A Carnival of Losses

by Donald Hall

  Decades later, my periodontist installed four implants behind the partial bridge on my lower jaw, two to a side. He drilled holes into the bone, inserted screws into them, and snapped faux molars onto a plate fitted to the screws. I removed my hardware—full upper plate, lower implanted molars—every night for soaking. When I had a new girlfriend, I performed my dental procedures after she went to sleep, and made sure I waked early to restore my youth and virility.

  One implant never took hold. Another soon wobbled and had to be removed. The remaining sites, opportunely opposite, held up for several months. I ate a small and tentative steak. Then the implant on the left loosened and left me. Even with only one screwed-in fraudulent molar, I was able to snap the plate in place and to chew for a year and a half. One day I did a poetry reading in Los Angeles. When I was going to bed in my hotel, I removed my upper plate, then pulled at the back lower partial. It wouldn’t move. I put my thumbs at opposite sides and yanked. It wouldn’t move. I tried again and failed. Finally, with an Arnold Schwarzenegger surge, I managed to pull it out—and my mouth filled with red saliva. I spat out two bloody mouthfuls, inspected the sink, and discovered that I had removed not only the prosthetic molar but the metal implant itself, disinterring a screw from my jawbone. Gums sagged themselves together to mend the gap, the wound stopped bleeding, I wrapped the hardware in a Kleenex, and flew back to New Hampshire to astonish my periodontist.

  There’s One, There’s One

  I’ve told it before, my favorite story about my great-grandfather Ben Keneston on his sheep farm at the north end of Ragged Mountain. Moving his herd from one pasture to another, he decided to determine how many head there were. He set a hired man to count the creatures as they crossed the road but picked a fellow who never learned to cipher. Ben Keneston found him repeating, “There’s one, there’s one, there’s one . . .”

  Born in 1826—102 years before me—my great-grandfather clipped wool throughout the Civil War, and made a good penny selling it to New Hampshire’s mills while they lacked cotton. In 1865 he decided to move from his Danbury mountain—it’s a ski slope now—to Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot. He bought this 1803 cape in a valley five miles south of the sheep farm and added rooms for his big family.

  Ben’s youngest child was born in 1878, my grandmother Kate, and I spent my childhood summers haying these fields with my grandfather, who died at seventy-seven. When Kate turned ninety-seven, Jane and I bought this place from her. I held Kate’s hand as she died, and now I’m about to turn ninety. This farm has housed members of one family for almost 160 years. It’s crowded with yesterday’s detritus. I write these words beside a battered three-legged stool. I sat on this stool at ten or eleven, while I watched my grandfather milk six Holsteins in the barn’s tie-up.

  When Jane was alive and the five grandchildren were little, we speculated which of them might take over the farmhouse. After Jane died and the grandchildren aged toward college, I realized that nobody would. None would be freelance writers. Only retired rich folks live deep in the countryside. After I died my offspring would empty the house, toss the family’s scattery abundance into a platoon of dumpsters, and sell the shell to somebody old who wanted to live beside Route 4 in Wilmot, New Hampshire.

  I stayed alive and stayed alive and then came a family party late in my eighties, with my children and my granddaughter Allison. She is my daughter Philippa’s first child, who grew up forty minutes away. When she was a baby, with Philippa’s help she often called on Jane and me. I remember Jane falling asleep on the sofa with Allison lying full-length asleep on top of her. Some years later, Vassar admitted Allison early and she majored in art history with a minor in English, writing a thesis on Rembrandt’s late drawings. When she graduated, it turned out that her salable talent was technological skill. She joined a business consultancy and worked at home, commanding electronic devices. Now she lives with her husband Will in New Hampshire, an hour and a half from my house. At my birthday party, she detached herself from the gang to tell me that when I died, she and Will would move into Eagle Pond Farm, where she could continue her work. In my generation, no one could have imagined a job like Allison’s. She didn’t ask me if she could live here; she told me she would.

  And these were the happiest words I ever heard, a joy that depended on dying, therefore an inevitable, even a reliable, joy. The sheep farmer’s great-great-granddaughter would continue the family residence. And after Allison and Will? There’s one, there’s one, there’s one, and maybe there’s another.

