here, outside in the courtyard.
So many letters and cards! So much sympathy, and kindness!
I meant to begin answering the letters. I’ve brought postcards outside with me, and Ray’s address book as well as my own; but now I am overcome with lethargy, a sick sinking sensation. This is a mistake. I can’t do this. Not yet.
In all this time—an hour and a half—I have opened only a fraction of the letters in the bag. The bag is still heavy with letters and cards and I am so terribly sorry, I just can’t do it.
Please forgive me, if you are one who wrote to me. The person to whom you wrote isn’t here any longer, I am not sure who this is, in her place.
Chapter 69
“Happy, and Excited”
Impulsively—naively—we’d gone to live in Beaumont, Texas.
Of all unlikely places—this industrial coastal city in southeastern Texas near the Louisiana border, in the late summer of 1961.
Ray’s first teaching job was at Lamar College in Beaumont: an assistant professorship he’d too quickly accepted after we were married in January 1961. He’d thought that he had better have a job, and a reasonably secure job, to “support” a wife. With a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century English literature from the University of Wisconsin Ray had seemed attractive to the Lamar English department as he had to several other English departments that made him early offers of assistant professorships—one I recall was in northern Wisconsin, near the Canadian border.
Somehow, we’d imagined that Texas might be romantic. We did think that Texas would be remote. Insane as it seems in retrospect, we had both wanted to put distance between ourselves and our families. . . . We’d wanted to be “independent.”
In subsequent years I would become so very attached to my parents, it seems alien to me now that I ever thought this way. Ray, too, became more attached to his family in Milwaukee, after his father’s death.
In the early 1960s, it was expected that a man would “support” a wife. It was not altogether common that a woman, even with a master’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin, would want to work, or could find work; and when I applied to teach freshman English at Lamar College, or, later, with what naiveté I could not have begun to fathom, high schools in Beaumont and vicinity, my applications were turned down.
At Lamar, though he’d suggested to Ray at the time of their interview that, if I completed my master’s degree, he might be able to “use Joyce” as a freshman English teacher, the department chair declined to hire me after all—something of a shock, and a disappointment. In the Lamar public schools, only teachers with education degrees, preferably from Texas state colleges, were qualified to teach.
(The public school system was rigorously segregated, like the city of Beaumont. Not much of this was exactly known to Ray and me when we first moved there but we soon caught on that “Ne-gras” were very different from “whites”—so different that they seemed to speak a dialect so foreign as to be near-unintelligible to our northernly ears.)
What humiliating interviews! I recall an “assistant superintendent” of Beaumont public schools staring coldly at me as if, with my degrees from Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and one or another publication listed on my vita, I were some sort of subversive impostor. “Your undergraduate major was English,” she said, frowning at my résumé, “and your minor was ‘phil-o-soph-y.’ ” So carefully was phil-o-soph-y enunciated, it might have been a rare disease.
Yes, I said hesitantly. That was correct.
“Well!” the woman said, now smiling with a look of triumph, “Did you study ‘phil-o-soph-y’ in high school?”
No, I admitted.
“Then how can you expect to teach it in our high schools?”
There, she had me. My pretensions were utterly exposed.
“We don’t teach ‘phil-o-soph-y’ in our Beaumont public schools, Mrs. Smith.”
The woman’s triumph was complete. My application was denied.
In my chagrin I had no idea how to reply except to murmur thanks and quickly depart.
In the parking lot Ray was waiting in our black, secondhand Volkswagen. (Our first car!—we’d had to borrow $100 from Ray’s brother to help purchase it.) Seeing the stricken look on my face Ray squeezed my hand and said, “Never mind, honey. You can stay home and write.”
Meager consolation, I thought, for such jeering professional rejection.
Beaumont, Texas! Forever afterward—for nearly five
decades—when Ray and I were faced, as frequently we were, with one or another serio-comic crisis, we would say But we’re not in Beaumont!
Or, At least we’re not in Beaumont.
My memory of this East Texas city near the Gulf of Mexico, one of the points of the “Golden Triangle” (Beaumont, Port Arthur, Orange), is vivid, visceral: the air was hazy, fuzzy; the air tasted of rotted oranges, with a harsh chemical taste beneath; at sunset the sky erupted in apocalyptic hues of crimson, flamey-orange, bruised-purple—“Isn’t the sky gor-geous!” residents would exclaim, as if such sunsets were a sign from God and not rather the consequence of airborne pollution from the then-booming oil refineries along the coast.
Our predominant Beaumont memory, apart from the perpetually hazy air, was of waiting—waiting, and waiting!—in long lines of traffic at train crossings, as freight trains rattled slowly—endlessly—past. Nearly every day there was rain, and sometimes very heavy rain; gale force winds rushing up from the Gulf, a threat of hurricanes; in the aftermath of torrential rain and flash floods the roads were frequently washed away in sections, or impassable; more than once, a line of cars had to maneuver around the bloated corpse of a steer in the road; everywhere were the bodies of snakes—some of them unnervingly long—broken and mashed on the pavement. Another ongoing joke in our marriage—if “joke” is the proper term to recall an incident fraught with alarm, disgust, near hysteria—had to do with the region’s “palmetto bugs”—enormous roaches with wings that seemed to be everywhere, and invincible. In the middle of our first night in a furnished rented duplex not far from the Lamar campus I prevailed upon Ray to investigate a sound of scurrying in our bedroom, and with a flashlight Ray discovered a swarm of roaches; by this time, I was standing on a chair, not very helpfully emitting cries of terror; Ray managed to banish the roaches with a broom, afterward claiming that the larger specimens actually “stood up to him” —“glared” at him.
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