Late-Life Love

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by Susan Gubar


  The closest I have come to such madness was the most terrible moment in my teaching career. Don had driven me to give a talk at Knox College, where I was informed that my graduate student Susan Clements had been murdered in a Bloomington dorm by an ex-boyfriend. Don kept hold of my hand or rested his arm on my shoulder throughout our stay. Long ago, he had lost a brilliant graduate student, another Susan . . . hit by a truck. My Susan was twenty-three; it was the spring of 1992.

  The speech at her memorial was the hardest I ever had to give as I grieved with her family over the promise lost and I realized once again that our graduate students are of course not our offspring, but they too should inhabit our posthumous future and the bonds should remain strong long after they have gone off to launch careers of their own. At the retirement event that Mary organized in 2010, many of my former graduate students and even one former undergraduate lined up at a microphone to recall in a phrase my most ludicrous moments of mentoring. Susan Clements had been dead eight years; she would have been thirty-one years old.

  The green-eyed monster blights the world of The Winter’s Tale. The king’s diseased imagination builds an unsubstantiated case that leads to a series of disasters and seems mulishly impulsive when he ignores the judgment from the Delphic oracle, which declares Hermione chaste, Leontes a tyrant, the baby legitimate. The oracle concludes: “the King shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found” (3.2.133–34). The king banishes his infant daughter, his son dies, and his wife faints. Leontes orders her to be taken away to recover, and then immediately repents his unwarranted accusations. After her friend Paulina announces Hermione’s death, Leontes determines to bury the queen with her son in a grave that he will visit daily.

  In the early afternoon, when I drove over to Carrol’s house, I decided to skip over the middle of The Winter’s Tale, though I love the name of the king and queen’s daughter—Perdita means “lost”—and the most famous of Shakespeare’s stage directions (to punish the man who leaves her in a foreign land): “Exit pursued by a bear” (3.3.57).

  Carrol, who had stopped eating but continued to sip water, was sitting in a hospital bed set up in what used to be her dining room, looking surprisingly hale. On a table next to her, she had laid out some of the products of her loom. She showed me “Woven Iridescence,” a blue shawl shot through with waves of purple, as well as two cotton dishcloths, traditionally striped and in need of repair. These told her, she said, that she had led a patchy life, full of mistakes she somehow managed to mend. Decades ago, she had been an undergraduate in a senior seminar I had taught. She deserved the poor grade she received because, she confided, she had been stoned on drugs when she gave her final report. The last year had been the best, she felt: a trip to Italy with friends and family, when she realized her disease was terminal; the Last Chance to Dance party she had thrown. Her rare type of ovarian cancer did not respond to treatment.

  In a sage-green room flooded with winter light, Carrol adjusted her covers and reached for a little bulb attached to a rod—a tahkli spindle, she explained, from India—and a plastic bag full of fluffs of white cotton. With her right hand she held the spindle; with her left, she somehow twisted and pinched and pulled a puff of fiber taut, creating a long, thin thread. In ancient times, she informed me, there was not only a stone age but also a thread age. She contemplated Egyptian shrouds woven so thin that “you could see through them.” The tiniest filaments of cotton are considered “as fine as frog hair,” she said. “Thin threads are so full of energy they want to jump together.”

  When I arrived back home, I called out to Don. “Didn’t Peter Lindenbaum own a bear costume?”

  He mumbled something that I couldn’t hear, so I went to stand before him.

  “What did you say? I’m sorry, I’m going deaf.”

  “It doubles the conversation,” he said. “Peter kept a bear costume in his office and enlisted a series of graduate students to chase him out of the classroom, pursued by the bear. That’s how he concluded every one of his final lectures on The Winter’s Tale.”

