by Donald Hall
After the divorce I don’t remember what I ate except for fifths of Heaven Hill, a bourbon that cost two dollars and fifty cents. My salary was nine hundred dollars a month and child support was eleven hundred, which persuaded me to write a textbook. Five years later Jane and I married. When we left Ann Arbor to move into this old house I warned her that we would have trouble finding anything to eat in New Hampshire. I talked about no fruits or vegetables out of season, no garlic, no veal cutlets, no cheese. I forgot that now we drove cars, not horses and buggies. Our market town was New London, fifteen minutes away, where our supermarket was Cricenti’s. In Paris twenty-odd years earlier, I had loved céleri rémoulade, a starter of celery root in strips steeped in mayonnaise, mustard, vinegar, lemon juice, salt and pepper. I had never found celery root in Michigan. In the vegetable aisles of a New Hampshire grocery I found it, and also Stilton cheese, garlic, Camembert, and Bath Olivers from England. Doubtless there were Spam and sardines somewhere, but I never came across them.
For the first years here we fought over who got to cook. Jane loved to study cookbooks and I to improvise. My dishes started with garlic and a cup of olive oil, or I made meatloaf with ingenious ingredients. Once I cooked it for my daughter with three boiled quail’s eggs in the middle. Another specialty of mine was beef stew with wine and onions and potatoes and garlic and basil and the rest of the spice shelf. Then my doctor told me that I had diabetes. “You mean I am pre-diabetic,” I explained. “You are diabetic,” he told me. My disease discouraged everything that made me fat. I withdrew from the stove and Jane read diabetic cookbooks.
She loved cooking, even for a diminished eater. She specialized in unpredictable combinations brought bubbling hot to the table—steamed vegetables, mushroom sauce on cutlets. Now I cooked only for gigantic family assemblages. First I bought a huge aluminum pot. I found an old-style butcher in Tilton who corned his own beef. He dipped his metal hook into a salt barrel to lift out an honest gray joint, corned beef with no red dye. “I’d say about five pounds,” he guessed as the beef dripped on the scale. Home, I would put my salt beef in the giant pot, add cabbage cut into wedges, onions, carrots, parsnips, and corn niblets, but never quail’s eggs. I boiled it four hours as it disassembled into a mass that tasted of salt beef, veggies, handfuls of basil and bay leaves, and naturally garlic. At the table I carved the corned beef and added foothills of vegetables variés.
The aftermath of boiled dinner was better than boiled dinner. I fastened the meat grinder to the kitchen’s butcher block and ground up traces of corned beef from the kettle, together with bits of cabbage and carrot and onion and anything else. The anomalous final ingredient was ground-up beets, either fresh from the garden or from Ball jars. I mashed the heap into a bowl, stirred it, and served it for breakfast or lunch or dinner or all three. This local delicacy—I haven’t tasted it outside New Hampshire—is red flannel hash. I added a pinch more garlic.
Jane and I ate lunch while walking around in a daydream of bookish silence, then took a twenty-minute nap and worked all afternoon. At night Jane cooked our supper while I watched from my blue chair in the living room. She sipped a glass of white wine and I drank a beer until her voice called out, “It’s ready. Come light the candles.” It was the only meal at which we were formal.
The United States Information Agency stepped in and enlarged our eating experience. They sent us in 1987 for seven weeks to China and Japan to talk about American poetry. It was the longest time we spent away from our kitchen and our writing. We ate what we had never eaten, in the vastness of China ending each day with a banquet of fifty dishes, concluded by a goose. Chinese banquets nationwide began at five o’clock and ended at seven, when our hosts stood up and fled. Japan was variety—fancy city food, northern Japanese cuisine, and Korean food at a restaurant that described itself as CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN, like New Hampshire’s NO GARLIC. (The Japanese had notions about foreigners’ hygiene.) In Hiroshima we ate at an establishment that called itself an Italian restaurant. It did not resemble Nate Mann’s.
