Coming into the End Zone

by Doris Grumbach

  I did think about it, about the weather in Baton Rouge in summer, about Sybil’s dislike of the South as a place to buy books (our one experience of ordering books from a dealer in Miami resulted in a box that contained a liberal sprinkling of moldy ones), about leaving Washington for that length of time, about Sybil’s antipathy to moving.

  I did not get to call Professor Broughton back. She called me. Her voice rang with apology and remorse. It seems the chairman of the search committee had, in the interim, checked me out in Who’s Who in America and discovered I was the same age as the man who was retiring.

  ‘So,’ she said, her voice very low under the weight of her embarrassment, ‘I must ask you not to consider the appointment.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. We hung up. I remember feeling relieved, but shocked. It must have been the first time that the full force of my age, sixty then, struck me. Too old to be something else, I remember thinking.

  Unpacking my snorkeling gear in the garage of the carriage house, I find an old bottle filled with sea glass. Since my first days at Moody Beach in Maine years ago, when the painter Marian Sharpe showed me specimens, I have been an avid collector of well-worn, unusually colored glass washed up and caught in the sea wrack. I am also always on the lookout for examples of perfect shells, stones (deceptively beautiful because they quickly lose their wonderful colors as they dry), odd pieces of driftwood (on the wall of my study I have a fine cross that must once have been part of a lobster pot), bits of porcelain that suggest seaborne breakfast sets washed overboard during a storm.

  All my acquisitive instincts are awakened at the sea. After a walk I realize, to my dismay, that I have looked too little at the sea, too much at the sand at my feet. Tonight during dinner Sybil says that she has often wondered why this is so. She has observed, she says, that even the most sophisticated visitor to the sea becomes a greedy beachcomber. Why, I wonder, feeling a sudden pang of guilt. Avarice? Desire to ‘bring something back,’ like photographs, to remember a good time? Pleasure at finding ‘something for nothing’? A desire to own and keep a piece of natural beauty?

  We come up with no answers. I like the last suggestion, but then my idea of beauty would astonish someone like H. L. Mencken who once observed that Americans are driven by ‘a positive libido for ugliness.’

  Libby, the lady who owns the corner antique store on Seventh Street, is missing from her usual seat in the window. I inquire of her neighbor in the art store. She is in the hospital; the diagnosis is cancer, but they say they have ‘caught it in time.’ She will be all right. Such a statement is the bromide of medicine. We have all learned to recognize it as the doctors’ consolatory, wishful thinking, the patients’ desire to believe, the world’s hedge against despair.

  Libby is the very spit and image of Colette. Her hair is dyed blonde, curled, and cut short and springs away from her head, her skin is fine and pale, and the lines in her face are kindly, put there by smiling. The window of her store, her desk beyond, and the aisles and shelves behind that are models of disarray and disorder, dust and obscurity. Yet, from her chair, which she rarely seems to leave (like Colette), she sends the customer directly to the object requested, and with one gesture she finds in the confusion of her desk the paper she wants.

  I miss her when I walk past her closed store. I say a prayer her affliction has indeed been caught in time, and that she will be back in her window, waving to me, a gentle, Colette-like salute to a passing admirer.

  The Post this morning: 96 DIE AT BRITISH SOCCER GAME. In the first paragraph the event is called an ‘incident.’ Another incident. Is ‘tragedy,’ I wonder, too heated, too vast a word for journalists?

  I stop for morning coffee at Provisions, a civilized shop across from the Eastern Market that provides a small alley of tables, chairs, and newspapers, for people like me, and Ted Nowick when he is not in Maine, to take time out from work at home. Two very pretty young women are at the table behind me. I overhear their conversation.

  ‘I feel rotten.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m menstruating.’

  Times and language have changed, sometimes for the better. I remember all the silly euphemisms we used years ago for that universal feminine condition: ‘I have my period.’ ‘I have the curse.’ ‘I fell off the roof.’ But we have not yet eliminated the foolish evasions for urination and defecation. I still hear ‘I have to go to the little girls’ (or little boys’) room, the powder room, to powder my nose.’ ‘I need to use the john.’

