Fifty Days of Solitude

by Doris Grumbach

  I was dressed for the cold, having put on a flannel nightgown and bathrobe, a woolen scarf, high woolen socks, a Navy watch cap, and a pair of Sybil’s old mittens. They rendered my hands useless for turning the pages of Marian Engel’s novel The Bear, which I had taken upstairs to reread before I went to sleep. Sybil’s mother had brought the furred sacks back from the Soviet Union years ago, and now they were stretched, overly large, but wonderfully warm and comforting. They conjured up Sybil’s presence. I put Engel on the floor, turned out the light, moved further down under the quilt, and, in the absence of sound and cold, in the imagined company of an absent friend, fell asleep.

  I DECIDED I would break my quietus by going to church on Sundays and on Wednesdays, for midday liturgy. I resolved to arrive late, just as the services were starting, and to leave at the moment the final words of blessing were spoken, in order to avoid the pleasant chitchat that always surrounded ecclesiastical rites at St. Francis. I managed to do this, leaving behind, I imagined, startled parishioners who remarked to each other about my sudden unsociability and wondered if I had gone “all queer,” as they say up here.

  Did I think talking to my acquaintances would affect the purity of my fifty days? I suppose I did, being an intolerant absolutist and believing, I think, that any break in the tapestry of silence would cause the whole plan, the unconditional experiment, to come undone.

  In the afternoon I worked for a while, keeping the fire going in the woodstove in the living room. Then I lay down under the afghan my daughter Elizabeth Cale had crocheted for me and finished The Bear. It is about a lonely woman, working in the isolation of an island in Northern Canada, who finds companionship and then love, yes, with a bear. I read the novel nearly twenty years ago for the New York Times Book Review and was impressed and startled by its originality. I had never heard of the Canadian writer Marian Engel, so I went to the Library of Congress and read her six previous novels, all in order to report that The Bear was unique among her writings.

  The other night I found the book again and reread it, to see how Lou, the librarian-researcher of early settlements in Canada, dealt with her time alone on Cary Island, alone except for the bear that had been chained up by the previous owner of the place behind the curious octagonal house Lou inhabited. At first she discovered she was listening to tiny sounds of small bird-feet in dry leaves, the river sucking at reeds and stones, the cracking of branches.

  But then she found herself “hating to disturb the precious felted silence” inside the house. “She filled the kettle, nervously scraping the dipper against the pail. She dressed and heard the tearing noises of her clothes. She stomped her shoes on and heard the laces whirring against each other as she tied them. She scraped the butter knife against her toast. Stirred her coffee with a jangling spoon. Not everyone, she thought, is fit to live with silence.”

  I had noticed the singular and disturbing effect of a little sound in a quiet house, especially a noise I did not anticipate. Sitting at the computer I jumped when I had to adjust the Velcro-fastened straps of my wrist band. Velcro is noisy, much louder than a zipper, totally unlike a button or hook and eye which make no sound at all. Closure with them, to use Engel’s good word, is felted. But Velcro: The arrangement of dense nylon hooks on one tape tears at the other one of nylon pile making a ripping noise that grated on my ear. It was not that I was not fit to live with silence, but rather that I was unprepared for its interruption.

  Perhaps the time would come when I could no longer bear it, after I had made an effort to spend hours without activating disturbances: doing a wash, rinsing the dishes, walking on the bare floor in heavy shoes. There was so much silence in my days that I had become aware of it only when a sound stopped: the refrigerator going off, the toilet ceasing to flush, the rain no longer falling on the steps. But I considered the possibility that quiet might become as oppressive as noise, that silence, unlike the harsh, unacceptable sounds that bounce off my ears like stones, could bring tears to my eyes and break my heart.

  BOOKS arrived, unbidden, in their hard brown mailers, unexpected titles I would never think to read if they were not delivered to my door, hopeful gifts from publishers who think I might recommend them to others. One day Maria Riva’s biography of her mother, Marlene Dietrich, came, a thick book (almost eight hundred pages) that vacillated between general admiration of the actress’s accomplishments, strong will, and creative skill at transforming herself into myth and legend and then particular dialogue that destroyed every bit of the celluloid vision we had all grown to revere.

