I was third in line to have my written test corrected. I waited while a young man stalked out in fury because he had exceeded the limit of six errors. Then the girl ahead of me, aged about seventeen, I would guess, left in tears, having told the state trooper she had to have her license in order to get the job she had been offered.
The trooper called me to his desk, looked at me carefully, accepted my sheet, and said, before he looked at it, ‘Don’t worry, ma’am. You’re allowed to take it over three times.’ I said nothing. He went down my list of answers, wrote o at the top, and said, ‘Okay, take this to the photographer in the next room.’ Ignobly, I could not resist asking him how many I had missed. ‘None,’ he said curtly, in what I took to be a tone of disappointment. Then he looked away and called across the room, ‘Next.’
There are few triumphs for the elderly in this world. This was my small one for today. I came out feeling very flinty.
Sallust (first-century-B.C. Roman historian): ‘All things which rise, fall, and also those which grow, grow older.’
Mid-October: One of my required ‘appearances’ is in Duxbury, Massachusetts, at an authors’ breakfast. The host is Bob Hale, a chap who arranges such things for his bookstore. The place turns out to be a handsome old church and the audience is mainly white- and grey-haired ladies of a certain age. Oh, there are a few brown-haired women, one of whom introduces herself as my student years ago at the College of Saint Rose. I say, ‘Oh yes,’ but truth to tell, I cannot remember her.
My fellow speaker is a young woman named Mary Cahill who has written a humorous, sprightly novel called Carpool, which is exactly what it is about. She is first to speak, and gives a very honest, funny speech about her experiences publishing her first novel. She tells me later, when we lunch together, that she is on a tour of Eastern suburbs where carpooling for the transportation of children is a familiar phenomenon. She is surprised by the elderliness of the Duxbury audience and wonders how many of her listeners know about carpooling. She thinks her publicity agent may have misjudged this stop.
On this leg of her trip she is accompanied by what she calls a ‘tour expeditor,’ an energetic and attentive young woman who lives in the area, meets her plane, assists her travel from hotel to lecture, and then back to the departing plane. Clearly, writers’ tours are a well-organized and profitable business. I have no such person, but no matter: this kind expeditor allows me to ride to Logan Airport with her and Mary Cahill in a blinding rainstorm. By nature she must be kind to itinerant writers, for she races ahead of me to the gate, carrying my bag. I make the plane by four minutes.
To go back to the event: I have difficulty speaking after Mary, because I have almost nothing funny to say. I notice the audience squirms a bit as I describe my views on aging, and certainly, I learn afterwards, when Mary and I sit at separate tables to autograph books, they have not been persuaded by my ‘dour’ remarks to buy my book. The lines at Mary’s table are long. I hear more than one buyer tell her they are planning to send her book to their daughters.
Of my book one elderly lady says to me: ‘I am giving it to my daughter’s mother-in-law.’ She offers no assurance that she intends to read it herself. An old lady walks by, carrying two copies of Carpool for her two daughters, I assume. Another lady with a cane does buy a copy of End Zone (bless her), and then asks me to inscribe it. I smile happily, write ‘For Amy’ and my name and hand it back to her. She pats my hand gently and says, ‘Well, dear, I do hope you will feel better.’
The flight from Boston to Bangor was accomplished in a plane called a ‘Business Express.’ It had two propellers and was so small that it was much buffeted by the wind and heavy rain we were ‘experiencing,’ as the pilot phrased it. It is capable of holding twenty persons, and a crew of three. On this trip there were ten passengers. True to its name, nine of them were businessmen uniformly equipped with briefcases, Wall Street Journals, furled umbrellas, and trench-style raincoats.
The Business Express seemed to me to be a somewhat frail, almost rickety, but still jaunty and gallant little plane, a throwback to the forties in style and size. I felt it was more liable to failure or accident than its larger and more robust jet brothers. Should it crash, I suspect a number of large corporations would suffer grievous executive losses. American literature, on the other hand, would not be significantly affected.
