I read the obituaries in the New York Times this morning, looking for the the tragic, telltale signs of an AIDS death: young age, twenty-one to forty-five, the announcement of death by a longtime companion, and the list of survivors, parents, sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews. I sit still as I find two such announcements today, the black pall of despair coming over me for the others I loved.… Then I go on reading on the same page. A writer, in her fifties, has died. I note the judgmental power of the order of words, as well as the choice of articles, the difference between ‘Mary Fitz, a novelist’ and ‘the novelist Mary Fitz.’
For my birthday this summer, Sybil gave me a computerized catalogue of my ballet books. It is a useful, handy present, because once the collection exceeded two hundred volumes, I found I sometimes bought the same book twice. I keep the books together in the guest room, and find myself going there often to browse. Today I read a rather poorly written but still informative biography of Anna Pavlova, whose greatest role was the dying swan. The pictures of her in action make it hard for me to believe she was as perfect as she is described. But I learn that as she was dying, she called her attendant and said, ‘Prepare my swan costume.’ The author does not say, but I assume it was brought to her and Pavlova was buried in it.
It is cold today. The leaves are yellow and blow about underfoot and cover the flower beds. Trees begin to have their barren, almost nude winter look. I wear my wool jacket to walk to the bookstore to bring Sybil some late-afternoon coffee. I decide to go into the long, red-brick Eastern Market to avoid the wind. It is a pleasant walk-through. I know many of the merchants. The chicken salesman named Melvin is an ardent Redskins fan and wears the team’s colors under his white apron. Mr. Miller, of the deli, is in his eighties. He wears a fedora while he works and brags that he roasts the beef himself. It is beautifully rare. I don’t have the heart to tell him his hand is too heavy with the garlic for my taste. But Sybil likes it this way.
The cheese man offers me samples I would love to try, except that delicacy is no longer permitted to enter my cholesterol-laden arteries. The older lady with dyed-black hair at the bakery has brought in her paintings-by-the-number to display. She only reads paperback books by Jewish authors or about Jewish life. The bakery counter is near the side door of the market. I buy two blueberry muffins from her, admire her art work, and leave the building reluctantly: It has grown darker and colder. I walk quickly to Wayward Books, and deposit the coffee on Sybil’s desk.
We drink, and eat our muffins. On the sign blackboard, now residing indoors near the door because of the foolish city ordinance, is a Henry James sentence: ‘It takes a good deal of history to produce a little literature.’ I ponder it. Is this what I am doing here, dredging up masses of personal history in the hope of producing a modicum of literature?
Now it is quite dark outside. The schoolyard across the street is empty of its usual complement of basketball players. I decide to wait until closing time at seven so I can walk home with Sybil. I sit on the stool and pick up a volume of short stories by a young man I knew briefly in the seventies. But I get no farther than his picture on the back flyleaf. I see it was taken by Thomas Victor.
Thomas Victor. He was an acquaintance who died recently of AIDS, a fine photographer of writers. My friend Joe Caldwell, the novelist, told me that Tom would ask his subjects if they had any special likes or dislikes when being photographed. ‘Oh, no,’ they would always say, ‘anything you want to do.’ ‘And then,’ Tom told Joe, ‘they would fight me all the way.’
I remember Tom darting around the New York Public Library to take pictures of notables at an American Book Award gathering, a small, dark man with a perpetual smile, now gone, his immortality a mere byline under other people’s faces.
At seven-fifteen the cash is added up, the day sheet finished, the alarm system activated, the door locked, and we start the short, cold walk home. All the way home I think about Tom Victor, which leads me into remembering that Joe Caldwell, then a small boy, asked his grandfather if he could have his books when he died. His grandfather said: ‘Who’s going to die?’
We eat late, whatever can be cooked in a rushed half hour, and ‘clean up.’ Sybil is the perennial dishwasher, I the dryer and put-awayer. She likes to wash, although she is firm in the belief that the act of dishwashing ruins her hands. She wears rubber gloves, which inevitably stretch. Recently she acquired a new pair but adamantly refused to throw away the old ones.
‘What are you saving them for?’ I ask. Hoarder that she is, she says: ‘You never know when you might need a small piece of rubber to stretch over something.’ I challenge her to give me an example of such a need. She is silent and goes on doggedly scrubbing a pan.
Suddenly I recall my mother and me walking along the east bank of the Hudson River on Riverside Drive. She watches the boats moving in stately fashion up the river toward Ben Marsden’s Amusement Park in the Palisades, a place I loved. My father used to offer to take us there on Sunday. (He was a man given to making lavish promises, few of which he ever fulfilled. I believe he thought the offer was an adequate substitute for carrying them out.) I, perhaps eight or nine years old, always watched the eddies close to the shore, absorbed in their varied and sometimes puzzling contents, so much more interesting than the featureless flow of the cleaner water beyond. I see a strange sight, an extended, light-colored length of rubber floating limply in the wrack.
‘What is that thing?’ I ask my mother.
She looks to where I am pointing, flushes, and quickly looks away.
‘That … that is a bandage you wear … when you have … a sore thumb.’