Later, the State Department transformed us and our culinary life. Twice they flew us to India, sending us all over the country on airplanes instead of our twenty-four-hour Chinese train rides. In such a huge country—seventeen languages and hundreds of dialects, with English the common tongue—the tastes and ingredients of food were vastly different across the country, from curry to yogurt, most of it Hindu and vegetarian. Cattle abounded in the streets but not on dinner plates. Jane’s love for everything Hindu created our new diet. The few years left in her life, our New Hampshire kitchen became vegetarian Hindu, overflowing with spices. Once a month Jane shopped at an Indian grocery near Central Square in Cambridge. Typically she cooked one or two dishes a day, and each night assembled a new combination of food with six arms. I took to the change with enthusiasm, but whenever we went out to dinner I ate steak with garlic mashed potatoes.
Jane had leukemia for fifteen months. I don’t remember what I ate in fifteen months of hospital cafeterias. Most of the time Jane ingested only TPN through a catheter in her heart. After Jane’s funeral my porch filled with whole wheat bread like Jane’s, casseroles, and a ham that I sliced for three weeks. In late spring my supper every night was fresh asparagus from the patch Jane had dug and planted and nourished across the road. Sometimes I’d buy myself two pork chops and eat one at supper with a frozen vegetable, two days in a row. I tried a restaurant alone, but I couldn’t stand it. Only when I started dating would I eat osso buco again at Piero’s La Meridiana. (Poetry finally attracted females, as it was supposed to do when I was fourteen.) As I escorted my date to New London’s Millstone one night, the hostess asked if my companion was my granddaughter. We both shrieked “No!” and never saw the hostess again. Most of my dates were mistaken for daughters, not granddaughters. At home I made them stew with red wine. I made meatloaf. Some of them cooked in my kitchen or in theirs. A friend from California flew in bringing her own garlic press, and we bought a bushel of cloves at Cricenti’s. When she took charge of the kitchen, even chocolate ice cream tasted of garlic. After my years of brief romances, I settled down with Linda. Until I stopped driving, one of us made dinner. Then we went to restaurants because I needed to get out of the house. We drove to the bookstore, the supermarket, and Piero’s. He isn’t reticent about cooking with garlic.
As I enter my mid-eighties my appetite dwindles. I bring home doggie bags from a restaurant. My daughter cooks me chili to freeze, and annually gives me a head of Stilton. My son keeps me supplied all year with five-year-old Vermont cheddar. Linda freezes thick soups, makes shepherd’s pie and garlic potatoes. Carole gave me a quart of roadkill bear stew. Most nights I push my four-wheeled pusher to the microwave to heat up widower food. It’s always Stouffer’s—the red packages with Swedish Meatballs, or Stuffed Peppers, or Cheddar Potato; the white ones with Meatloaf and Potato, or Steak Portobello with Broccoli, or Ranchero Braised Beef with Sweet Potato—flakes of garlic with everything.
A House Without a Door
MY COUSIN AUDREY is ninety-six. She taught reading for sixty years, professionally and as a volunteer, at the Danbury Elementary School, which staged a celebration in her honor last fall. Audrey’s mind is undiminished, but like me she walks pushing a roller with four wheels. I remarked that the school was generous to seat us together, so that she would not seem the eldest in the room. (I am eleven years younger.) I told her a recent dream in which I found myself walking in a dark house, among shadowy male strangers. I felt mildly anxious and wanted to go outside. I kept looking for a door but couldn’t find one. It was a house without a door.
Audrey said, “Sometimes it’s hard.”
When Jane and I moved here, I worked all day on freelance writing, taking breaks between genres. For ten years, before we installed an oil furnace, I hauled wood from the shed to our centenarian cast-iron Glenwood stoves, then huffed back to my rolltop desk. With central heating I lost my trips to the woodshed. I interrupted my work by walking o
ur dog Gus, or by driving to browse in the Morgan Hill Bookstore, or by visiting Cricenti’s to buy a jar of pimentos I didn’t need. When I was eighty, after my two accidents and selling what remained of my car, it was annoying for a month not to be able to take an impulsive spin in the Honda. Gus was dead and neither the cats nor I took walks. Gradually the car desires dwindled, and I congratulated myself on accepting unavoidable limitation. Then I dreamed the dream.