I am relieved to be home in Sargentville, weary of being an artificial, public person. Here I feel I become real again, no matter how badly dressed and grumpy, quirky, cranky, etc. I am. Know thy place. I find a letter from Patty Smith and a card from a Washington friend. In her letter Patty says she went to a bookstore in Camden to buy End Zone. The clerk could find it on the computer but not on the nonfiction shelf.
‘I know we have it,’ she told Patty lamely.
Patty searched and finally found it nestled happily among more active-type books, on a shelf marked SPORTS.
And Cinder Johanson, a friend and librarian at the Library of Congress, writes a postcard from Stone Harbor, New Jersey, where she often vacations. It reads: ‘Loved your football book.’
There is a lesson in all this. Mary McCarthy once told me she was very good at naming books, as indeed she was: she provided me with the name for the biography I wrote of her, The Company She Kept, to echo the title of her own book, The Company She Keeps. On the contrary, I have a genius for misnaming books. Chamber Music found itself on the MUSIC shelves of bookstores, The Missing Person, a novel about Hollywood in the silent days, ended up among MYSTERIES, and now there is my new football book.…
Other mail: A letter from a young man with AIDS who lives in the Far West. He writes that he was diagnosed several months ago. Since then, the time has passed ‘rather numbly,’ from denial or shock, he is not sure which. He read End Zone, interested in what I had to say about the friends I had loved and lost from AIDS:
The dam broke, I’ve been angry, cried and then started to focus on what life means to me, what is important.… I hope the rest of my life—be it five years or fifty—is lived with some clarity and belief in values, in love of friends and respect of self, others and the world. I would be exaggerating if I gave your book all the credit for helping me past this point. It is at least a wonderful coincidence.
He says he has found Oregon, as I have found Maine, a wonderful change, and that he is planning a garden for next spring. His lover and he are heading for Mexico in January, he concludes, because Oregon is very wet and dreary at that time of year. ‘We will think of you when he shows me the Mayan ruins.’
To receive a letter like this gives me reason to write, to know that one such reader is out there and, even in a small way, has been affected by something I said. More than the hope of monetary reward, or of fame, or of the chance of immortality, I write in the hope of hearing one person say ‘Keep writing,’ the injunction with which Bob Doyle ends his letter.
Sybil asks me to accompany her on a book call to East Blue Hill, where a lady, who is moving to Tennessee, is selling her house and her books. Ordinarily I don’t go along on these jaunts because I feel unequal to them. I usually think the books I am looking at are not worth very much, but Sybil sees value in many of them, and is usually right. I don’t enjoy the dust that has settled on old collections, and I sneeze and then quickly grow impatient, reluctant any longer to give up the time it takes to go through them carefully.
Sybil, a true book woman, is indefatigable, patient, and generous in what she pays for books, so she is better off going to see them alone.
But there is one thing about such visits that interests me. Better than pictures, furniture, clothes, or architecture, books may reveal the character, the personality, the nature of the owners. What they bought and collected over the years, or inherited from parents or grandparents and kept, often throws light on their lives. In a way, it constitutes sociological data from which it is intriguing to construct fiction about them, or atleast to raise interesting questions and attempt some answers.
&nb
sp; For example: A Maine farmer, whose family has been on its Bucksport land for 150 years, collected books of Japanese prints, mostly erotic (as Japanese art often is). Is one permitted to make something of that? Or, a long-widowed elderly woman is selling her large collection of hard-boiled modern fiction. Or, a Methodist minister is ridding himself of his collection of volumes on the subject of homosexuality.
Recently, very early one morning, we went to Penobscot to buy the books from a family of five, parents and three children. Their collection was varied and indicative. There were many well-used greasy cookbooks, with written-in additions and corrections to the recipes, a good number of Catholic classics by Fulton Sheen, Joseph Girzone, and Andrew Greeley, and William Buckley mysteries, and two old Daily Missals.