I remember we walked on. I watched the water intently and saw more bandages. It occurred to me that there must be an inordinate number of persons in New York City with sore thumbs. But I say nothing—until this moment, when I break my silence and say to Sybil:
‘I’ve thought of a use. Condoms for considerate gentlemen.’
‘Also,’ she says, and finishes the dishes, clad in her tight new rubber gloves.
Saturday. This morning, so absolute is my addiction, I find myself turning to the crossword puzzle in the Times even before I read the headlines. One clue is PALEY. The answer turned out to be, of course, GRACE. I remember the day when the clue was BOYLE, the answer KAY. This is true fame, I thought, to have one’s name immortalized in a game that two million persons puzzle over while they drink their morning coffee.
When she appeared in my puzzle that day, I sent Kay a postcard, congratulating her on this recognition. She wrote back that several other persons around the country had written to her about her inclusion, some even sending the whole puzzle so she could see for herself. Then she effectively humbled me:
‘I hope you are not one of those persons who does crossword puzzles.’ As I remember I did not reply to this. Should I feel ashamed? Is this a lowbrow, unworthy occupation?
A letter in the mail this morning from Jay Booth, a student friend in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. She says she has embarked on a new three-hour exercise program on the boardwalk in Dunes Park, a wonderful place that offers fine views of the sea. ‘However,’ she says, ‘When I sit down to write, I fall asleep.’
This result of physical activity does not discourage her, she says. Because ‘this year my literary prize blossomed. Two years ago I was awarded a dogwood tree for the first chapter of my novel, One Fine Day. As dogwoods do not flourish or even survive here, I thought the whole business ominous, also comical. Well, the tree flourishes. The book, on the other hand, is out to publishers. I have two rejections so far.’
Correspondence has begun to arrive from the American Ballet Theatre about a projected two weeks in Paris, to live the high life, visit places not usually open to the ordinary traveler, and see a lot of ballet and opera. Jane Emerson, my daughter, is one of the organizers; I feel a certain maternal obligation to subscribe to the trip, but also some natural eagerness to see Paris again.
This evening I call to tell Jan
e I would like to go with her and her husband. Bob answers the phone. Jane is still at work at ABT, making arrangements. I ask him if he would find it onerous to be accompanied by an aging mother-in-law. He says, politely, not at all, he has a number of eccentric relatives. He once told me about his Uncle Seth, a man of absolute fidelity. After his first wife died, very young, he remained a good and faithful friend to her sisters and their many children. Late in life he remarried, having finally overcome his fidelity to his wife’s memory. The new wife turned out to be psychotic; she was, apparently, treated by lobotomy. The son born to them was severely retarded. Now in his eighties, Uncle Seth concerns himself solely with the constant, loyal care of his wife and son.
I tell Bob to inform Jane I intend to accompany them to Paris.
A letter from Ted and Robert, Washingtonians transplanted to central Maine, friends we made through the bookstore; they were among our early customers. They invite us to spend Christmas with them in Blue Hill while, they hope, we will look for a house to buy near there. Their friend Bill Petry, a real estate agent, knows of some places we might like to inspect.
Maine? Maine? Well, yes. Sybil and I have often thought about moving there, debating our separate and often contrary needs. I want to leave this dangerous, badly run, threatening, crack-and-crime-filled city. She loves the variety and excitement of Seventh Street, and the people who come in to Wayward Books to chat with and buy from her. Break-ins and violence happen everywhere, she says, citing the thug who broke into Ted’s car when it was left overnight in a motel parking lot in Portland, Maine. In Maine? she wonders.
‘Omaha, Nebraska, I have read,’ she says, ‘is a major terminus for the drug trade.’ She reminds me that two years ago an anonymous caller had threatened, by telephone, to come and rape me in Iowa City, and that my rented house in that city was broken into through a side door on Halloween. But I continue to remember my trashed car, and the sight of the floor of the bookstore strewn with books and papers after someone had ransacked it looking for the cash box.
I hate the sense of vulnerability I have on Capitol Hill, the feeling that my grey head and unsteady gait make me a natural prey of young marauders during the day, and especially at night, when I have to park the car some distance from our front door and make my hesitant, wary way across the dark street and through the even darker path to the door.
Maine seems to me to be healthier, safer, cleaner, freer from drugs, guns, muggers, gangs. This morning the Post reported an eleven-year-old boy in Washington had killed his father, shot off the top of his head with the father’s handgun. The Post called this an ‘incident.’ I am always shocked by the implication of insignificance of that word. For some reason, the third and fifth dictionary definitions are what I always think of: ‘3) something that occurs casually in connection with something else,’ and ‘5) an occurrence of seemingly minor importance.’ The ‘occurrence’ reported by the Post is more than an incident.
This morning I sent my yearly contribution to the Catholic Worker, a publication I have read and subscribed to since the early thirties. My check has grown larger with time. I remember my first donation was one dollar when Dorothy Day asked for an emergency sum for the maintenance of the Catholic Worker House on Christie Street.
