Coming into the End Zone

by Doris Grumbach

  I spent the evening writing. At breakfast I gave him my thin sheets of Rockefeller Institution stationery in an open envelope. I never heard from her, nothing about her from anyone, until the spring of 1987 when my reliable informant (on death matters), the New York Times, published a short, laconic obituary. Teacher, scholar, an expatriate who became a Polish citizen after World War II, she had died in a nursing home in Warsaw, survived by her sister, a niece, and a nephew. Nothing more. Nothing about her learned accomplishments, nothing of her successfully communicated enthusiasms for the world’s great if little-known literature, so that egocentric, self-satisfied students (as I had been) were brought out of themselves into the dark yet illuminating religious fervor of the Middle Ages.

  Had I been the obituary writer I would have added something about her curiously profound understanding of a time so steeped in God that men died and murdered for Him (as the Mayans were doing a hemisphere away), curious because it came from an atheist, a convinced Marxist. In our time the religious spirit that suffused every aspect of human life is long gone. Now we tend to secularize Him, ‘to see Him only in our neighbor,’ Thomas Merton wrote. Prayer has become horizontal, not transcendent, not ‘fiery prayer’ as the Fathers of the Egyptian desert practiced it.

  Maggie was a fiery scholar, a defender of an age whose profound faith she did not share. But she understood it, because her passion for Communism (‘no matter how undogmatic’) resembled it. I picture her spending eternity not in a plebeian downtown campus but at some ethereal Heights, teaching with the great prophets and sages. Had she lived until today she would have been eighty-eight. I miss her.

  My daughter Elizabeth lives on Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina. She sends me a clipping from the local paper about a significant event occurring in Myrtle Beach. A bill is being sponsored by Representative Tom Keegan ‘to ban dwarf-tossing’ in that state. He thinks the activity ‘not only degrading but dehumanizing.’

  What is dwarf-tossing? Just what it says. A nightclub audience has been entertained by the spectacle of David Wilson, a midget, being thrown into the air. The newspaper does not say if it was a contest to see who could throw Wilson highest or farthest or hardest or most often. Or whether there were other small persons tossed at the same time. Wilson wore a protective leather harness and a neck brace and landed on air mattresses. Nonetheless, a few days later, he died in Gainesville of what was said to be alcohol poisoning.

  This did not end the entertainment. The club held another dwarf-tossing. Informed of the bill before the state legislature to stop ‘the fad,’ as the manager called it, the manager disagreed with Keegan’s view that the contest was dehumanizing. ‘Why would a dwarf be doing it if it was?’ he demanded of Keegan.

  Why, indeed, I wonder. For notice? For money? Because there are not too many employment opportunities for midgets? Because cruelty to defenseless ‘freaks’ and animals, small children, and women is common in this society. A misdemeanor charge, with a two-hundred-dollar fine for thirty days in jail, will not cure the common human need to be cruel to anyone who is weak, obscure, and small.

  Each year at the end of September I spend a morning gathering up my files and correspondence so they can be transferred to the University of Virginia Library, where my ‘papers,’ as they call them somewhat ostentatiously, reside. Today I find, under the files waiting to be transported, three letters that must have escaped my last donation to the library.

  The first is from May Brodbeck, chancellor of the University of Iowa when I taught at the Writers Workshop there. She wrote to me in Washington from Iowa City (September 20, 1980):

  ‘I spend the exhausted evenings—when I can—either at concerts (the Cleveland Orchestra tonight!) or reading: New York Jew, which I loved, of course, an old Sarton, and de Beauvoir’s All Said and Done. She’s not a nice person, I’ve decided, narcissistic and politically too naive for a grown-up woman. On your recommendation I’ve just bought Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus and cannot wait to start it. Then I’ll go back to Italian novels, to keep the language up. I’ve bought two season tickets for the concert series; perhaps when you get back here we can share them.’

  May Brodbeck was a philosopher of science, pushed up the demanding administrative ladder because of her calm, steady, logical way of thinking, and her objective but kindly treatment of everyone with whom she dealt. After years of enduring ‘the exhausted evenings,’ she retired, went to the West Coast, bought an apartment, and, a few months after settling into it, took her life.