  The conclusion of The Winter’s Tale—after a fast-forward in which Time appears on stage to “slide / O’er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried / Of that wide gap” (4.1.4–5)—presents the second chance of later-life love as a miraculous resurrection: the dead live and the lost are found, all in the nick of time. Leontes arrives at the house of Hermione’s friend Paulina with the daughter he now accepts as his own and only heir: his object is to view a statue of the queen. Like a stage director, Paulina draws a curtain to reveal a lifelike effigy. Leontes exclaims, “Hermione was not so much wrinkled” (5.3.28–29). After Paulina explains that the artist presented his wife as she would look sixteen years after her death, she offers to make the statue descend.

  Calling for music, Paulina proclaims—in a voice remarkable for its powerful authority—“be stone no more,” and Hermione steps down to embrace her husband. Hermione’s first words after sixteen years in hiding and her last words in the play ask the gods to grace her daughter. She wonders how Perdita was saved, and promises that she herself will recount how she, “Knowing by Paulina that the oracle / Gave hope,” had “preserved / Myself to see the issue” (127–28). Wanting to see the oracle’s issue as well as the child who issued from her body, Hermione establishes both her own agency (she preserved herself) and the primacy of her desire (to see her grown offspring), but she also hints at her dependency on Paulina for survival.

  The question of whether a destructive tyrant deserves this happily-ever-after shadows the play’s ending, especially because Leontes actually makes a pass at his daughter, before he understands who she is. His adoration of the stone wife contrasts with his earlier vilification of the fleshly wife. Given his control issues, wouldn’t he prefer his woman to be a mute, immobile thing on a pedestal—like Pygmalion’s Galatea not after but before she comes to life? While the reunion of mother and daughter echoes the mythic reunion of Ceres and Proserpine, which brings about springtime renewal, Shakespeare’s mother and daughter inhabit the wintery realm ruled by the king who had split them apart.

  Still, what makes the ending powerful is surely a miracle, the rebirth of the dead. The audience is meant to accept the death of Hermione in act 3—reported by Paulina and accepted as a fact by the king. Paulina’s successful efforts to establish the illusion of Hermione’s death and her expert efforts, sixteen years later, to establish the illusion of Hermione’s rebirth are created and validated by her author. The power of illusion is what Shakespeare shares with Paulina, whose authoritative utterance “be stone no more” performs a theatrical act of magic not dissimilar from those of her author. Although Paulina has been accused of being a witch, she is a wizard like Prospero and an artist like Shakespeare. The play’s the thing whereby Paulina captures the conscience of the king.

  After the wide gap of sixteen years, both the king and the queen are quite different creatures from who they had been before. He has lived with remorse and regret, she with proof of her uncanny survival skills. They remember but no longer incarnate the rash, furious despot and the tongue-tied, pregnant consort of the first act. The second chance of their reunion holds out the promise of a more equitable union between people who have outgrown disabling identities.

  Yet surely Shakespeare knew that after the opening night of The Winter’s Tale, most audiences would view the statue of Hermione as a sort of tableau vivant: not stone but a woman looking like stone (more precisely, a male actor looking like a woman who looks like stone). Besides dramatizing Paulina’s and her creator’s artistry, what does Paulina’s injunction—“be stone no more”—signify? The phrase eludes and needles me, though it surely does more than underscore Shakespeare’s most potent portrait of female friendship, or so I thought until I remembered the date: our appointment that afternoon and the fact that we would soon have to fall back, relinquishing daylight saving time. An additional hour of morning light was a boon for little kids at school bus stops, bu
t it hastens nightfall at the end of the day.

  As about so many eccentric preferences, Fran and I had adamantly disagreed on this point. She was glad to see the sun go down at supper time so she could go to sleep. But I loved daylight lasting as long as possible before I turned into a night owl. Would next month, my birthday, or the upcoming holidays bring some sign of reconciliation or even a reunion? Might these events inspire one of us to send a peace offering and perhaps then arrange a meeting, I wondered.

