She did not go to Harvard Medical School, she told us, because in her time it would not accept women.… She treated five generations of the Hannay family.… During storms she used to put on snowshoes to reach stranded families with sick children and once was air-lifted by helicopter to care for a patient with a bad heart who lived in the hills.… Out on her rounds if she saw a child playing in the yard who was supposed to be in bed, she would stop her car, order him indoors, and chastise the child’s parent.… Sybil once complained to her that her hands and feet were always cold. She wondered if she might be anemic. “Try turning up the thermostat,” was her advice.… She was an avid lover of animals and, spotting a deer in a field during hunting season, would blow her horn loudly to scare it back into the wood.… Once she took her chair and sat in front of a tree she wished to save from the axes of road builders.
I did not know her well. Few people did: She was a very private woman who did not air her aches or griefs and disappointments. Sybil knew her better, and loved her, and thought of her every time she paid her Washington internist three hundred dollars for a physical examination.
ONE of the elderly nuns at the College of Saint Rose, where I taught for almost ten years in the 1960s, wrote to me of the death of my longtime friend Sister Noel Marie Cronin, at eighty-three, in retirement at her order’s motherhouse, as it is called, and having served her vows faithfully for more than sixty years. She suffered from osteoporosis. She too was a woman of unusual reticence, who never to my knowledge talked about herself—I cannot recall her ever using the first person pronoun. She taught mathematics at the college. In her free time, deeply concerned for the future of young blacks in the South End ghetto of Albany, she organized a summer tutorial program at the college called GAP (Growth and Progress). She taught high school students math, persuaded other college personnel to teach English, dramatics, history, and science, and saw to it that the college provided lunch, snacks, and classroom space for “her kids.” She was unforgiving of carelessness, thoughtless behavior, and bad manners; but the kids respected her, some even loved her, and certainly they obeyed her.
Noel (I would not have dared to address her in this way anywhere but in print, and after her death, but I thought of her as Noel) never asked me for money to support GAP once I had left the college. Instead she would write to me regularly in Washington, D.C., reporting on the progress and growth of one or another of her prize pupils and telling me some news of the faculty.
She was the daughter of deeply religious parents. Three of her brothers became priests and another sister and brother never married. I often speculated on whether strong puritanical teachings about sex had discouraged these children. All I knew for certain about Noel’s sentiments was that when she heard an alumna had married she would wrinkle up her nose in distaste and say nothing.
I never heard her utter a critical word about a priest. Her devotion to the clergy was absolute. She was fond of Father Sam Wheeler who later left the priesthood to marry my daughter. She wrinkled her nose when she heard the news, but she said nothing disparaging to me about him and certainly never seemed to hold his disaffection against me.
When I heard of her death I pictured her as I first saw her, a small, bent woman in her old floor-length black habit, looking up into the face of a six-foot black lad, he with his hands on his hips looking down at her and protesting something. I saw her shake her head and point, and then the boy sat down at an outdoor picnic bench on the campus and took up a pencil and paper. She stood looking over his shoulder watching him work out some algebraic equations.
I walked away after that, but the tableau has remained with me. Wherever she is now she is doubtless laying down the laws of trigonometrical functions to a boy about to take the entrance exam to some celestial sphere or other.
THE news that disturbed me most, that unsettled me to the point of a wasted morning’s work, because all semblance of peace had departed from my study, concerned one of Sister Noel’s favorite priests, Father Bertrand Fay. Tall, handsome, and very charming, he was my friend too. We spent many happy hours together listening to his superb recordings of opera in his quarters at the college, the same house in which Sam Wheeler lived before he defected into marriage with my daughter.
Years ago, when Bert was the object of unproven accusations of sexual “deviation” against him and Father Richard Lucas, both of them teachers in the department of theology, Noel was one of Bert’s firmest defenders. (I have always thought that to her innocent mind a priest could not possibly be guilty of any sort of wrongdoing.) The unpleasant brouhaha ended in the resignation of the college president, who had issued the terminal contracts to him and to Richard, and the departure of Richard from the college, the church, and the city because (this is my guess) he could no longer bear to be dishonest, to play the closeted role he had been forced into.