  The other two letters were from Esther Senning, a longtime friend of my husband’s from the years they spent in Ithaca at Cornell University. Esther lived in a partially restored farmhouse in Voorheesville, near Albany, when my husband and I and our children lived close by. We visited the Sennings on Sundays and watched their four children grow up along with ours. Her husband, Bill, a New York State official in the Conservation Department, used to entertain the children by standing on his head at the age of fifty. One day an aneurysm burst in his head; he has spent the rest of his life in a nursing home. Only a small portion of his former physical and mental capacity survives.

  Esther raised and educated her children, visited Bill once or twice a week, and sometimes, with help, brought him home for the weekend. She was a gallant, lonely, cheerful woman who loved cigarettes, music, art, and literature, but the Fates (perhaps more accurately the Furies) gave her no peace. One of her sons fell deeply in love, married, had a child, and then was deserted by his wife. He lived alone near us, in Gaithersburg, and called once to arrange a date for dinner. Before we could meet, he climbed on his motorcycle, left his helmet at home, and drove at full speed into a wall. Esther mourned him quietly. A short time later she developed cancer of the mouth, refused the operation that would have disfigured her face, accepted less radical chemical treatment, and went on living alone with her affliction.

  On January 27, 1977, she wrote to me in Washington from her farmhouse in Voorheesville: ‘And now the news. The cancer is gone or arrested. I can hear again. I’ve got up off that couch and am able to take care of myself, even drive. I’m pleased about the last two, but oddly enough, I’m not so sure how I feel about being rid of the cancer. It’s like having to die twice. I had accepted it when I declined ‘adequate’ surgery, figured I’d had seventy pretty good years and was ready to settle for that. And the kids had come to terms with it, even to Bert’s [her youngest son] bringing himself to say he’d like to make the pine box for me, which I said I’d be very proud to be buried in. I felt as though I were attending my own wake, at least receiving last rites. And now we all have to go through all this again. I feel I’ve conned people into getting more than my share, or at least crept down and looked at my Christmas presents ahead of time.’

  I wrote to tell her that, as literary editor of The New Republic, I often got duplicates of books. What sort of books did she enjoy these days? In February she wrote: ‘I like all of Faulkner and John D. MacDonald, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Adam Smith. All of Robert O’Neil Bristow and both of Richard Bradford. Merle Miller’s Truman thing, and Jane Howard’s A Different Woman. I like John Cheever, Janet Flanner, Kingsley Amis. Anthony Burgess confuses me, but I’m willing to try him again. I liked Portnoy, couldn’t stand the bloke who wrote Myra Breckinridge. Or Auchincloss.

  ‘I wonder if the common requirement I have for books is learning how different people manage to get from womb to tomb, even from day to day. Because for me it’s a real stinker, propelled by momentum and dumb hope, deriving sustenance from a Picasso here and a Beethoven there, or a passing cloud and a few hearty laughs now and then. Why do I go into all of this? I’m really jollier than I sound.’

  Less than a year later she was dead.

  I put the letters into a correspondence file to send to Charlottesville. I shall probably never see them again. Although I have no photographs, the faces of those two friends are clearly present to me. I never found out who Robert O’Neil Bristow is, or Richard Brad
ford, for that matter, and I don’t know to whom May Brodbeck gave her second set of concert tickets when I did not return to Iowa that year. These mysteries, like the end of Margaret Schlauch’s life, bother the novelist in me. But the friend I was is enriched even by my incomplete memories of them.

  Sybil calls me from the shop. She sounds close to tears. We have been broken into, there are records, papers, books all over the floor, and our cash is gone. I abandon plans for a morning with the clipboard, throw on yesterday’s clothes, and walk over, faster than I usually am able to travel.

  This is our second break-in since June, the same month in which my car was stolen by the ‘not bad’ boy. The first time the robber came through an upstairs, barred window from the roof. This time he broke a front-window pane and squeezed through into the front of the shop. Two months ago, a thief cleaned out the cash box while Alan Bisbort, our manager, was putting books away at the back.