Since then, during the years of my acquaintance with Dorothy, and after her death, I have been one of those conscientious but characterless supporters who gives money but not themselves. Once, in the thirties, I worked in the soup kitchen at Christie Street, and later on the coffee-serving line for a longshoremen’s strike. But those were youthful acts, ‘incidents’ in a long, selfish life away from the slight service of my youth. Dorothy Day did it for me, offering her entire life for the poor, the homeless, the drunken and mad, the objectors to war, the victims of injustice.
My check, I remind myself, is not tax-exempt. I rummage in my files to find a copy of the issue of the Worker that contains the policy statement on this matter:
We have never sought tax-exempt status since we are convinced that justice and the works of mercy should be acts of conscience which come at a personal sacrifice, without governmental approval, regulation, or reward.… Also, since much of what we do might be considered ‘political,’ in the sense that we strive to question, challenge, and confront our present society and many of its structures and values, some would deem us technically ineligible for tax-deductible, charitable status.
I admire this position. I have always cringed at the letters that arrive in December from charitable organizations urging me to contribute before the end of the year so I may take advantage of a tax deduction. The Catholic Worker’s statement reminds me of how much must be spent, in time and resources, to obtain and maintain a tax-exempt status.
I went to Dorothy Day’s funeral a few years ago. It was a wonderful reunion of friends and former workers as well as present inhabitants and workers at the houses on East First Street and Maryhouse. Mass was formal and old-fashioned, the kind Dorothy loved and hated to see reformed. How ironic, I remember thinking as I watched the Cardinal of New York kneeling before her plain pine box, that a women who spent her life fighting for social reform and against the retrogressive social failures of the Church would not countenance any changes in the liturgy. But at the last, the hierarchy of the diocese came in full red regalia to the scruffy Lower East Side church to pray with the people she had cared for and officialdom had often turned its back upon.
‘Works of mercy should be acts of conscience …’ I seal the letter with my check and stamp it with a commemorative stamp that reads LOVE.
October 10. I put down this date, although my habit in journals is not to do so. If something is worth recording, I have always thought, it ought to be general enough to be free of dull, diurnal notation. But this day:
I take the very early Metroliner (six-fifty, an unusual hour for me to take a train) to New York for a meeting of the board of the National Book Critics Circle, a group I have belonged to for many years. A law has been passed which, I believe, makes this the last year of my term, so I am determined to attend every meeting, despite the cost of travel. We are reimbursed only for the two last meetings in the year if we do not serve an institution that pays our way. National Public Radio does not do this for me.
We talk about NBCC business and possible recommendations of books deserving of nomination for an award. It is always fun to meet with other critics and editors. We hole up on the third floor of the Algonquin Hotel, and argue, insult each other pleasantly by challenging the validity of views different from our own, eat a buffet lunch together as we work, and take notes on books of interest we have missed and ought now to read.
At four o’clock the meeting is over. I planned to meet my daughter Jane at the Public Library for a cocktail party a publisher is giving to celebrate the appearance of the first volume of T. S. Eliot’s letters. I need coffee, as I always do between events. Caffeine acts as oil with which to shift gears, sustenance for my flagging spirits. Flagging: why is that adjective always used for spirits? The Oxford English Dictionary informs me that the usage is three hundred years old and first referred to falling down through feebleness. It then was used for the heart, then the circulation. Matthew Arnold was the first to speak of ‘a spiritual flagging.’ I buy coffee in a plastic cup and carry it to the benches on Forty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue (now called, grandly, the Avenue of the Americas, but in my youth known simply by its common number).
While I drink I watch a street lady eating a hot dog on a roll. Behind her and across Sixth Avenue is the store from which her food must have come. There is a huge sign over the door which reads: AMERICA’S 24 HOUR HOST. STEAK’N’ EGGS. She converses with herself between bites in a loud, harsh voice and shakes her head at what I assume are the answers she hears in the air.
Her hair is composed of switches pinned, it seems, to a wig base, and at the top there is a great heavy bun. Her eyebrows are crusted and red, the same flush that covers her light-brown skin and culminates in a
n angry red ball at the end of her nose. Her body is very thin under a coat composed, like her hair, of parts that are pinned together, but her thinness disappears at her neck, which is full of thick folds of skin, like the necklaces African women wear to elongate their necks for beauty.
She finishes her hot dog, rises slowly, and walks to the trash container near the door to the office building. She moves as if her steps were painful. Her face suggests misery and resentment, as though the weight of all the bunches of cloth tacked on to her were depressing her spirits. She returns to her bench. Her profile is Flemish: the long, thin nose, the chin that falls away, a large black mole on her cheek. She wipes her mouth and her nose on her fingers and then puts them in her mouth. I shudder.
I finish my coffee, stand up to walk to the trash container, and, inexplicably, fall on my face. There is pain in my right ankle that turned and caused me to fall, and greater pain in my left shoulder, so intense that I cannot get up. I lie there, seeing two sets of feet in well-shined shoes pass me by without breaking stride. I try to think of a strategy that will get me on my feet, but without the use of my left arm and hand nothing works.
Then I see a brown hand near my face and hear the street lady’s rough voice say: ‘Here. Hold on here.’
Coming into the End Zone Page 9