For many years after that Bert and I exchanged Christmas presents. He would send me a magnificent poinsettia plant; I would, on occasion, give him whatever new book on opera I could find. Poinsettia was a flower Sybil disliked, but we could not figure out a way to cut off the thoughtful and (to my way of thinking) very handsome gift.
Bert was well-to-do, having a good salary and being the only child of wealthy parents. One after the other they died, leaving money to their beloved son. He moved out of the college into an apartment. With a close friend he set up an antiques business, after that a good restaurant. Both seem to have failed. For many years, a much-admired priest who was considered a fine preacher, he went on teaching at the college and serving a nearby parish on Sunday.
He must have run out of money. He must have needed it to go on living the good life he found important (“He dressed very well,” one parishioner told a reporter, a bad thing, I suppose he thought, for a priest to do). Someone else told me Bert felt he deserved the good life.
Apparently Bert still went to New York during the opera season. Did he keep the same subscription tickets he had had for so many years? I have no way of knowing. It was said he had two apartments in New York, but I don’t know if this was true.
All I knew for certain was what I read in the long clippings sent to me from the Albany Times-Union and the Troy Record. It would appear that recently he had begun to borrow money from priest-friends, former nuns, senior citizens, and friends, on the pretext that it was an investment (to be repaid at 18 percent interest) in important work being done at the college by a student who was expecting large grants for his research in entomology. When very little of the more than a quarter million dollars in loans was repaid, Bert said the student had died of AIDS and his family was withholding the money.
There was, of course, no department of entomology at the college, nor any student registered there who was doing research in the field. Bert gave up his college post, which he had held for twenty-five years, and left the priesthood. He now faced foreclosure on a house he allegedly collateralized with the money he borrowed, as well as numerous counts of grand larceny. He was out on bail.
I felt great pity for Bert even while I recognized the wrongs he may have done to trusting persons and the selfishness of satisfying his own needs at great cost to others. If he is convicted, his will be a tragic fall, from the heights of respect and admiration granted a priest and professor, especially if he is handsome, graceful, and charming, from prosperity and every kind of pleasure, to the lower depths of a probable jail sentence and the life-long distrust, even scorn, of his acquaintances and friends. How will he live with this descent during the years he has before him?
American society leads to many more precipitous falls than ascents that move steadily upward through a lifetime. It is one of the tragedies of a very promising youth that too often achievement and recognition come early and too fast, leaving a long life of disappointment and decline. At the same time, those who start slowly are more fortunate. With few expressed hopes for their futures and only their own convictions, they quietly and in obscurity make their way up whatever ladder they wis
h to ascend. Success in middle and old age is gratifying, especially since it makes more bearable all the physical failures of those years.
IN WHAT odd places we must go to find solitude! A physician I know told me that he did not mind one whit having an examination known as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a diagnostic procedure most people hate because the patient is encased for so long, lying still in a machine that is almost tomblike. He said it was the only quiet time he had had in a long time, and he was able to think very well in the stillness and silence the examination provided.
ONE day last week the newspaper contained a review of a new book, The First year: A Retirement Journal by John Mosedale. It startled me because so much of Mosedale’s initial concern about retirement ran counter to mine. Without the presence of the storm and strife of the work-a-day world, he said he feared that untroubled retirement would not be a continuous pleasure. He told a story of a man who lived on a South Pacific island: “Life was effortless. Each day the sun rose in splendor. One morning the man emerged from his hut, looked at the rising sun and said, ‘Another perfect goddamned day’ and shot himself.”