  Dan Harvey and Roger Straus (the Younger) hold a party to remember Richard. I go to New York for it. My daughter Barbara, who knew Richard slightly, and had driven me to Oneonta to say goodbye to him in the fall, comes with me.

  It was a most satisfying occasion. Dan’s apartment is one of those large sprawling old West Side places, which he has beautifully restored. Guests came from publishing houses on both coasts. Seminarian friends of Richard’s came from all over. I was the only representative of the College of Saint Rose days in Albany when Richard (then a priest) and I taught there. We ate, drank, and stood around in little clumps reminiscing about him: his charm, his intelligence, his exceptional good looks, the gallantry and grace of the end of his life. My cane. Someone else’s birthday gift, a box of California figs, which arrived the day after Richard died. The April Ring tickets.

  A priest friend wondered: ‘Who will use them?’

  Another friend from the seminary years said: ‘He will. One of them, anyway. The seats will only seem to be empty.’

  In my rereading of writers’ journals on my shelves, I find in Katherine Mansfield’s a note: ‘Perhaps it does not so much matter what one loves in this world. But love something one must.’ Katherine Anne Porter, in her essay on Mansfield, writes that this is ‘a hopeless phrase.… It seems to me that St. Augustine knew the real truth of the matter: ‘It doth make a difference whence cometh a man’s joy.’

  Reading the journals of others forces me to wonder how much truth ought to be included here. Even if I aim for what seems to me to be truth, will not the very process of putting it into words and setting it down fictionalize it? And then there is the natural reluctance to open all the sores and secret miseries of one’s life, the misdoings and meannesses. Truman Capote would have required me to tell everything: ‘No matter what passions compose them, all private worlds are good, they are never vulgar places.’

  In print, I would prefer to appear better than I am. ‘There is only one tragedy, that we are not saints’—Leon Bloy. I would like to feel I have used the materials of my life and the persons involved in them fairly, but of course I know I have not. Nietzsche, in his Aphorisms: ‘The poet behaves shamelessly toward his experiences; he exploits them.’

  If anyone should wish to write about me after I am dead (in case that should happen), will not the biographer try to find, buried under my euphemisms and charitable thoughts about myself, the true monster? James Boswell, I remember, said he would not change the nature of his beloved subject: ‘I will not make my tiger a cat to please anybody.’

  A letter from a former student now teaching English in a high school in the South: ‘I have gone back to trying to build vocabulary because they have none, or what they have is entirely street jargon. You will be amused. In one vocabulary test I received these: “Virtuosity: having many virtues” and “Trope: a traveling company of actors.”’

  A sailing enthusiast in our store, looking for books on wooden ships, uses the phrase ‘sail by the ash breeze.’ I ask him what it means.

  ‘Go at your own speed, without help.’

  I once thought that was entirely possible. Now I know my speed is determined by failing limbs, weak ankles, loss of confidence. (Perhaps this is why I dream often about going down a flight of stairs so miraculously fast that my feet do not touch the steps.) As for progressing without help: no longer possible.

  The cleaning lady says the bathroom is now ‘crazy clean.’ She is sympathetic to my having to live in a two-sto
ry house. ‘How you standing up to the stairs?’ she inquires.

  Today I throw away the last pages of Camp. I’m not sure that will help the novella, but sometimes total elimination is more efficacious than rewriting the same thing over and over. I remember the painter Frank Litto, my friend in New Baltimore, once told me that he was making creative use of erasure. Reminded of Frank I go on to dredge up another phrase he used once. He told me he was ‘on the hanging committee’ for an art show in a new gallery that would include his work. Made him sound like an active part of a posse or a lynch mob.

  At National Public Radio today to tape four book reviews, I join a small group of employees who are talking about the death of one of the directors. I notice that middle-aged persons react according to sex at such news. Men ask: ‘How old was he?’ Women: ‘Of what?’

