Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

by Nina Sankovitch

  She was right. There is always an answer to despair, and that is the promise of beauty waiting in the future. I know it is coming because I have seen and felt beauty in the past. Stacks of apricots in Rome; raccoon footprints in snow; piles of oyster shells bleached white over winter; lime green leaves of spring; burnt orange leaves of fall; Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher; the old stone walls of Connecticut winding around my yard; Venice at dusk, rose-colored from sky and sea: memories of beauty, sometimes experienced alone and sometimes shared.

  Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin, talks about a visit he made to London when he was just a boy. He went there from Dublin to visit his dying grandfather. While in London, his father took him out for a hamburger, and when the waitress, Irish herself, heard why the young boy had come to London, she touched his cheek and brought him an ice-cream sundae. He has remembered that waitress his whole life. Those moments of her kindness and sympathy were exactly the kind of chance connections that led McCann to write the magnificent Let the Great World Spin. Those moments are the moments that can be brought forward through time to sustain hope. Those moments can reignite belief that the world can be a kind and forgiving place. Those moments are beauty.

  In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes talks about how in remembering such moments of beauty, he allows himself to expect them to come again. Giving up on life is unimaginable for Barnes because there is always the “promise of a new novel or a new friend (or an old novel or an old friend), or a football match on television.” I love that line for how Barnes revels in the quiet and simple joys as being enough reason to live. I will never again have the joy of holding my newborn in my arms—those days are over for me—but the pleasures of a book or a painting or a walk in the park are both in my past, and sure to come in my future.

  Looking backward in order to move forward. In her poem “Stepping Backward,” Adrienne Rich recommends the backward glance for gaining fuller perspective: “We live by inches and only sometimes see the full dimension.” Looking backward allows me to see the entirety of my present life, of what it took to get me to where I am, and of what I want to have in the life still ahead of me. The big picture, the great perspective. I understand what is important by looking back to see what I remember.

  Later in my year of reading, I would again come across the admonition to look backward, for “such glances always make us wiser.” The line was in the stories collected in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales. The copy I had was an old one, printed in 1890. Someone before me had underlined the line, and it struck me also. Such glances behind do keep one moving ahead with a bit of wisdom. And so I would go on with my year: present reading, past memories, future wisdom.

  I understood why I was where I was now, with a whole year of new books stretching out before me. I was here to read, as planned. But it was also necessary for me to go back, to my past. The Elegance of the Hedgehog gave me the first hint that my plan for a year of reading would change. My plan would evolve as the year progressed, and I couldn’t know how. My year of escape would be something very different from what I had expected. Comfort, yes; pleasure, of course. But now I also had a mandate to go backward and recover memories. And an even greater mandate: to share what I found in books, intertwined with my memories. I would write about what I read not only as my own recording of an endeavor but to share with whoever stopped by my Read All Day Web site the magic of the books I was sinking down into. I would find “the odd moment of beauty,” and the “always within never.” I would hold those moments tightly while also passing them on. What else would change in my plan of reading and writing? I could not even guess. My year of magical reading was on.

  Chapter 4

  In Search of Books and Time

  “What did I ever give her?”

  “The happiness of giving.”

  EDITH WHARTON,

  The Touchstone

  I WENT TO THE LIBRARY IN EARLY NOVEMBER, IN SEARCH of books. Adding a new method to my lifelong formula for library search and seizure, I found an armload for my second week of reading. The new method involved the usual browsing of the stacks and selecting anything with a good title, but I added the twist of reaching only for those books with a width of one inch. A one-inch thickness in a hardcover book of average height (nine to ten inches) generally translates to a total page count of about 250 to 300 pages. Because I read about seventy pages an hour, I can read a three-hundred-page book in just over four hours. Reviewing that book would take more time. Just a few days’ experience of writing reviews had shown me that a review had no definite time allotment. It could take me half an hour or five hours, depending on how much the book meant to me and how easy or hard it was for me to translate what the book meant into words on my computer screen. I averaged out the reviewing time to about two hours and planned accordingly.

  Six hours to read and write equaled the six hours I had more or less to myself every day, at least during the week. Weekends were unpredictable, but I could stake a claim to four hours each morning, especially if I got up early. I planned out my year: if I spent two hours writing and posting a review, I would have no problem finishing up the daily book by the time school-day buses rolled in (and the corresponding waves of snacks, homework, activities, and meltdowns or euphoria that had to be shared). I would be able to plan and cook dinner (not well, but no worse than before my book-a-day year started); I could keep laundry under control (clean underwear in every drawer); and summary cleaning would get done (and I mean summary: crumbs off counters, dishes in dishwasher, kitty litter filtered and tossed). Weekends I would have to do some reading at night, but that was fine—I could swing it by ordering in pizza and relying on Jack for at least one good dinner. I would be able to write my reviews, enjoy my books, and be there for my family as greeter, driver, food shopper and server, cleaner, cook, friend, counselor, disciplinarian, lover (to my husband, on occasion, and not often enough), and overall, overlord of the manse.