In cardboard boxes, under piles of toys and games, there were many paperbacks of good children’s books by Robert McCloskey (a master of the genre who lived nearby on Deer Isle), Margaret Wise Brown, Ruth Krauss, Barbara Cooney, Maurice Sendak, Katherine Paterson, and others. They all showed the usual signs of hard wear: nicks, crayon scratches, hot-chocolate spots, and what I took to be saltwater marks. There was an old Hoyle, the great authority on games, Collier’s encyclopedia for children, and a few choice books on sailing, birds, gardening, and the seashore.
At once the shape of this family’s life appeared to me. I thought I knew them. I asked the young-looking, bearded father why they were leaving.
Regret flooded his voice. ‘I’ve been transferred. To San Antonio, can you believe it?’ He looked over at the autumn remains of his vegetable garden and out to the scarlet hillock where his blueberries were, and at the two great balsam firs that framed the entrance to his driveway.
‘We all hate to leave,’ he said. He was wearing a red baseball cap and a plaid L.L. Bean flannel shirt. He stared at the FOR SALE sign mounted on the road at the edge of his property. A little girl carrying a large, healthy-looking fern asked him:
‘Dad, if I sell this, can I keep the money?’
‘Sure.’
‘How much is it?’ I asked her.
‘Um. How much is it, Dad?’
‘What do you think?’ he asked her.
‘Ten cents?’
‘Oh, more than that,’ I said. I, who often bargain for what I buy at yard sales, was seduced by the father’s anguish at leaving the state and the little girl’s charm. I gave her a dollar. Her blue eyes widened with surprise and delight.
Sybil paid the father for the boxes of books she selected and carried them to the van. I carried the fern. As we drove away I caught sight of a woman’s solemn face at a window. We now had some remnants of the past life of a family in the back of our car, residue of the contentment that appears to have characterized the Maine life of this family.
More householders’ signs of approaching winter: We stretch the three long hoses to dry out before coiling them and retiring them to the cellar to rest for the winter beside the inner tube, screens, and my granddaughter’s baby pool. We empty the flower boxes on the deck and cover the bushes and perennials with pine branches, all to the end of closing out our fine, free outdoor life and retiring, of necessity, to the closed-in, restrictive indoors.
As a sign that I accept the inevitability of the move, I sit in the living room watching the light die over the Cove through the window, and listen to a 1959 Hamburg concert of Maria Callas singing ‘Una voce poca fa’ from The Barber of Seville. Her recorded voice is expressive, dramatic, but somewhat harsh and sharp, ‘Italianate,’ I always think. Like the air out there on the deck and blowing through Sybil’s rock garden, it has an absence of summer softness, a crusty edginess.
In a few weeks, DEAN (Down East AIDS Network) will sponsor a walk in Ellsworth to raise money for its activities. Sybil volunteers to get donations of food for the workers and the walkers, and I offer to contact ministers and priests in the area to ask for their support.
We are both persons who hate to ask for anything, but this Saturday I accompany her on her rounds, sitting in the car in cowardly fashion while she goes into pizza places, supermarkets, and small grocery stores, her heart in her mouth, she says. But still she goes, and mirabile, she is not turned down by anyone, except by the owner of Merrill & Hinckley, the prosperous grocery in Blue Hill, who can only offer to sell her, at cost, what she might need. She is pleased that, with the uniform generosity of other merchants and restaurant owners, she does not need him at all.
I call or write a long list of churches, finding each call a trial because I hate using the telephone but more because I dislike asking for anything. I devise a mental stratagem to drive me to the phone. I think of Carlos Calderon, my AIDS patient two years ago at Capitol Hill Hospital in Washington. When he left the hospital, I followed him to houses and apartments provided by the Whitman-Walker Clinic where he was able to stay when he could no longer live alone. Once he told me he wanted to see Wayward Books (our bookstore on 7th Street). He climbed painfully into my car, and I drove across the city and helped him into the store.