  Walking to the market—a freezing, raw morning—I see a very old man ahead of me, holding on to the railings of successive houses, scraping his feet in galoshes along the ice. From the back he reminds me, for some reason, of Harry, my father-in-law, whom I loved because he loved me, and because he had the kind of sharply inquiring mind self-educated persons seem to possess. He would get up at five in the morning to watch a program they once ran on television called Sunrise Semester. Having left public school in Brooklyn at the age of eleven to work in his father’s butcher shop, he wanted to read everything he could find on social and political history. I remember he once called me up to discuss a theory he had developed after reading a book of Barbara Ward’s for the TV course and was shocked to hear I hadn’t read it. He loved to argue, asked your opinion of a matter, and then said he held the opposite view, which he defended vigorously.

  After many failures and disappointments in his lifetime—he lost his long-held job as manager of a knitting mill when the union came in and wanted him out, he drank a great deal, he moved from Brooklyn to a small town in Pennsylvania where he never managed to make a go of his small knitting store—he settled into old age. He was cantankerous, still argumentative, still intellectually vigorous. He believed most of modern life was a hoax, a sting, a sham, assuring us all, when The $64,000 Question, a TV quiz program in the fifties, first appeared, that it was rigged. We all scoffed. It was.

  He foresaw corruption in sports. Baseball was his life’s passion. He predicted the dishonesty of some politicians in his time, and those he suspected turned out to have their hands in the public till.

  How he knew these things I never understood, unless his knowledge sprang from a general distrust of the human race that happened, more often than not, to be entirely justified. But he was often a cheerful man and saved sentences he had heard in his shop to tell me when we spoke on the telephone on Sunday mornings.

  My favorite, said by a lady who came in to buy wool: ‘I would like to knit an African.’

  Mist outside the door this morning at six when I went to pick up the Times was grey-white and thin. It reminded me of the skimmed milk I now drink, in obedience to diet instructions.

  Tomorrow I leave for Cancún with Ted and Bob, to revisit the great Mayan cities I love. Sybil, staying behind to conclude the house sale, is clearly disappointed not to be going, but good-natured about it. To justify my defection I spent the evening beginning to pack the Mark Twain collection. After one box, I stopped halfway into the second one, having discovered a book I had forgotten I had. I found it in a small town outside of Iowa City a few years ago. It is The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English by Pedro Carolino, published in 1882 in Boston, and contains an ironic, tongue-in-cheek introduction by Mark Twain, who predicted ‘pretty confidently … that this celebrated little phrase-book will never die while the English language lasts.’ He compares ‘its delicious unconscious ridiculousness and its enchanting naiveté’ to ‘Shakespeare’s sublimities.’

  He was right: ‘One cannot open this book anywhere and not find richness.’ I spent the rest of the evening in a chair, not packing but laughing and copying out samples of the English translations of Portuguese phrases, in fact the whole of Dialogue 17, about how ‘To inform one’self of a person’:

  How is that gentilman who you did speak by and by?

  Is a German.

  I did think him Englishman.

  He is of Saxony side.

  He speak the french very well.

  Tough he is German, he speak so much well italyan, french, Spanish and english, that among the Italyans, they believe him Italyan, he speak the frenche as the Frenches himselves. The Spanishesmen believe him Spanishing, and the Englishes, Englishman.

  It is difficult to enjoy well so much several languages.

  Twain, who loved to make fraudulent translations from the French and German, says of the final sentence: ‘I am sure I should not find it difficult to enjoy well so many several language if he [Senhor Pedro Carolino] did the translating for me from the originals into his ostensible English.’

  So much for packing.

  New acquisitions from two books I am reading, made to my vocabulary before I fall asleep, my bags in the hall downstairs ready for the trip to Mexico:

  Sleepwort: the Anglo-Saxon word for lettuce.

  A recovered word, which I once knew but had forgotten: Prolepsis: anticipation (in rhetoric, a figure of speech in which objections are anticipated). Adj: proleptic.