  Memories of our time together flooded me: running at the gym and then sharing an apple with a wedge of cheddar, sitting in the camping chairs she set up by Lake Monroe, admiring her efforts at composting and her volunteer work at a homeless shelter, marveling at the Susie-sing-along she organized for my—was it my fortieth?—birthday, singing carols as she groused about the out-of-tune piano, laughing together over old Bob and Ray radio routines or Danny Kaye’s movies (“The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true”). Like Paulina, Fran helped me survive the miseries of divorce and encouraged me to take a second chance.

  What was lost, could it be found? Fran always set her clocks back the day before one had to. Anticipatory mourning: had she begun to withdraw from me to protect herself from the grief she feared feeling once she heard my terminal diagnosis?

  A cry of pain propelled me into the living room.

  “My leg just gave out,” Don said, slumped in his wingback chair by the window.

  “The good one or the bad?”

  “The good one is also a bad one.”

  Then, just before renewing his efforts to stand, he said, “Ole rocking chair got me . . . with my cane by my side. Fetch me some gin, son, or I’ll tan your hide.”

  “What watch, Liebchen?”

  “In a few minutes,” he said.

  Returning to the blue couch, I knew that Don had determined not to undergo another knee surgery . . . and also that he believed he had four years left to live. His father had died at ninety-two. But I had met his father when he was in his late eighties, and he was not nearly as vigorous as Don, who has gone outside without the leg brace and started up his old Honda after more than half a year of disuse.

  “Be stone no more,” I realized, enjoins the resurrection of the spirit after traumatic loss. It could be the meme emblazoned over the stories of later-life lovers who have suffered shocking setbacks, privations, or heartaches before they found a way to recover emotions they had feared were dead and gone. Winter to spring, stone to flesh, suspicion to trust, spite to tenderness: Shakespeare holds out the promise of transformative renewal.

  Certainly, most audiences know that Hermione is not really a statue. She had been stoned by suffering into a numb, dumb replica or simulacrum of herself. Becoming aware of her numbed and dumbed self, Hermione then brilliantly, over the course of years and out of a yearning to be reconnected, taught herself to stonewall. The suspension of disbelief Shakespeare invokes has to do with art—our willingness to imagine ourselves through characters conjured by words—but also with faith in human resilience after great pain: our unanticipated capacity to resist injustice and regain sentience after stunning disasters.

  After the cataclysm of the Great War, after the poet H.D. lost her marriage, her father, her brother, and a stillborn baby, she fictionalized her plight through the character of Hermione and gave birth to a daughter she named Perdita. That daughter, Perdita Schaffner, once gave me permission to quote her mother’s words. At Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, studying H.D.’s papers, I had been introduced to a personage who turned out to be a descendant of Ezra Pound’s. She looked up from her desk and said, “H.D., who was she? She was nothing compared to Pound!” But we were going to be late, if I didn’t rush us out the door.

  Twice weekly in the late afternoon, I had to take Don back to the Trace, not to the gym but to a smaller facility, full of all sorts of machines for people who could afford a personal trainer. The therapists paid by Medicare had gotten his knee to bend to 79 degrees. Wanting to work on greater strength and flexibility, he signed up for regular sessions with an energetic woman who always kept him longer than the assigned hour. I grabbed my dog-eared copy of a contemporary novel that rewrites The Winter’s Tale and hustled us into the car. On the way, we passed a succession of houses and mentioned their former owners. It was “a street of the deceased,” Don said. Wasn’t that bungalow on the corner the one in which Jim Jensen fainted dead away at a bris for one of Al Wertheim’s sons? That must have been when? Maybe the sixties . . . before I arrived.

  Since I did not need to pick up prescriptions or groceries, I plunked myself down on an uncomfortable love seat inside the lobby of the Trace, near a fireplace with a fake burning log. Nicholas Delbanco’s The Years begins during a cruise tour of Pompeii on which two people, who had been college lovers, independently embarked. Within ruins preserved by ash, Lawrence and Hermia recognize each other after the lapse of forty-two years. Lawrence, at sixty-four and recovering from angioplasty, had dreamed the night before about “a woman [who] was a statue, and the statue was marmoreal but warmed to his hot touch.” Sixty-three at their reunion, Hermia fears that she has been “alone too long to yield her hard-earned privacy.”