My problem isn’t death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down. Yesterday I fell asleep in an armchair. I never fall asleep in a chair. Indolence overcomes me every day. I sit daydreaming about what I might do next: putting on a sweater or eating a piece of pie or calling my daughter. Sometimes I break through my daydream to stand up. At Christmas or birthday I no longer want objects, even books. I want things I can eat, cheddar or Stilton, my daughter’s chili, and replacements for worn-out khakis, T-shirts, socks, and underwear. Every day in winter I wear a long-sleeved T-shirt, in summer the short-sleeved kind.
Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence. Jane and I married in 1972, when she was twenty-four and I forty-three. For six months we delayed marriage because she would be a widow so long. After a surgeon removed half my liver, Jane wrote her elegies—“Otherwise,” “Prognosis,” “Pharaoh”—and the next year was crowded with generous anticipatory funerals. (A writers’ group put on a Donald Hall tribute; the University of Michigan gave me an honorary degree.) I felt fine after chemo in January 1994 when Jane was diagnosed with leukemia, and in April 1995 she died. I will mourn her forever.
Ten years ago I found Linda, and she helps me get out of my house. Earlier she helped me travel, as long as a week at a time. She saw to my requirements at poetry readings from New York to Los Angeles, from the District of Columbia to Chicago, from Monterey to Pennsylvania to Kansas City. We flew to international literary festivals in Sweden, in Vancouver, in Mexico, and twice in Ireland. The places where I read my poems paid for travel, and airline credits helped us undertake more fanciful journeys. In summer we flew to temperate Argentina and Chile. May and June were right for London. July was warm enough in Russia’s St. Petersburg. In spring we went to Italy, and in many seasons flew to Paris. For the first French visits we stayed at a hotel that served paradisal croissants. One morning I ate fourteen. Between one flight to Paris and another, my balance began to fail. I waddled with feet wide apart and found stairs increasingly fearsome. The entrance to our hotel was five deep steps without railings. Holly, my travel agent, found us a hotel with no stairs, only three blocks away from our old one. We clambered into taxis for museums, returning to old marvels and discovering new ones. For lunch we walked a block or two, usually to Les Deux Magots, where I ate a sandwich Camembert, the cheese an incomparable ripeness on a baguette warm, dense, tender, and delicious. Once the waiter took our order and shortly returned. He said it would take a few minutes; the bakery had just delivered fresh bread. How many times a day did warm baguettes arrive at Les Deux Magots? For dinner we went to fancy places—to La Tour d’Argent, to Lapérouse—but later found less notorious, more dingy and intimate restaurants. My favorite was old and plain, Joséphine “Chez Dumonet” on rue du Cherche-Midi, where they served a boeuf bourguignon I loved as much as the city itself.
In September of 2011 Linda and I last flew to Paris. I was eighty-three, and at home I avoided a broken hip by pushing my roller. For Paris I took only a cane, assuming that as I walked more, my legs would get stronger. Hah. After five days I moved two or three inches each step. Taxis could carry us to boeuf bourguignon, but I got Linda to look at paintings alone while I lay in bed reading books.
A year later Linda took a job teaching French, and over school vacation returned to France to practice the language. She went by herself.
Not everything in old age is grim. I haven’t walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel. For years a pusher has scooted me through security in fifty-four seconds, and for years I have boarded the plane before anybody else. One pusher in Minneapolis insisted that Linda sit in a wheelchair too, because Linda’s walking would slow him down. He sprinted us to the luggage carousel as if he were Usain Bolt. In 2010 a university gave me an award. I flew there with Linda, and at two A.M. of the prize day I woke with stomach flu. Imodium shut me down by noon, and I struggled through my honors at four p.m. The next day I was still shaky and frail when we flew back by way of Baltimore-Washington. A pusher wheelchaired me to the Southwest Airlines gate for Manchester, New Hampshire. As usual I was first to board, Linda behind me. As we started toward the empty seats, my trousers fell down around my ankles. “Technical difficulties,” Linda announced.