  Psychasthenia: a neurotic condition characterized by obsessions, phobia, the like.

  Anosognosia: defective body image. (Happens after a stroke when person does not believe in its results, denies paralysis, for example.)

  Folie à deux: two persons (twins, perhaps) who develop shared delusions or become mentally ill at the same time.

  I may never find a use for any of these, but they’re nice to know. Maybe ‘sleepwort’ will fit somewhere, sometime. After all, Bill Kennedy used ‘ironweed’ profitably.

  February

  After Mexico. I have returned from two fine weeks in the sun, bringing with me no notes or entries into the journal I carried all those miles. At home I find a letter from a friend and former student, David Tate. He writes that he had gone to Spain to be restored after finishing a book. It worked. ‘I think part of it was the opportunity to see fresh things and to stop thinking stale thoughts, to stop, for long periods, thinking at all, just looking, smelling, tasting, all the sensual delights I have been overlooking.’

  Same here, as we used to say when I was young. I spent the first week at my beloved ruins, forgetting all the houses and possessions I have been worrying about, in Maine, on North Carolina Avenue, on Seventh Street. Suddenly there was nothing before my eyes but the grandeur of El Castillo looming skyward in the early-morning light, massive, stolid, grand. Of course I can no longer climb it, but no matter: I remember the view from the top and spend my time now memorizing the way it rises in geometrically diminishing layers, marred only by the little ants of people who are triumphantly scaling it.

  In my new obsession with questions of death, I spent more time than usual at the Platform of the Skulls, the Temple of the Warriors, and the bloody frieze at the ball court. I was aware of how much darker the glyphs and friezes had become from the first time, fifty years ago, that I saw them. A fellow traveler told me it is the result of pollution; soon the beautiful faces and disembodied heads will be entirely obscured by black film.

  During the sun-soaked days the site is filled with noisy visitors. The Nunnery, the Governor’s Palace, the cenote, lose their mystery. But we went back in the early evening before anyone else by an entrance customarily unused. The sun was dying and the dreadful light show for tourists had not yet started, We entered the Great Plain on a footpath. There it was, a deserted city, the great grey stones, enigmatic and silent. A holy place even to us irreverent twentieth-century travelers, struck dumb before these ancient, inscrutable architectural secrets.

  My sense of mortality wells up in me, closing my throat, my eyes, bowing my head. I am threatened by stone eternities. The Mayans believed that man is already dead, awai
ting only his acceptance into the eternal life of the gods. Or else, in this life, that man awaits death by joining his blood to the already stained soil of sacrifice.

  My friend, standing beside me, says: ‘It gives one pause.’

  I find this a good way to express one’s awe. ‘For in that sleep of death/What dreams may come … Must give us pause.’

  At the Temple of the Warriors, I saw vestiges of paint on the pillars. They suggest the past glory of color that the now grey stones have lost. So much is lost here beside color. We came upon a tiny sign that read CHICHÉN VIEJO, pointing into the jungle. Next morning we followed the path, so narrow that one foot had to be placed directly in front of the other. Two miles of hard walking and we came upon overgrown, small, lovely vestiges of buildings, one with a rude upright fertility sculpture: A plump, uncircumcised phallus protruded from the half-fallen wall. Buried in high brush were two fine stelae carved with warrior heads, a truncated jaguar, other small carved stones. The recent Hurricane Gilbert had wrecked many of the old trees that lined the path. It is a forgotten place, clearly neglected by avid tourists and misinformed guides. We felt as though we had been presented with a small piece of antiquity for our private delectation, refreshing in its unrestored state.

  Restoration is now the curse of the Mayan ruins. My daughter Kate and Paul Yarowsky, whom she is to marry this summer, told us to visit three small sites a short distance from Uxmal. We arrived very early at the first, Kabáh. It was entirely ours for almost two hours—a Puuc village, with many beautifully carved Chac masks on a two-story building, a superb corbel archway, standing alone, the sole survivor, I think, of a structure that now lies strewn across a little plain.