Vocabulary I acquired on Grand Manan: Fishing boats of whatever size are called dories there, never dinghies, as in Maine. Dulse: purplish seaweed that is edible, gathered on the rocks of the west coast of the island in Dark Harbour, dried on the beach, and then packaged and served as a snack, like peanuts. Some people do not like eating it but chew it and then spit it out, like tobacco. I look at it but do not buy it, being, as I have become in old age, loath to try anything new, sure it cannot possibly taste good.
Information about Cather’s summer cabin that I found in my file of letters at home: In 1963 the New Brunswick government wanted to make it an historical site so that visitors could view the place, ‘reverently.’ Miss Lewis, Cather’s long-time companion and executor, replied to the request that Miss Cather, as she always referred to her, ‘was so opposed to any publicity on Grand Manan—she so wished to keep the little cottage unadvertised and unknown—that I do not feel that I can give you permission for any sort of lease for viewing the site.’
I was right. Miss Lewis wanted the place kept private for her friend, sixteen years after her death. Cather is still there, hostile to our presence, forty-five years later.
The prospect of months ahead in Sargentville, cold, icy, and tempestuous as they might have been, has been dimmed and then wiped out. Jane’s operation is the third of next month, so we will drive down about that time.
I had looked to January and perhaps February here to try out my theoretical love of solitude. Cato: ‘Never am I less alone than when I am by myself.’ The test will have to wait until next year.
Sunrise in winter is far redder, far more brilliant, than at any other season. It starts early and by six has filled the sky over Deer Isle with a color not unlike fire.… I think of the news recently that the Berkeley hills were caught in a great sweep of fire, leveling a hundred homes. On television, standing in front of a sky still burning, I saw old acquaintances, the McClungs, and listened to them tell of the total destruction of everything they owned. They are book people, he an editor at the University of California Press and she, I think, active in the University Press bookstore in Berkeley that we visited years ago when we went book-hunting in California. I have a horrified vision of the hundreds of books that must have inhabited their house reduced to grey ash.
I cannot escape constant worry about my daughter. When I look out over the winter-roughened water of the Cove I see her face. What makes this operation especially harrowing for her, and for the rest of us, is that she had a benign brain tumor removed fifteen years ago. It was a long and terrible experience. She has a vivid memory of the pain she will have to endure again, of the difficulties and indignities that accompany having one’s head opened and foreign matter removed from it, and the long, slow, pain-filled recovery.
Having been through all this, she is understandably in an acute state of nerves. The Wheelers and her husband, Bob, are trying hard to help her through these next weeks of waiting, but it is not easy for anyone, especially not for Jane.… Her younger sister, Kate, a physician who is very pregnant, has come up from Baltimore to assist her in conversations with the doctors who will do the seventeen-hour surgery. Another sister, Elizabeth, will take leave from her Lake Placid job to stay with her when she comes out of intensive care, thus putting to rest at least one of Jane’s great worries, being alone in a hospital room, as she was last time when an emergency arose. And she is promised a private room, another of her concerns: she doesn’t feel up to bearing the pain of anyone else, unreconciled as she is to the prospect of her own.
It is good to see how concerned these sisters are about each other in an emergency. I am filled with pity for Jane, and find it hard to concentrate on what I had planned to do. How selfish writers are. Full of concern for a child I love, still, a morsel of resentment sticks in my craw that anything should happen to distract me from putting words on the page.
Three years of occupation of what I once considered a most spacious study, and now there is hardly room to get into it. Books and folders are piled everywhere. It makes me think of the visitor who was shown through Mark Twain’s study in Hartford. He asked the great man why it was necessary to have so many books spread and piled so untidily over the floor. ‘Well, you see,’ Twain said, ‘it’s so very difficult to borrow bookcases.’