  Sybil quickly becomes philosophical, after we have cleaned up, and after the police have come by to hear her story. They try to sustain her with tales of multitudinous break-ins in our area and beyond. This information seems to have the same effect as the statistics provided me by another policeman in June. A car is stolen every two minutes in the District of Columbia, I learned. This was told to me as consolation for the temporary loss of my beloved Toyota Cressida, named, by me, Troilus.

  Sybil tells a detective who visits her later in the day that it would be good if Seventh Street were better patrolled by police cars. He agrees but reminds her that it is not possible for the already overstrained police force to monitor all the business streets. We smile at this. Two months ago we were visited by a city inspector. He gave us a five-hundred-dollar ticket. It seemed that our little A-frame, four-foot-high billboard placed outside our door within an iron-grated area, containing literary quotations, was a danger to public safety. Seventy customers voluntarily signed a statement addressed to the District of Columbia protesting the fine. They said the billboard was an asset to the street, the city, and to learning.

  Sybil had to take an afternoon off to appeal the ticket. The judge was sympathetic and somewhat amused by the inspector’s avidity. He reduced the fine to fifty dollars, but told her the sign would have to be removed. This she did, being afraid to court further bureaucratic action. At the same time she removed the small BOOKS sign that protruded a foot from the building and nailed it flat against the window frame. Today we decided to install a costly but necessary alarm system, and a grate for the front window.

  My partner is far more philosophical than I, who tend to grow more and more paranoid as I live in the District and feel I can count on the city only for senseless harassment, not protection. She tells me my fears of attack and mugging are interior, without reference to exterior events, unjustified by the statistics on crime in our section of the city.

  I smile as I listen to her, not reassured in the least. Interior? For some reason, disconnected from what has happened, but evoked by the word, I remember the time I went to a funeral home to order a coffin for my grandmother. The funeral director was unctuous. He called the coffin a casket, and then asked if I wished a vault. ‘What for?’ I wanted to know. He was full of scientific information. He assured me, the loving survivor, that the steel structure ‘would impede decay of the body’ from attack by outside insect attack. I asked him if it was not true that the body was more likely to decay from the interior. He waved away this possibility. I waived the purchase of the vault.

  So, despite police statistics, I feel at bay, attacked from within, sure that every passing young black is a threat. I despise the racism involved in this. How can I conquer it? Leave Washington for a while until my sanity and balance are restored?

  October

  This morning I visited my dentist, a wonderful fellow named Ted Fields who works on teeth during the day and spends all his free time in the evenings and on weekends in his studio doing witty and original ceramic sculpture. To get to his office on Nineteenth Street I pass a beautiful old building, three brick stories that wrap around the corner. It is now occupied by the World Wildlife Federation.

  Every time I go by the place I am struck by painful nostalgia. Except for dental visits three times a year I find I avoid 1244 Nineteenth Street. In the front window, just left of the door, I sat for two and one-half years, editing ‘the back,’ as it was called, of The New Republic. If every life contains one blessed time, no matter how short, a Camelot of the mind or spirit, these years were mine. I was fifty-four years old and alone, separated, by my decision, from everything I had known for thirty years—husband, job, city, apartment—and exhilarated by the sudden offer of the literary editorship of The New Republic in Washington, D.C.

  To this day I wonder at Gilbert Harrison’s choice of me. I had no experience as an editor. After college and graduate school I went to work as a title writer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (a job I obtained by simple nepotism, my great-uncle being Marcus Loew, who owned the company). After that, in quick succession, I worked for Mademoiselle, from which I was fired for irreverence toward fashion copy, The Architectural Forum, where I was a news writer, and Time in San Francisco during the founding of the United Nations. That was my ‘experience.’

  After two years in the Navy during World War II, I ‘retired’ to have children and write as a free-lance reviewer for such Catholic publications as America and Commonweal. It was in Commonweal that Reed Whittemore, then literary editor of The New Republic, saw a piece of mine on Mary McCarthy, and asked me to be a contributing editor.