  It took two full days of my hoarded time to read the book. I was fascinated by it all, despite the doubts about its veracity that crept in after the first hundred pages. Until then the evidence about Dietrich’s early career came from letters she wrote to her husband, entries she kept in her diary, and copies of letters from her lovers she sent on to her ever-patient husband.

  But on page 101 there are three long paragraphs, occupying the whole page, of direct quotation from Dietrich in conversation with her husband, overheard and then reported by her daughter who, at the time, was six years old. We are told that the actress, as she spoke, was eating stuffed cabbage, before that she had munched “on a hunk of pumpernickel, loaded with goose fat.” A paragraph later “she took another dill pickle.”

  What was I to think? What could I believe? That the child Maria retained and then produced, without question or paraphrase, these hundred or so sentences verbatim? That, in addition, she could recall the exact food her mother ate on that day more than fifty years ago? Of course, it could be said that she remembered the kind of nourishment her mother had preferred in her younger years, but these exact details, first the cabbage, then the pickles? It boggled my mind.

  From this point on, unless I was given a letter or a diary entry, I questioned everything I read. This was too bad, because Maria knew her mother well enough to claim she might well have said these outrageous things about everyone she met or knew: her sharply critical custom was to talk in this manner all her life apparently. It was, I decided, the ubiquitous presence of all those quotation marks that made me doubt her narrative. Until the last fifty pages, that is, when she told the story of her ninety-year-old mother’s tragic end as a recluse, unable to walk, stranded in a soiled and reeking bed (which she refused to allow anyone to clean), drunk most of the time, drugged the rest.

  Holding on desperately to a life she was too frightened to give up, and to a vision she had of herself provided by an adoring public that she could not bear to see updated, Dietrich lived on, sick, closeted, deluded, and furious that the fate of her aged body was common to all who lived long, resentful that she was not uniquely and youthfully preserved as she thought she deserved to be. I found it easy to believe every word of this, not only because the direct dialogue here could perhaps have been remembered (more or less) by her daughter who came often to Paris to see her, but because Maria Riva’s description of her mother’s final state rang so true to my vision of the end beautiful women often came to when the surface they have spent their lives relying upon was lost.

  For Dietrich, the hardest loss, worse than friends, lovers, admirers, hearing, health, and agility, was the youthful state of her face and her legs. It seemed to me tragic to have the sense of one’s self dependent on these transient things, so that old age is spent in a constant state of mourning for lost beauty. It is the fate of those who had it to begin with, nurtured it, relied on it, used it, and discovered at the last that it was the sine qua non of their lives. There was little else.

  CARE in the use of language came with seldom hearing it or using it aloud. I discovered that when I began to write in those dark, early mornings I approached the whole act of word choice warily. I attributed this to not wasting my verbal energies in hearing talk and in speaking. Every word I put down on paper seemed to take on a kind of holiness, a special, single precision (to use a computer term in a different sense), resembling not at all the usual detritus that was left over
after spurts of talk.

  I realized that inconsequential conversation, and television and radio talk, had deafened me to careful usage and to precision in syntax, in sentence structure, in word choice. Now when I spoke aloud, as I did occasionally to fill an oppressive space of silence, I uttered some spontaneous foolishness. When I ended a long, soundless spell by taking up my clipboard to write, I proceeded slowly, carefully, feeling I had to consider each letter of every word, because quiet and unlimited time produced a boundless prospect for choice.

  I WAS not the only living creature in the house. A horde of large black flies had taken refuge around the window frames in the bedrooms. Prudently, they had come in from the cold to live as long as they could in a milder climate. I wondered what sustenance they found on the wood and glass of the southeast windows, but I understood their affinity for the radiating sun. As long as they did not come closer in search of greater warmth when I was reading in bed I practiced my usual tolerance for living things and my dislike of killing them under any pretext.