My greatest difficulty is finding what I need. The old, original classification scheme, installed by my librarian-housemate Sybil, seems now to have been completely broken down, by me. Books are stuffed in everywhere, on their sides, flat on their backs. Next time I arrange them I will resort to the most absurd system I know of, like the one I read of recently in Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books, a small Christmas book published by the bookseller, Oak Knoll. It was a crazy scheme suggested in an etiquette book of the Victorian age: ‘The perfect hostess would see to it that works by male authors and female authors were properly segregated on her bookshelves. Unless (like Elizabeth and Robert Browning) they were married.’
The telephone rings. I tell this story to the caller. She laughs. ‘That system is still in use,’ she tells me. Elaine Showalter, the feminist scholar at Princeton, admits only women writers to the shelves of her dining room.
I welcome a day away from the difficulties I am encountering with the novel to drive down the coast to visit May Sarton. On the way I stop to see what damage has been done by Hurricane Bob to Moody Beach. Seawalls have been broken and steps washed away; the Hazeltines have had water driven in under their porch. But on the whole the beach has survived well and is still as vast and as beautiful as ever.
Standing at the top of the seawall in front of the Hazeltines’ cottage, which adjoined ours, I imagine I can see Sam Wheeler, then a Roman Catholic priest, visiting us. It is early morning, and Sam is a sight to behold. He is dressed in his long, black cassock and is playing long-distance Frisbee with my husband and Mike Keating. Five years later he will be my son-in-law. I wonder what has become of his cassock.
And I recall another scene. We are sitting around a campfire built very close to the Keatings’ cottage up the beach. It is growing dark; we are all about halfway through the evening’s drinking and feeling fine. The children are bedded down. The grown-ups decide to stay up as long as the fire lasts. We build sand barriers against the encroachment of the tide, and watch it with inebriated interest as it creeps closer and closer. Then a miracle: the water breaks through the sand wall, parts around the still-burning embers, and comes up to the steps, avoiding the fire. It is close to three o’clock in the morning. Still we sit, celebrating our victory over the force of nature.
At this point my memory fades. But Kathy Keating tells me the next morning that we stayed to see the tide turn and begin to retreat, as if discouraged by the noise of our intoxicated hilarity. At that moment, we put out the fire, I am told, and went down the beach to our cottage, walking in the black water. The Keatings went skinny-dipping, as we called it then. The sky was beginning to lighten, that I recall. It was one of the great moments at Moody Beach.
Another: On Labor Day, beginning at noon, we would build a great bonfire, composed of every broken object, every scrap of wood and driftwood we could find. One year it rained, so we mounted a broken umbrella over the built-up high point, and it protected the fire most of the day until it too succumbed to the flames. All day, neighbors emptied their refrigerators into the fire; the odors that resulted were terrible, especially when Kathy disposed of a huge pot of decaying turkey soup into it. In the evening, we held a sort of bacchanalia around it, with music, drunken dancing, and folk singing to Mike Keating’s guitar. The drinks of the night consisted of the remains of every wine and liquor bottle of every description left over in the cottages.
The high point of the evening came when we gathered in the dying firelight to review our summer’s collections of sea glass, deciding which pieces were not sufficiently ‘done’ to be retained. Sea glass, as every walker of the edge of the sea must know, are bits of glass washed up by the sea, blue, green, brown, w
hite, and colors in between, which are remnants of bottles caught in the sea wrack.
We had decreed, in our first year on Moody Beach, that the discards had to be thrown back into the sea by a virgin, in order to be further seasoned by the pious action of the waves. For some reason we saw the ceremony as religious in significance. The selection of the person to perform the rite became the night’s pinnacle of hilarity: who was truly fit for the task? It was thought we might have to go as far as York Beach, or Wells Beach, to find a truly qualified candidate. At last, after much debate, Martha Keating was settled upon as the only sure celebrant along the mile-and-a-half stretch of beach: she was four years old.