  And so there I was, in the library cruising the stacks, looking for the right width and the good titles, the interesting authors, new ones and some old ones. I picked up books and put them back again. I found eight or so that I wanted to read. I checked them out and brought them home to sit on a shelf next to books I’d been given for my birthday. What in years past would have been a month or two of reading material now equaled less than two weeks of reading. A shiver of excitement passed through me. I could do this! I felt as if I’d won the lottery and played the best trick ever, all rolled up in one great feeling of complete gratitude. Life was good.

  I skimmed the titles waiting on the shelf. My finger stopped on Death with Interruptions by José Saramago. Saramago, a Portuguese writer, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. I loved his books Blindness (made into a movie with Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, and Danny Glover) and The Cave. Death with Interruptions was his latest, found on the new-releases shelf at the library. It was due back within three days. No problem: I would read it today, review it tomorrow, and return it over the weekend.

  I took the book and walked into the kitchen to make myself some lunch. I was getting started late today—what with my trip to the library—but Death with Interruptions is a book of less than 300 pages, and I trusted Saramago to make the pages fly.

  The book begins with the sentence: “The following day, no one died.” And so I found myself in a country where no one dies. Sounded good to me. Thirty-five minutes, forty-three pages, and one lunch later, the phone rang. Caller ID showed it was a Westport Public Schools phone number. I could not ignore this call. I put my pencil in the book to mark the page and clicked the talk button on my phone.

  “Hello, Nina. It’s Sandra over at Kings Highway. Martin has been in twice already today complaining of a bad tummy, and now he’s thrown up.” Sandra was the school nurse and a very good assessor of kids’ maladies, both of the mind and body. This time the assessment and diagnosis seemed easy enough. Martin had to come home.

  “I
s he okay?”

  Sandra understood what I meant. Were there tears? “No, he’s fine, just wants his mom and a bed with a bucket beside it.”

  “Is there a bug going around?”

  “Yes, and it’s a bad one, only twenty-four hours but nothing pretty.”

  “I’ll come get him. Be there in about ten minutes.”

  It was nine thirty at night before I got back to Death with Interruptions. Martin needed hovering over and dinner needed cooking and boys needed nudging into bed. Now I had two and a half hours left until midnight and almost two hundred pages still to read. I sank into the purple chair and into the book. I could feel the pull of the words drawing me in, holding me tight in anticipation and pleasure. Luckily for me, the best part of the book—and all of this book is so good—is in its final chapters. I got to them at eleven o’clock, and any weariness that had started creeping in vanished. I had no trouble staying awake through death’s attempted seduction of the young man she has fallen in love with and her final surrender to love. Love overcoming death—yes!

  Midnight came. The book was finished, and I gave a sigh of satisfaction. It was a great read, and it would be an interesting one to write about. No problem that I was up so late. The weekend had officially started, and I could sleep in tomorrow. I set the alarm beside my bed for seven (one whole extra hour of sleep!) and turned out the light.

  The next day’s offering of nonstop Saturday cartoons made it easy to keep Martin lying down, resting in front of the television. The hard part was keeping him apart from his brothers, but I had to do it. I didn’t want the bug spreading through the family. Waving the (empty) blue bucket/family vomitorium over my head, I warned the older brothers about the illness, and told them Martin had to stay segregated on his own couch, untouched and unbothered. The sight of that waving bucket was enough of a deterrent, and when Jack offered to take the older boys out for pancakes, I was left alone in the house. With a puking child.

  I wrote my review in bits and pieces, hustling back and forth between the bathtub, where I washed out Martin’s bucket again and again, and the poor kid himself, shivering and pale. He looked so small lying on the huge green couch, his body hidden under the fleece blanket, one skinny arm reaching out to hold on to the bucket. I sat beside him, stroking his hair back from his face, feeling his forehead for warmth. No fever. I raced back to the computer and hassled with the review. Back to Martin and the bucket. Back to the computer to finally post the review.

  That afternoon Martin slept the hours away, and I stayed close, reading. I chose The Touchstone by Edith Wharton, a short book, and felt myself relaxing, sinking into the couch beside Martin while I read. By dinnertime Martin was better, charging around after his brothers and hollering for food. Jack fixed up some pasta, and I read on in The Touchstone.

  The Touchstone is about morality and identity, as are all of Wharton’s books. She is the master of pulling back the curtains of propriety and custom to reveal the duality of life, the struggle between publicly identifying—“finding”—oneself and deliberately hiding what is private or shameful in an effort to bolster respectability, wealth, and, most important, security. Wharton enveloped her insights on human nature within page-turning plots of love, intrigue, and betrayal. The Touchstone is perfect storytelling and was a quick and good read.

  I finished the book easily by dinnertime, in turn laughing at Wharton’s hilarious passages about wedded bliss (“The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a crimson ramble mounted to the nursery window of a baby who never cried”) and shaking at her insight into the role of beneficence, where “the happiness of giving” offers satisfaction to both parties, the one in need and the one bestowing what is needed. I promised myself that the evening would be reserved for Jack, my kind and giving husband, who had taken care of three meals to allow me all the time I needed to both read my book and coddle a sick child. Saturday night, book finished, boys in bed, and inspired by Wharton, I went to give Jack my own overdue messages of love and marriage. But he was asleep on the couch, and I soon joined him, passed out on the other couch, television on but unwatched. The messages would have to wait.