  But one night my lamp, my book, and I were attacked by an extended family of flying seekers after light and heat. My first instinct was to slap at them madly. So inept was I (I was wearing Sybil’s Soviet mittens) that I missed them all and succeeded only in sending them back to their old berths in the window. I turned out the light so they would not be tempted to return, although I was not tired and wanted to continue reading. But I felt the truce that we had formed in the darkness—they in their place, I in mine—was preferable to mass slaughter. Eventually, pleased with my pacifism, I fell asleep.

  ONE morning there were huge black crows at the feeder, and no one else. They seemed to have frightened the small birds away permanently. Forty or so eider ducks remained in the cove, swimming decorously, almost parading, across the frigid water in the morning and back again at dusk. I shuddered to think how cold they must be and then applauded their gallantry at not leaving me for the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico.

  Befriended in this way—by crows and ducks and black flies—how could I feel lonely or alone in this place?

  DID I think more about age, aging, being and growing old when I was alone? I think so. I had no resident check on my despair, no one to point out how lucky I was to be here in order to despair. Solitude became the rich breeding ground for my natural depression because I had ruled away every possible deterrent: phone calls, dinners out, television, even the radio most of the time, preferring to choose the music I wished to hear on tapes or CDS.

  I played operatic music and musicals while I worked, and one day reduced myself to tears by listening to La Cage aux Folles. In its uncritical, sentimental way, it celebrates elderly love, fidelity, and acceptance between lovers of the same sex. I could not bear it and had to change the tape to something chillier, more coldly classic: Bach, I think it was.

  When I am among people I have usually been able to forget, or bury, or disguise, my despondency. Without company I have had to remember that despair is always lurking beyond the circle of lamplight, the flames of the woodstove, the warmth of the gas oven. If I took steps into any dark place I was once again afraid, despairing, and aware of how old I was and how young I would give anything to be.

  SOMEONE once told me that my mind was too Gothic, that my mental life was lived in dark, medieval towers and dungeons. What I needed, he said, was brighter, more cheerful interior decoration. I thought about this, in one of those evenings when I was “low,” and decided that when I was young my Buckminster Fuller mind was furnished with Marcel Breuer furniture and Formica countertops, but there occurred a rapid retreat as I grew older, a relapse into the decor of Edward and Victoria.

  IN search of parallels to my experience, to what it was like to walk out on the bare deck and see the moonlit night sky and the frozen waters of the reach, I remembered that Beryl Markham, the intrepid pilot of a small plane that delivered mail in east Africa in the 1930s, wrote in her autobiography (West with the Night) about sitting by a camp-fire before the tents with a few natives and two friends, Bror Blixen and Winston Guest, meditating on primordial Africa:

  It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation’s hour had left it.… In a sense it was formless. When the low stars shone over it and the moon clothed it in silver fog, it was the way the firmament must have been when the waters had gone and the night of the Fifth Day had fallen on creatures still bewildered by the wonder of their being. It was an empty world because no man had yet joined sticks to make a house or scratched the earth to make a road or embedded the transient symbols of his artifice in the clean horizon. But it was not a sterile world. It held the genesis of life and lay deep and anticipant under the sky.

  You were alone when you sat and talked with the others—and they were alone.… What you say has no ready ear but your own, and what you think is nothing except to yourself … You talk, but who listens? You listen, but who talks?

  A distant lion “stalks in a distant silence. A jackal skirts the red pool of comfort that warms you,” the native boy warns that the lion is hungry tonight. “But Simba is not hungry. He is alone, too, companionless in his courage, friendless in his magnificence—uneasy in the night. He roars, and so he joins our company, and hyenas join it, laughing in the hills. And a leopard joins it, letting us feel his presence, but hear nothing. Rhino—buffalo—where are they? Well, they are here too—somewhere here—just there, perhaps, where that bush thickens or that copse of thorn trees hides the sky. They are here, all are here, unseen and scattered, but sharing with us a single loneliness.…

  “Somebody attempts to break the loneliness. It is Blix, asking a simple question that everybody answers, but nobody has listened to.”