Mosedale worried about “the sudden silence after the roar of work.” I remember that when I moved to Maine (retirement in the strict sense is not required of writers) I could not wait for the moment when quiet would descend upon me, only to discover that silence was not a state often granted to anyone, however one might desire it. In the fifty days in which I worked to achieve it, I learned how elusive it was. The far-off sound of a passing car, the whine of a chain saw in the distance—at my neighbor’s house a quarter of a mile away, was it?—the rough quack of crows searching for sustenance in the snow under the bird feeder, the crack and snap of a log falling into the woodstove ashes, these were the breaks in my silence. They roughed up the smooth nothingness I hoped for.
Mosedale said he thinks much less about death now that he is approaching it than he did as a young man. “I don’t avoid the thought. I am just not interested.” Curious. When I was alone in my relative silence I thought about it a great deal. I realized that at my age it had become part of the very texture of my thinking. Everything was related to its imminence: my reading, the music I heard, my sense of time and place, my plans, my prayers, my very appetite for thought, for work, for sleep. Perhaps in this sense I not so much thought about death as lived with it, like a mortal illness or the loss of a leg. It was not indifference, quite the contrary. It was interest so profound I could not for a moment escape its occupation of my life.
I SPOTTED an eagle very high in the sky over the cove, making its easy way through a blank sky. It made me think of a Franciscan nun I read about in the local newspaper who died of cancer after a lifetime of devotion to the poor, the homeless, the hungry in Hancock County where I live. Shortly before her death, her caretaker told her an eagle was flying over her house. “Tell it to wait,” Sister Barbara said. “That’s my ride.”
“I CAN’T hear myself think.” I must have said that many times in my lifetime. The cliché may have been preceded by: “The noise they (the children, the neighbors) make in the house (or apartment) next door is so great that, etc.” When I set the conditions for thought, in those blessed days and nights, I discovered it was sometimes very hard to hear what I was thinking, not because of any exterior noise, but, strangely enough, because of the overpowering silence. I had to listen hard (as I had learned the importance of looking hard) to hear what I was thinking, or even to discover whether I was thinking at all. I needed my ears to catch the gossamers of thought that I would have believed more substantial and more independent of those organs.
I have always known that without words placed in logical relation to each other I had no thoughts, am not, indeed, thinking, contrary to what students used to say to me: “I know what I mean but I can’t say it.” It turned out that the words in which my thinking was necessarily couched were hard to catch, because the tone, the voice, was mine, and I had grown immune to that voice. Try as I might to listen, I found I had become bored with the sound of my own thoughts embedded in that old, omnipresent voice, and so I stopped listening. This, I discovered, was one of the unavoidable disadvantages of being alone.
In the silence I eagerly sought, I could hear myself think, and what I heard was, sadly, often not worth listening to.
ONE long, very dark night, I found myself fantasizing about the vague sounds I heard in the attic above my head. I told myself the reason so few old homes harbor the ghosts of those who have lived and died there is because those unsubstantial figures are dispelled, frightened off, by the multitudinous in-house noises of today: the furnace, the refrigerator, washing and drying machines, the dishwasher and Disposall, electric clocks, all of these things, and more.
Quiet houses are hospitable to ghosts. They flourish there. I know this because, one night when the power failed, so that all the appliances were silenced, no car moved along the road, and I lay upstairs in bed without the intrusive, tinny sound of the battery-radio, I thought I heard Ella Byard, who built this house before she married Captain Willis White, moving about in the hall downstairs.
Then my fantasy grew. I thought I heard her walking to the porch to sit in the sunlight of a cool August afternoon with her women friends and relatives, exactly as the ten of them appear on the back of a postcard given to me by Connie Darrach, one of her descendants in Sargentville. I saw that it was the porch of another house down the road from me, and I remembered Mrs. Darrach telling me the women gathered together every year to celebrate the birthday of her grandmother. Ella Byard is front left, birdlike and elegant. Addie France, smiling and apparently toothless and wrapped in a shawl, is behind her. Aunt Mae Millikan is bespectacled and very pleasant looking. Emma Gray is next to Faustina Dodge who is wearing a fine black hat and is looking away from the camera. Ella is near her relative Abby Byard, white-haired, handsome, and all in black satin, and Lydia Byard Sargent Gower whose ruffled collar frames a thin neck and a thoughtful, almost grim face. Sweet-faced Dora Currier is all in white, rather ghostly among the black-satined other ladies like solemn Lucia Means who sits between her and gloomy, straw-hatted, bespectacled Serena Turner. The occasion appears to be in the 1920s.