He had no energy left to look at books but I remember him saying: ‘I like being in a place where there are books.’ His gaunt, handsome face looked happy; he shook hands heartily with Sybil as though she were part of the ambience he liked.… Remembering all this (and Carlos’s death six months later, one week before we came down from Maine last year) made it possible to make those telephone calls.
Why do I hate to beg? Which of course is what we were really doing. Even in a good cause. Because, I suppose, I was taught ‘to pay your way,’ never to ask for anything, to live honorably. I think it would be easier, were I in need, to steal than to beg. The act of stealing is private, involves some skill, I would think, and a sense of accomplishment in the face of the danger of discovery. If one ‘gets away with it,’ a sort of victory over peril is achieved. Whereas begging is public and ignoble, and is only accomplished by assuming a lowly attitude of need and unworthiness.
Last night we had dinner with friends Gail and Celeste. The other guest was John Preston, a writer with whom I had corresponded and for whose books (on AIDS) I have written blurbs. He now lives in Portland and is not entirely well, having had one stay in hospital. But he is full of intellectual (and physical) energy, has contracts and plans for two or three books, and has just taken on the care of a new puppy, an exuberant vizsla dog he tells us is a Hungarian breed, overfriendly, but yet a good guard dog, used in the past to protect the Hungarian border.
Next day: A young woman comes by, accompanied by a photographer, from the Bangor Daily News. It turns out she is an entry in my Small World file. After the interview she tells me about herself. She was born into a working-class, German-American, Catholic family, the first of six children. She has Washington, D.C., roots, was a student at American University during the time I taught there, and raised a child born out of wedlock while she studied. She had no classes with me, she says, but used to walk by the closed door with my name on it, and wonder about me. She has battled depression (as well she might have), but now works as a journalist, doing the arts interviews for her paper.
The photographer takes so many pictures that, at last, I put a stop to it. I dread being photographed, more than I ever have. Not being photogenic makes one dislike the camera, the way Sybil, who fears heights, hates bridges.… At seventy, I wrote about my discovery before a full-length mirror of the decadent changes in my body, a section of the book that, to my horror, was often quoted in reviews. Interested in what the review had to say, I was forced to read that odious description again and again.… Now I am sure his pictures will reveal all the aged ridges, lines, valleys, sagging and blotching of my face and neck, the unreal mask I think my face has become in order to hide the unseemly youth I see in my mind’s eye.
New York: Another radio interview, this one from New York by satellite to Philadelphia. Then I go to lunch on the east side of the city with my friend Hilma Wolitzer. She is enveloped in middle-aged contentment, having four good novels ‘out there,’ her no
velist-daughter Meg happily married to a former student of Hilma’s (and mine) in Iowa, a first, new grandchild, and a beautiful apartment that looks out, from a saving height, at the glories of the city of New York.
There is something about long blocks of cement paving and horizontal walls of buildings that threatens my stability. Uncertain about how much farther I can walk without repeating my custom of tripping, or turning my ankle, I go into a coffee shop that is kitty-corner from Carnegie Hall. A few young women are sitting alone smoking and drinking coffee. The ‘help,’ as we used to call waiters and cooks, are all of Central American or Oriental extraction, having replaced, in toto, the Irish girls who constituted the help at Schrafft’s and Stouffer’s and Childs when I was young.
(Suddenly I remember that in Manhattan in my youth, jobs tended to be filled by members of the same nationalities. Janitors in apartment houses were very often German and very exacting. I remember my friend Dolly’s father, Mr. Sudermann, who would not permit the tenants of 130 West 86th Street, where my family lived for many years, to come into the basement for fear that ‘they will upset it.’)
Gallant, ageless old Carnegie Hall is still there, having, from what I can see, not changed at all, except for its newly cleaned facade, from the days in the thirties when I went every Friday afternoon and paid fifty-five cents for a student ticket. I sat on the floor of the second balcony, leaning against the last row of seats with my back to the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, John Barbirolli conducting, often following a score, and always, whatever the music, in a state of uncritical bliss.
Extra Innings Page 4