  Why did I read these pages again and again? Because the sense of absolute aloneness is there, despite the presence of other persons and hovering wild animals. Beryl Markham knew that one could be alone surrounded by all this, perhaps even more alone because of it, not listening so one did not hear, feeling presences without seeing them, so concentrated in oneself and one’s own thoughts that no one, nothing else existed. At the end she called this loneliness: They were all, human beings and animals, partaking of a single loneliness, the universal solitude in which we all have lived, try as we might to escape it in company, in entertainment, in family gatherings, while making love.

  I DID not find solitude easier to live in or accept the longer I stayed alone. No, every day I found I had to work harder to maintain it. From the exhilaration and self-satisfaction of the first days, when I went into training for it, turning meetings and inquiries and visitors and machinery and appliances off, living productively in it was never easy.

  Sudden strokes of neediness struck me. One night I tired of the thought of making dinner and longed to go out for someone else’s cooking. Increasingly, I wearied of the exercise of listening hard to hear and of staring at objects to see them more clearly and more enduringly. The words I put on paper, at first so prinked out in elaborate language, staled. Ideas that arose out of the well of loneliness after a while seemed moribund if not actually dead. And then, what was I to do? I emulated Mark Twain’s person sitting alone in darkness and bemoaned my failures.

  I noticed that my mail, in this period, contained an inordinate amount of bad news. Friends wrote to let me know about deaths and, in one sad case, the imminent trial of a priest-friend on seven felony counts of grand larceny.

  Letters that contained obituaries from newspapers were kindly meant, I knew. The writers assumed (rightly in both cases) that “up there” I would not have heard or read the news. But always, the day bad news arrived became a useless one. I felt like an epiphyte, that tropical plant that takes its nourishment not from the soil or sand but from the air. Every breath of air I took seemed full of doom.

  I needed to take a walk to the road and back after I learned of the death of Dr. Perkins. I had to get out of the stale, dire house air. Anna Perkins was doctor to Sybil’s family and to most people in the rural hill towns of East
Berne, Westerlo, and Clarksville in upstate New York. For sixty-five years, after her graduation from Radcliffe College and Columbia University Physicians and Surgeons Medical School, she made the rounds of her largely poor patients, farmers and working men and women, treating and dosing them for her fee of $5 a visit. Sometimes she forgot to collect the fee and had to be reminded or accepted a chicken or eggs in its place. Sybil told me that once, having treated her son Chris at home for a high fever, Dr. Perkins flatly refused to accept any money. “I was passing your house anyway,” she said.

  One day I went on her rounds with her. She was then in her mid-seventies, I believe. She would pull up to a farmhouse and begin to gather her equipment as the farmer’s wife (or husband or daughter) came down the path, helped her out of her Land Rover, and carried her bag to the house. I waited in the car, studying the list of places she intended to visit, the names of the chronically ill or the sick who had called, their complaint, and what medicine she intended to administer. The back of her car was crowded with free samples from drug companies, her own vials of medicines she dispensed to families who could not afford them, and her well-worn missal; her day always started at the Catholic church with early mass.

  Visits to her office, from the day she began to practice medicine in 1928 until she died in 1993, cost $4. She was not the prototypical country doctor who sticks stubbornly to what she once learned. Every Thursday she drove to the medical center in Albany to attend the weekly seminars on recent advances in medical knowledge and practice. She read the current literature (I know this from the journals I saw in her van) together with the customary Catholic fare: America, Catholic Mind, the papal encyclicals.

  She had not always been alone. Her companion of forty years was the daughter of a local industrial family, whom she always referred to as Miss Hannay. Miss Hannay died in 1973. Ten years later, when Sybil and I visited Dr. Perkins, she was still grieving for her. “It does not get any easier,” she told us, and then said nothing more.