  Monday morning, Martin was completely recovered. I had four boys getting on buses, with only moderate grumbling and no last-minute dashes for anything. I showered and dressed, poured a fresh cup of coffee, and sat down in front of my computer, ready to write up a quick review of Silks, the new Dick Francis mystery I’d read on Sunday. Sundays were my mystery days, the day I allowed myself candy and soda in the form of fast-paced, gripping novels of detection, sleuthing, and resolution.

  Silks had been great fun to read, but the review was harder to write than I had anticipated. How to convey the sheer entertainment value of a good Francis, while also acknowledging its formulaic unfolding? I struggled through for more than two hours and then sat back to do a spell-check. The phone rang, and in my urgency to see if another stomach bug had come to plague me, I hit the wrong button on my computer. When I came back from a call asking about my satisfaction with my cable service (Damn! I reminded myself to look at the caller ID number every time), I found an empty screen before me—total erasure of what I had spent the morning writing.

  By the time I stopped yelling like an idiot at the blank screen and pounded out another review, it was lunchtime. I wasn’t hungry. I was frustrated. Forget lunch, forget the laundry I’d planned on getting started this morning, forget my plan to fumigate the big green couch/sickbed. I had to start reading my book of the day, and I had to start now. I grabbed The Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee off the shelf, shoved myself down into my purple chair, and began to read. In what seemed like only minutes, the back door swung open. The shouts of returning boys echoed through the house.

  Another night up until midnight. Real life had kept me from the book all afternoon. I thought of Edith Wharton’s “happiness of giving” as I drove boys here and there, did a slapdash grocery run (bread, bananas, milk, orange juice—my daily mantra of what we always seem to need more of), scooted to the train to pick up Jack, and pushed loads of laundry through the washer. Everyone wanted dinner—surprise! I overcooked some chicken cutlets and tossed a premade salad. I cleaned up from dinner, folded laundry, and began straightening up the house and getting kids ready for bed. When I finally could sit down again with Coetzee and Dostoyevsky, it was ten o’clock. I was tired, bone-tired. I was downstairs alone, while my husband slept alone upstairs: messages of love out the window, we’d have to try again tomorrow.

  The happiness I got from giving to family was getting all mixed up with my scheduling. I could schedule reading, writing, cooking, and cleaning. But how to schedule caring and loving? The “happiness in giving” would have to come the other way now, as boys and husband worked to make time and space for me and my books. A book a day? For one year? I would need all the time and space—and love—they could give me. And I promised to give back all the happiness I found.

  Chapter 5

  Rearranging the Rhythms

  The weird world rolls on.

  PAUL AUSTER,

  quoting Rose Hawthorne, Man in the Dark

  THE NEXT EVENING AT DINNER I ANNOUNCED A NEW HOUSEHOLD POLICY. I’d put together a cleanup schedule. The two older boys were on duty cleaning up after dinner, two days on and two days off, and I would clean up on weekends. The younger boys were responsible for setting and clearing the table on alternate days. The boys would also help with laundry, bringing dirty clothes to the laundry room and putting away cleaned clothes.

  “Your allowance will go up,” I promised.

  “But you never remember to pay us,” Michael said.

  “You never remember to ask me,” I answered, while making a note in my brain to pay allowance every week, without fail.

  After dinner, George approached me with a book in his hand.

  “I really want you to read this book, Mom. I think you would like it.”

  I took the book from him. Watership Down by Richard Adams. I kne
w it was one of George’s favorites. I opened it up, turned to the last page. The book was almost five hundred pages long. I looked up at George. His face was a mixture of challenge and supplication.

  “If you’re going to read a book a day, you should make sure the books are good ones,” he offered, “and I know this is a good book. I want you to read it.”

  I nodded. “Of course I will.” I placed it down on the kitchen counter, on top of other waiting books. “That will be one long day of reading,” I said.

  “You’re not going to read it tomorrow?” he asked.

  “No, but soon, I promise.”

  George frowned, and I groaned inside. It would be hard to find a day with enough time in it for such a long book. But how could I say no to one of my boys?

  According to my dry cleaner, I had given birth to four boys because of the dried dates I’d eaten on my wedding night. The conjugal activity I’d engaged in that same night, repeated at regular intervals in the following months and years, played only a minor role, according to Mrs. Kahng. Using photographs from her son’s recent wedding, Mrs. Kahng explained to me an old Korean wedding tradition. In one photo, she is tossing chestnuts and dates at her son and new daughter-in-law, while they struggle to catch the flying foods in a cloth they hold stretched between the two of them. There is pride on Mrs. Kahng’s face, glee on the groom’s face, and determination on the bride’s. The number of chestnuts caught is the number of girls the couple will have, and the number of dates is the number of boys.