  The Years delineates the losses that have hardened Hermia: the breakup of her college romance with Lawrence, her wretched marriage to a physically abusive husband, her flight from him to protect herself and her child, and, after a life in hiding, the disappearance of the daughter she had attempted to save. By splitting Leontes into two characters—Lawrence (who is a feckless youth, but not crazed) and Hermia’s first husband (whose violence springs from paranoid delusions about her infidelity)—Delanco skirts the scandal of The Winter’s Tale: the idea that a woman might determine to be reunited with a man who had effectively killed her son and set out to murder her and their daughter.

  Hermia thinks of “the school of second chances” when she invites Lawrence to visit her Truro house, possibly to resume their relationship after the forty-two-year gap. At lighthearted moments, she believes they are finding in each other new as well as old friends. “We wait and wait,” thought Hermia, “and sooner or later the thing we wait for does in fact appear: the statue moves . . .” When her missing daughter reappears, Hermia’s stony face expresses her recriminations. Quickly, however, she embraces the runaway and commits herself to Lawrence with the words “’Tis time. Descend.”

  Hermia’s “passion,” she discovers, “was not spent”: “everything was restored, made whole, old treacheries forgiven and old arguments resolved. What had been lost was found. They were gentle together now, slow.” To him, marriage means “getting things right only forty years later, well, more than forty, but who’s counting.” What would have transpired if he had proposed back then? Regret permeates the lost years, for it is impossible not to wonder what might have happened if they had married back in the sixties. “ ‘Better late than never,’ ” he concludes. Yes, that was Shakespeare’s point too.

  “Let’s not go home,” I said to Don when he finally emerged from his workout. “Let’s go to T.J.Maxx and look for some extra-wide shoes with laces instead of Velcro.”

  He was wincing from a pulled muscle, but agreed. I wanted to put off poring over the second pass of my cancer book. I am a terrible proofreader, since instead of fixing typos or grammatical errors, I generally judge each sentence a mistake in need of recasting.

  “They used to be called galleys or proofs or tegras,” I said. “I used to lug them on planes, but soon all the copyediting and proofreading will be done online, don’t you think?”

  “There used to be Continental, Eastern, Pan Am, Northwest, Allegheny, Southern. I took TWA to California, you had to change planes in St. Louis.”

  In the car, as Don told me a story about being at dinner with the poet Josephine Miles in a crowded Berkeley hotel restaurant, I thought about the stone woman I had been during my divorce. The grief was
so stultifying that I could not eat, could not read, could not write. Stupid with pain I was down to about one hundred pounds, which happened again during the months of reoperations and infections, when everyone thought I was dying, as I did too.

  But the divorce in the eighties had been a worse period than the initial cancer treatments . . . possibly because it involved more self-recrimination. It was my fault that I had embarked on a mismatched marriage. I had ricocheted off the trauma of my father’s death. Regardless of my incompatibility with my first husband, the stresses of midlife marriage—we had no money, the children were demanding, the tenure clock was ticking—had overwhelmed me. We were each too self-involved, too vain, to sustain a conjugal conspiracy that the poet Marianne Moore considered an “amalgamation which can never be more / than an interesting impossibility.”

  There are fewer obstacles for empty nesters, I thought, as the realization dawned on me: Don and I would never have clicked in midlife. We were both too riveted by our political commitments and professional ambitions. In our thirties, we each of us needed a wife. And neither of us then would have been willing to undertake the renunciations required by that role. In late life, we excavate “the temporal layers” of all the different people we have been and share a yearning to remain connected amid threatening circumstances. He tells my jokes; I keep his silences. In sync now, “two by two in the ark of / the ache of it,” we have acquired the patience to accommodate each other.

 

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