Today, standing on the edge of Moody’s empty expanse, I thought I was watching a shadowy volleyball game, played every afternoon between the Keatings, the Grumbachs, and their friends. Mike Keating and my husband were fierce competitors. Once, when the Keatings were a point or so behind, Mike reached for the ball in the air, hit small Martha, and knocked her out. Perhaps I remember it wrongly, perhaps it never happened, but what I see and hear is Mike shouting to Kathy to pull her out of the way without taking his eye off the ball on his side of the net. The game went on, goes on still in my memory, played hard by absent sportsmen and children, in a time half a century in the past.
Vita mutator, non tollitur. My friend LaSalle, writing to me about a sentence I quoted in End Zone (‘There is no death. Only a change of worlds’) sends me the version of it from the Tridentine Mass of Requiem: ‘Life is changed, it is not taken away.’ In whatever version, I continue to find it very hard to think of death as anything but oblivion, the bottomless abyss, life’s light obliterated, the unending dark. Perhaps that is the ‘change’ the proverb and the liturgy describe.
Elizabeth Cale, my sports-loving daughter, is going over her huge collection of clippings, in an apartment where she has finally been able to have a room just for her collection. Twelve years ago she clipped an article from the New York Times about the Mormon Nation (a faith in which she was, for a time, deeply interested). She sends it to me. For a moment I am puzzled, not understanding its pertinence to my interests. But on the back she has drawn an arrow pointing to a headline: ‘Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.’ The date of the clipping is July 3, 1981. The article begins:
Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. Eight of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made.
The article, the first, I think, in newsprint on AIDS, appears far back in the paper, on page 20, and goes on to say that diagnosing doctors have alerted other physicians ‘to the problem’ in an effort to reduce the delay in offering chemotherapy treatment. The cancer is given a name, Kaposi’s sarcoma.
Just that long ago? Beginning so simply, so inauspiciously, seeming so containable. A little thing, a problem, another variety of the Big C. Would that it had been, and that thousands more had not followed those first forty-one men into that good night.
The Christmas season: All our tree decorations are on a shelf in our apartment in Washington, so we decorate this house with a plain wreath on the door. A Spartan holiday for me, but Sybil, who never cares much for transforming the house with Christian symbolism, is content. On Thanksgiving she told me this was her favorite holiday because it had no religious connotations. I too have my partialities about holidays. I don’t like the patriotic ones, the often-bogus display of flag and bunting, uniforms and marching-band music, war-praising speeches and gun-and-cannon firing.
I also have an aversion to sentimental displays, Mother’s and Father’s Day, and other such plastic celebrations. Subtract religious, patriotic, and sentimental holidays from the calendar and what do we have left? I yield to Sybil: Thanksgiving.
Two days before Christmas, St. Brendan’s, the little church in Stonington, finds itself without a priest. Cynthia, who has served the Episcopal congregation well for two years, has decided she must be at a retreat house in the West, her whole sacerdotal profession now being inner-directed. She regrets her need to be absent, she tells us, but she wishes to continue her ‘spiritual journey’ under the leadership of Father Keating, a Catholic priest, whose films she has been showing us for some time.
Cynthia is a deeply spiritual woman, with strong mystical (and Catholic?) leanings. We all express our understanding, to an extent, of her choice between our needs and her own. But we are angry, resenting the prospect of a bleak Christmas Eve Mass. We can go to the church in Blue Hill, of course, not go anywhere, or hold our own Mass without the Eucharist.
We decide to stay together, to use the whole liturgy of Rite One, except for the words only the priest may say, and to ask Cynthia to consecrate and reserve the sacrament so that we can receive it and celebrate with the wholeness that Christmas requires. That evening (Maine churches hold their midnight services at nine because of the cold and the icy-road threat), a saving remnant of us met in the Catholic church, which always allows us to use its sacred space when it is not otherwise occupied, and celebrated Christ’s Mass. There was an eerie suggestion of the very early church rites about it. Without a priest, the royal priesthood of the people, as Martin Luther termed it, had assumed the celebratory role.
Less than two weeks until Jane will undergo her ordeal in New York. Last evening at the Christmas Mass, during the prayers of the people, I spoke her name, without saying why I was asking for prayers for her. It is perhaps naive of me, but I have faith in these communal requests for the Lord’s help.