Their sloping shoulders, their drawn-back white hair, their hands folded comfortably in their laps, the ten old ladies respond to the camera’s action as if they knew this was a signal moment in their elderly histories, that life might not catch them all together in this way again. In my fantasy they are thus unexpectedly reunited, but this time on my porch, populating my quiet, almost empty house with their ancient shadows, satisfying my sudden need for people.
KENNY GRINDLE once owned our house, perhaps twenty years ago. Now he lives in a tiny shack down and across the road from us. He has few amenities, no telephone, no television, no car. He relies on neighbors for his occasional forays to the general store and on his radio for the news. He heats with a wood stove so his strip of yard on the state road is strewn with logs which he splits himself and with odd bottles and miscellaneous objects he offers to passersby in a perpetual yard sale. Now and again, in a fit of assertive desire for isolation, he tacks up on his trees four cardboard signs that warn motorists to KEEP OUT.
He is elderly, suffering from emphysema and the remnants of a hard life, yet his opinions about what is important in life remain firm. Sometimes he and his clothes smell musty. I wonder if he believes that cleanliness has very little connection to godliness and that constant washing, under the conditions he lives, is too much trouble. He is adamant in his conviction that people are not to be trusted and are not necessary to him, that the news of the outside world, from whatever source, is tainted and false, and that the times of his youth in Sargentville were in every way superior to the present. He is more interested in who will be elected to be his selectman and game warden than he is in his representatives in Washington or the president.
The other day I waved to Kenny when I drove to the post office, reluctant to break my sile
nce by giving him a ride. I need not have worried. The next morning (it was the second day of a cold month) he gestured that he wanted a ride. I stopped for him, and he rode to the post office with me, saying nothing until he got out at his house, under one of the KEEP OUT signs. “Social Security day,” he said in his thick, almost incomprehensible Maine accent. Holding his letter of the month, he said good-bye and walked off, a great, slow bear of a man ambling into his cabin.
When I got back to my place, the Captain White House, as it was still called before we moved in, I thought about Kenny. To the summer people of Sargentville, he is a “character” who speaks a strange tongue and looks very much alone and odd. They do not associate themselves with him, because, of course, they lead their lives differently.
But the more I thought about him, the more I realized that he and I are more alike than we are like our other neighbors. I too prefer my own society, I too have become distrustful of what I hear on the TV, the radio, in the newspaper, and do not often listen to them, or read it. We are alike in our critical views of the contemporary world and its inhabitants; we both keep better track of the small animals we live among than the human beings around us. It may be that we part company in our views of personal sanitation. But then it is easy for me, possessed of unlimited hot water, a washing machine and dryer, a shower and a tub, to stay clean. Left to myself without these amenities, I think I would decide that, living alone without a companion or much company, I did not need to worry about clean clothes or baths. Who knows, I might even put up some KEEP OUT signs to replace the discreet PRIVATE one that now stands at the side of my driveway.
ON all the roads I traveled in this very cold, wet, and snowy winter there were warning signs. Some read FROST HEAVE, others simply BUMP. The roads freeze, melt a little, and then freeze again, leaving serious barriers to progress. Being an inattentive driver, I often failed to see the signs and then was jolted out of my driving reveries by hitting the heave, hard. Then I was alert, watching for the next BUMP sign. The lesson was: words are not as powerful as acts. Show, do not tell.
Fifty Days of Solitude Page 4