  From April through September I watch baseball on television. In October it’s the playoffs and the World Series. I watched the Red Sox collapse as the worst team in baseball in 2012, in 2013 win the World Series, and the next two years become the worst team in baseball. In 2016 and 2017 things improved. When the Sox collapse mid-August, or don’t, football training camps have started. I like baseball because it’s slow. I like football because it’s fast. I switch the channel from baseball after a curveball and watch a screen pass to a wide receiver followed by an injury time-out, and when I click back to baseball I see the same batter foul off the next pitch at ninety-six miles an hour. I understand that in three hours of a New England Patriots game, two and a half exhaust themselves in penalties and standing around. Somehow the tension—interceptions and concussions—makes it feel fast. It engorges three hours in nine minutes of action.

  And it exists on television. I remember before TV, when radio football was hapless. My mother and I listened to Yale games on the floor of our Connecticut living room, recording each play with a pencil on a scorecard shaped like a football field, available at your local gas station. (Back then there were local gas stations.) (Back then a Yale player won the Heisman.) (Back then Harvard went to the Rose Bowl.) My father got us tickets once a year for a Yale game. I made my parents laugh when, walking to the Bowl, I referred to Yale’s schedule by calling it a sheh-dooly. When Yale beat Harvard to end a season, we crossed the field as we left, past a Harvard player sobbing fiercely. A grown-up crying?

  Radio baseball was better than radio football. On Sunday drives my father turned on the Brooklyn Dodgers, WOR, play by play with Red Barber. When I was twelve, I sat in Yankee Stadium and watched the first game of the 1941 World Series, Dodgers and Yankees. Joe Gordon hit a home run to beat the Dodgers. My next and last attendance at a World Series was thirty-four years later, in 1975, after the Red Sox won the pennant. I had been writing about sports—for Harper’s Magazine, Sports Illustrated, the New York Times—and became friends with a Chicago sportswriter who got tickets for Jane and me. From the center field bleachers in Fenway Park, we watched Luis Tiant’s tonsils as he wound up and beat the Cincinnati Reds. In the sixth game Carlton Fisk hit a homer. In the seventh, he didn’t.

  Romance

  I remember when I first fell for girls. I think I lost my heart before I was supposed to have a groin-oriented heart. I must have been ten or eleven. My great-uncle Luther and his granddaughters came to the farm, and I lusted after the younger girl. I’ll call her Rebecca. She must have been twelve or so, already beginning to swell twin bumps under her blouse. I followed her and her sister around, but I wanted to get Rebecca alone. In a comic book I read that someone—Archie?—got a girl’s attention by claiming that he had seen a polka-dotted rabbit. Rebecca found it difficult to believe but followed me down the riverbank (where nobody could see us) to investigate. I leapt on her, straddling her waist, and kissed her neck. She was astonished, amused, called me “Donnie,” and set me down. In the sixth grade I fell in love with Mary Beth Burgess, who sat beside me in art class. I drew badly and the teacher told me so, and I wept in front of Mary Beth. She liked it when I wept. In the summer my mother drove me to Mary Beth’s house and we spent the afternoon playing catch. A year or two later I fell in love with an older woman named Barbara Darrow. She was fifteen and I wasn’t. Again I expressed my love by leaping upon her and kissing her. It was a disaster, and I climbed down, saying, “I’m sorry. I left som
e snot on your ear.”

  Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Frankenstein, and T. S. Eliot

  The Paris Review invented the literary interview, printed like a play without stage directions. George Plimpton did E. M. Forster in the first issue. In issue 2 another editor interviewed William Styron. I was poetry editor and did poet interviews: T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound. I’ve collected poet anecdotes in books that have gone out of print, which permits me to repeat myself. Eliot spoke like a member of Parliament, in finished, elegant sentences, humor gently disguised from idiots, in a diction that needed no tidying up. He dismissed “The Waste Land” as “rhythmical grumbling.” Marianne Moore gave me lunch, reminding me that “Fritos are so nutritious.” She revised the interview after I transcribed it. She had told me a story from her youth which ended, “I don’t remember how old I was.” Reading the transcript, she transformed her diction: “Can you deduce my probable age?” Ezra Pound wanted to appear quick, witty, amusing with personal anecdotes, and proud of his inventions for modernist poetry. He began a story or a rant, couldn’t remember something, stopped, and fell back into miserable silence. On the tape I heard him say, over and over, “Turn that damned thing off.”