Almost daily, on Route 172, we pass a huge barn, built very close to the road, that is in the process of collapse. It once belonged to our neighbor Abby Sargent’s great-grandfather, whose children operated the farm for many years. Now almost eighty years old, the barn served for a time as a ‘hen factory,’ and began to fail in 1979. Everyone, most of all Abby, worried about it. We watched it age, grow more feeble, threaten to fall into the road, much as we would watch a beloved old person go into a decline, as we used to say. It was Abby, I believe, who spoke to the road and town authorities to see if something could be done to hasten its safe demise.
Finally, by what agency I do not know, the beautiful old building fell down entirely this week. Now it is a flattened pile of grey boards, done in, I would like to believe, by a kind of joint civic euthanasia. The old die late and well in Maine.
This morning, because I am feeling very good in the presence of the beauty and snowy elegance of the buried gardens, the meadow, the edge of the Cove, the silence and the solitude of the house as I work, the name Miss Schaff suddenly entered my mind. I searched my memory for the reason, could not find it. Then I spent an hour going through a notebook from five years ago. Voilà, here it is. I remembered it, I believe, because of the headline ‘The Long, Unhappy Life of Miss Schaff.’ Stories appear regularly in the newspapers about obscure persons, seemingly of low degree, who die and leave a fortune. Katherine M. Schaff’s life story is both odd and prototypical; it has remained in my mind.
The headline writer was correct in one respect: she did live long, ninety years. The assumption that her life was ‘unhappy’ is what I question. She was born in Pequannock, New Jersey, and left school at thirteen to work in nearby Union as a jewelry polisher, leaving home before dawn, taking three buses, and coming home long after dark. Her father and two sisters died in her early childhood; she lived with her mother for forty-five years, supporting and caring for her, and then, for the next twenty-five years, with her brother, until he died. Except to go to work, she left her house only twice in her lifetime: once to take a pleasure trip for a day to Asbury Park, and at the end, after a stroke, to enter a nursing home, where she died in 1982.
She worked overtime at every opportunity, building her many savings accounts. In 1978 she began to collect social security, $270 a month, which she lived on. Her reclusiveness was abetted by her fears: of bugs (her house was always spotless, and in the nursing home she rose at four-thirty every mor
ning to clean her room), of thunder, and of men (a terror she inherited from her mother). She hated having children enter her yard, yet she planned two weeks ahead for Halloween. She had had one suitor, whom she turned away because of what she said was her duty to her mother. After her retirement, a kindly neighbor did her shopping for her, and checked on her by telephone each morning. Miss Schaff would reply, ‘I made it through the night.’
Her only visitor was her neighbor, who came by on New Year’s Day for pickled herring. She had a radio and a telephone, made her aprons from old dresses, her blouses from her dead brother’s shirts. Only her neighbor, a minister, and the driver of the hearse attended her funeral. To Pequannock’s Rescue Squad, which had once taken her to the hospital, to the Fire Brigade, and to the Youth Recreation Department she left the contents of her five bank accounts: over one hundred thousand dollars. Her neighbor eulogized that Miss Schaff had led ‘a hard, very unhappy life. I don’t think I ever remember her laughing.’
Unhappy? I wonder. I think I understand her life. She loved routine and sameness. They made her feel safe against her fears of invasion by dirt, the elements, the opposite sex. Her hermitic life was further protection. She had shut herself away, pulled in the boundaries of her existence, so that the walls of her life sheltered her against everything she could not bear. She must have preferred her own company, solitude, to the company of others, which may be what loneliness is. The radio was her connection to the world, as much of it as she wanted to hear about. To her, ‘doing without’ must have seemed both normal and satisfying, and her money lying secure in her banks was a safety net she was never to use. Buffered in this way, expecting nothing, never disappointed or rejected, with nothing to lose and nothing to be concerned about gaining, must we assume she was unhappy?
Extra Innings Page 11