Poetry readings become increasingly difficult for my hosts, because I’m hard to handle—and I’m no longer doing many. My lecture agent makes sure about no stairs. If anyone says there are only a few steps, there are probably ten. (They never noticed.) Mostly I live the same day, every day, which doesn’t bore me except at beginning and end. In the morning I turn on the coffee, glue in my teeth, take four pills, swallow Metamucil and wipe it off my beard, fasten a brace over my buckling knee, pull painfully tight stockings over edema—then read the newspaper and drink black coffee. Daytime is writing, napping, daydreaming, and dictating letters. Days are not boring because I read and write different things, and because writing sustains me. Bedtime is as much ennui as getting up. Fill coffee machine for morning, detach false teeth and soak them, take evening pills, remove brace, peel off painfully tight stockings.
Weeks are not boring, or months. Since I started long ago to make a living by freelance writing, it’s been hard to tell day from day, week from week. Sundays the mail doesn’t come. Occasionally the mail doesn’t come on other days, which is puzzling until I realize it’s the Fourth of July.
Old age is averse to innovation. Ten years ago I touched a computer once. It was black, it was hard, it did something weird when I touched its mouse, which was not really a mouse. I inhabit the only computerless house the length of Route 4, and I don’t have an iThing. I do have a television set, for MSNBC and baseball. In newspapers and magazines I read about what’s happening. Apparently Facebook exists to extinguish friendship. E-mail and texting destroy the post office. eBay replaces garage sales. Amazon eviscerates bookstores. Technology speeds, then doubles its speed, then doubles it again. Art takes naps.
I should add that the electronically equipped Kendel lives just down the street. Like me she is handicapped, though thirty years younger. She has MS, and we compare notes on getting around. As well as typing my manuscripts and letters, she is my bookkeeper who tells me what I paid for what, and when. With my accountant she prepares my taxes. She shows me where to sign my name. If I want to know something, she finds it on Google.
When I’m annoyed by change, I think of my mother Lucy. When she could no longer live alone in her Connecticut house, Jane and I wanted her here, but she needed a medical facility. She had frequent attacks of congestive heart, which required an immediate doctor. We found her a bed in a New Hampshire place attached to a hospital, the Clough Center. Beside her was a phone jack that lacked a phone. When we bought her a telephone we found only an instrument that worked by pushbuttons, numerical as a cash register. She was disgusted. A phone has a dial!
At ninety my mother’s mind remained clear. This farmhouse was twenty minutes away from her bed. She could have shuffled out of her squalid room wearing a caftan, squeezed herself into the front seat of the Honda, and sat in her childhood living room or visited the bed where she was born. She might even have smoked a cigarette. She never made the journey. In old age everything is too much trouble. The Clough Center had no door.
The ground floor of this farmhouse contains a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom. I have not visited the root cellar—with its empty cider barrels, its molasses kegs, and its abandoned ping-pong table—for nearly a decade. I
put in a new furnace without looking at it. There is a big floor upstairs with books and papers and pictures, and the workroom where Jane wrote her poems. I last climbed up—on two-hundred-year-old risers five inches deep—several years back with a man who evaluated my pictures. I use the living room for reading and writing, the parlor for watching baseball and dictating letters. My children and grandchildren visit, which enlivens a day.
It is Carole who keeps the house. She washes my clothes, she drives me to the doctor. She arranges my furniture for comfort and safety. She examines my tick bite infection. When my bottom missed the toilet and I fell, she found and installed aluminum rails, giving me handholds. She bought an electrical chair to help me stand up. (For some reason, such things are easy to find secondhand.) She nailed two handles to help me step on the porch. We smoke cigarettes together and I write about our habit in Playboy. I depend on four women in their fifties. My trainer Pam forestalls the wheelchair. Linda, Kendel, and Carole do everything else. When I talk with them, I carelessly assume I’m their age, while they witness decrepitude without letting me know. I look in a mirror at my extravagant beard and I have no idea that the back of my head is bald.