  It wasn’t until recently that I remembered the first interview I ever did. I was a sophomore in Hamden High School, a flourishing suburb of New Haven, where the Shubert Theatre mounted plays on their way to Manhattan. Sometimes a play came back from Broadway on tour. One day in 1943 the New Haven Register advertised a comedy coming to the Shubert. Arsenic and Old Lace had opened in New York in 1941 featuring Boris Karloff, and now Karloff would return in the touring company. The actor’s name set my brain afire. I had grown up on horror movies, taking the bus from Hamden to downtown on Saturday afternoons to watch Dracula, The Wolf Man, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Karloff starred in the earliest Frankenstein, followed by Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein, before he encountered Abbott and Costello.

  Indirectly, my poetry comes out of Boris Karloff. When I was twelve, at home between horror movies, I read horror stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe and turned to writing lines that engorged themselves on Poe’s morbidity. When I went to Hamden High as a freshman, I no longer attended Saturday matinees. I knew I would be a poet the rest of my life, but when I read in the paper that Boris Karloff was coming to the city, I had to see Arsenic and Old Lace. I spent a month’s allowance for an opening-night ticket. I loved every moment of the hit comedy of serial murder in which Karloff played a character called the Murderer, who didn’t murder anybody onstage. Instead, two little old lady heroines served poisoned elderberry wine to depressed elderly gentlemen who had come by to inspect a spare room, then curled up and died after they sipped the ladies’ hospitality. We were told that twelve old men were buried in the cellar. At the end of curtain calls for the large cast, twelve Equity corpses climbed up from their graves in the cellar and took a bow.

  The audience left the theater in the good cheer of multiple homicide. I was thrilled, and my pleasure engendered a further plan. As an assistant editor on the Hamden High newspaper, the Dial, perhaps I could interview the horror master? Although we were merely a once-a-week school paper, the Shubert cultivated anything that hinted at public attention. Someone led me to a greenroom where I was introduced to the actor I had admired since fifth grade. His forehead looked like anybody’s forehead, and Mr. Karloff was kindly, polite, and had nothing to say. The interview printed in the Dial was kindly, polite, and had nothing to say.

  Of course I gloried in my acquaintance, my byline, and praise from my drama teacher Miss Miniter. Literary ambition continued to roar me home after school to write poems. More and more I became The Poet, maybe in my persona more than in my line breaks, diphthongs, and metaphors. I whispered mysterious sentences into the ears of fifteen-year-old girls. “Skeleton cowboys gallop in night’s canyon.” To embody my manner for myself, on Saturday nights I walked alone down the dark streets of New Haven, a mysterious figure wearing a black scarf, adolescent and terrifying, or terrified, as I crept through shadowy alleys. If only I looked like a monster! When I mounted the trolley home to my family’s six-room house, I shut the door and returned to scribbling poems, which eventually got me interviews with poets as eldritch as T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound.

  Way Way Down, Way Way Up

  In September my family throws me a birthday party at O’s, a restaurant in Concord. Three years ago Linda drove me there, bringing a wheelchair in which my son Andrew pushed me from parking garage to table. As I had hoped, my daughter Philippa gave me plastic tubs of chili that I would freeze and defrost for dinner. Andrew gave me a year’s worth of ten-year-old cheddar. I enjoyed my party and it wore me out. The next morning I felt wretched, as I did the next and the next, from late September all the way into February. All day every day I felt down, down, down—exhausted until circadian rhythms took over at suppertime. I felt almost human until 9 p.m. and bed. I slumped into sleep. I woke feeling weak, even moribund. Was I about to die? I was a mere eighty-six. When I woke up each morning I lagged through the Concord Monitor and the Boston Globe, then collapsed into dictating letters. My family has made a specialty of letters. My mother spent her eighties writing classmates from college, and after they died she wrote their daughters. When she herself died at ninety, I emptied her house and discovered that she had saved every letter I ever wrote her.