  I was amazed, and delighted. But I took the assignment seriously, and went to Washington for a few editorial meetings. Gil must have been surprised; in an off moment he had invited me but, I suspect, never thought I would appear. Washington was hundreds of miles from Albany. After a year, to my greater amazement, I had that unexpected letter from him: ‘My literary editor, Reed Whittemore, has resigned to work on a book about William Carlos Williams. Would you think about taking the job?’

  Good God! Would I! No offer had ever come at a better time. Yet, very aware of my lack of qualifications, why did I accept? I will never understand this. I was unwell during that time, and the long trips (even driven by Sybil, my friend with whom I planned to live) had been a strain. But Washington had seemed to us, during our visits the year before, a striking city. I remember Reed took us to the newly opened Kennedy Center one night to see an Arthur Miller play. It was a balmy December evening. During an intermission, Sybil and I stood on the balcony looking over the dark Potomac with its sprinkling of river and shore lights. One of us, I don’t remember now which, said: ‘I could live in this city.’

  So, despite the logistic problems of combining two households (she brought the furnishings of her house in Clarksville, I the remains of my apartment in Albany), we came to the capital, rented a house near a school for her two adolescent children, and began our lives together. After a few idyllic years at The New Republic, the literary editorship came apart. Her children left the city to live with their father; we bought a house together in a suburban part of the city called Barnaby Woods (there were noticeably few woods still standing). I went to teach at American University for ten years, while she went to work at the Library of Congress and, at almost the same time, opened the first of our bookstores in the basement of our house. We named it Wayward Books.

  I said my editorship came apart. I meant to say: It was ripped to pieces by a long-bearded fellow named Martin Peretz who bought the magazine, making the usual promises to owner and editor Harrison that all would remain as it was. But of course, nothing in life ever remains as it was. (Sybil’s useful aphorism for this phenomenon is ‘Everything is different since it changed.’) Peretz is a Rumpelstiltskin of a man with a volatile temper and inflexible convictions. Jewish affairs and the State of Israel were his passions. Gil was maneuvered out of the magazine he had turned over with such innocent faith and goodwill to Peretz. One day Gil departed, silently, telling no one. Soon after, ei
ther by Peretz’s knife or resignation, others left in rapid succession: Stanley Karnow, Walter Pincus, Robert Myers, David Sanford, I.

  That brief but lovely time was over. The weekly column I had written at the back of the book, called ‘Fine Print,’ ended. It reappeared for a time in the Saturday Review. When that ill-fated publication slowly fell onto bad times, the column disappeared entirely. Gil, a helpless gentleman before the furious little man who had ousted him, retired to care for his ailing wife, Anne, and, after her death, to write the biography of Thornton Wilder. The rest of us went on to other things, Pincus to a career as an investigative reporter at the Washington Post, Karnow to fame with his books on Vietnam and the Philippines, Sanford to a good job at the Wall Street Journal, I to teaching and writing fiction.

  Later, the title ‘Fine Print’ had a curious resurrection. In San Francisco, at about the time the Saturday Review was bought yet once again, there appeared a magazine devoted to the arts of letterpress printing, called, most fittingly, Fine Print. At first I felt litigious. Then I realized that only in the most personal way did I own the title, and that this phoenix rise of the name was in some sense fortuitous.

  In Washington, in the next year, I met the editor of the new Fine Print, Sandra Kirschenbaum. I told her of my interest in printing and typography, binding and papermaking. Now I contribute occasional reviews to FP, feeling at home under its aegis. Once in a while I double-dip, as they say of writers who use the same material in two different places, and review a fine handmade book on the air. Yolla Bolly Press in California printed a beautiful, expensive volume of John Muir’s Travels in the Sierra. I explained, in Fine Print and then on National Public Radio, the pleasures of owning such a book. The response was surprising. I mentioned the high price. Twenty-five people called the publisher to inquire about purchasing it. Clearly, there is a small but avid market for books that appeal to the touch, the eye, the mind, especially in the presence of the fifty thousand ugly, mass-produced, carelessly or tastelessly designed books that pour out of offset presses and ‘perfect’ (not an accurately descriptive term) binding machines every year.