  Now, when I had done four or five letters or emails, five or six more to go, fatigue began to hollow me out. I was not merely tired, much less sleepy. I felt a blackness drag from my toes through my trunk into the follicles of my hair. How could I keep on? I complained, and Andrew set up an appointment for me with Dr. Jordan, Andrew and Philippa both in attendance. Much of the hour I closed my eyes, my head wagging from side to side as I heard them talk but couldn’t pay attention.

  A week or so later I admitted to myself that I had stopped writing my new book, notes and essays of memoir and meditation as I shuffled toward ninety. I couldn’t add a sentence to the manuscript, which was hard, because I had written or tried to write every day since I was twelve. Usually at Thanksgiving Linda drove us to Andrew’s house outside Boston, but this year the two-hour drive would be exhausting and the staircase impossible. My children and their families came to me instead. I kept on feeling down, even though my publisher brought out The Selected Poems of Donald Hall. Ten years earlier, my last selection had included every poem of mine I liked and it was seven times too long. I was US poet laureate back then, and I did one or two poetry readings a week, reading aloud for an hour and signing books for an hour. When the readings and signings stopped—old age and disability—the big old book went out of print, and it’s depressing to be out of print, even as you shuffle toward ninety.

  At Christmas it was sixty degrees, and my children dropped by and I saw my grandchildren. Maybe for the last time? Dull days repeated themselves. Mid-January I understood that I wouldn’t have another birthday. Allison hadn’t married yet. She would marry Will on October 1 and I wouldn’t be there. With Linda I watched movies I couldn’t follow; Linda paused the Netflix to explain. Daytimes I lived in two chairs. My housekeeper Carole had found me an up-and-down mechanical chair for the parlor, where I dictated letters and watched MSNBC, where I drank a whey-banana milkshake for lunch and picked at a dinnertime Lean Cuisine. Otherwise I sat in the living room, in an overstuffed blue chair Carole revised for my health. She has vacuumed my carpet and washed my shirts three mornings a week for twenty-five years, and over the decades has evolved from housekeeping to eldercare. A few years ago she shuddered as she watched me plop onto this puffy chair with my head just missing the bookcase beside it. She assembled and installed a platform that lifted the seat a foot so that I could plop down without a concussion.

  One morning two weeks after Christmas, I couldn’t pee. It was early, and no one answered at the New London Medical Center. I telephoned Dr. Jordan at home. “Dial 911,” he said. The New London am
bulance arrived, strapped me to a stretcher, and hauled me to Emergency, twenty minutes away. Soon my urine dribbled into a catheter. Then a nurse took me to an x-ray machine and wouldn’t say why. Was urinary retention a symptom of heart cancer? X-rays attended to my corpse-to-be. Back in my room a doctor disclosed my monumental constipation. My inability to piss was caused by a bloated intestine pushing against my bladder. Dimly I remembered that I had recently neglected to defecate. A nurse ripped out the bloody catheter and I was subjected to suppositories, enemas, and laxatives.

  With me I had brought weekly issues of The Economist and The New Yorker. I could read a page of The Economist, skipping only a paragraph or two, but The New Yorker was too difficult. A television set loomed opposite my bed, and its remote included many channel numbers that could not be summoned. The set would not deliver MSNBC. I got my news by processing Fox News backward. One Sunday I found the NFL playoffs and watched the New England Patriots lose to the Denver Broncos. Fox News played better football.

  When my personal sewage system calmed down, I was ready to leave the hospital. I felt as horrid as I had felt since my birthday, but longed for silence and solitude. A young nurse named James arranged for my discharge on a Tuesday. Linda picked me up in the afternoon to drive me home. She spent the night and at 7 a.m. left for work. I crawled through the day with my mouth hanging open between bed and bed. Beside my blue living room chair sat the box that entombed my abandoned book. I considered looking at a page, but it would be miserable to glance at what I could no longer give myself to. My children telephoned and I told them I was dying. I telephoned Linda after she finished her workday to remind her that I was dying. When a stranger wanted to come calling, I told him I was almost dead.