Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

by Nina Sankovitch

  When I was in high school, I began keeping a journal of favorite quotations from books. The purpose of the journal was to act as a vault. I wanted to save the words whispered in my ears by beloved authors, and store them up for the day when I would need to hear them again. As much as they had inspired me when I first read them, I could turn to them when needed and rekindle the inspiration. I hoped back then that by following the words, I would become stronger, wiser, braver, and kinder. The quotes I saved in my journal were the proof of, as well as guidance for, how I would meet any challenge and overcome all difficulties.

  Not that I didn’t find direction from my parents. But my parents didn’t teach us through oft-repeated words of advice or family sayings or long lectures. My father occasionally called us “parasites,” like when we asked for a larger allowance or whined about all the weeding and lawn work we had to do, but neither he nor my mother made a big deal about the basic tenets by which they lived. We watched how they behaved, and we learned from their actions.

  My parents liked their jobs, and we never heard them complain about having to go to work or putting in long hours (my mother when she was chair of her department at Northwestern, or my father all those nights he was on emergency call). They loved to listen to music, beautiful music like Schubert and Brahms, and the singing of Jacques Brel, Georges Moustaki, and Nana Mouskouri. On Sundays, music was always playing in our house, accompanying us in our long lunches and throughout the lazy afternoon. My parents cared about other people, especially others who, like them, were outsiders in the community. We had frequent dinner guests and overnight visitors, whether newly arrived immigrants, recently hired faculty members, or homesick university students. Our house was open to anyone who needed a little extra support or comfort or just a home-cooked meal.

  My father was a surgeon at three hospitals in Chicago, but he also had a family practice in the large Polish neighborhood of Chicago’s west side. When patients couldn’t pay, my father took promises in lieu of payment and accepted gifts of embroidered pillows, crocheted blankets, and bottles of liquor in thanks for his generosity. He brought the pillows and blankets home, and left the vodka in the office. One afternoon while at work, my father heard an explosion from the storage room. Four bottles of home-brewed vodka had exploded, leaving headache-inducing fumes in the air and shards of glass everywhere.

  One of my very first memories from childhood is of being taken on an Open Housing march by my mother. It was the fall of 1966, and I had just turned four years old. That summer, Martin Luther King Jr. had started his Freedom Movement in Chicago to open up white neighborhoods to black families. Organizers from Evanston began their own campaign to integrate our town’s neighborhoods, staging long walks that began in the predominantly black part of town and then passed through the almost exclusively white areas.

  My parents had had firsthand experience with segregated housing. In 1964 they bought a house in a small development on the border of Evanston and Skokie. Soon after moving in, they discovered a covenant in the deed of the house that had never been pointed out to them by their lawyer or by the lawyer of the couple who sold them the house. The deed prohibited the selling of any house in our cul-de-sac to a “non-Caucasian.” My parents were outraged, and they, along with a few other families on the street, drew up a petition to remove the clause from the deed.

  My mother walked through the neighborhood, asking for signatures to the petition. Doors were slammed in her face, and nasty notes were left in our mailbox. Anne-Marie and Natasha were told by local kids, “We can’t play with you anymore,” while their parents sued my parents for harassment (the suit was later dropped). My family finally moved out of the cul-de-sac and into a house with no restrictive covenants.

  My mother began attending the Open Housing meetings held at Evanston’s Ebenezer AME Church. When the marches were organized, she went along, taking us with her. The marches always began with a sermon in the brick church, people packed tightly into its small interior. After the sermon, we spilled out of the church in waves. I remember feeling suddenly cold after the heat of the church and looking up to see hundreds of stars in the sky. Everyone was excited. There was a lot of laughing and singing. For me, it felt like a holiday, and I clapped along. The campaign leaders set us up in a long snaking line and led us in singing “We Shall Overcome.” My mother placed me in a stroller for the long walk ahead, and with my sisters at her side, we moved forward with the crowd.

  As strong as my parents’ examples were, I remember as a kid wanting to hear some words of advice from them. I clung to the words my father spoke once, when my sisters and I were complaining about something—“Do not look for happiness in life. Life itself is happiness.”—and I wanted more. I remembered the sermons we listened to in the Ebenezer Church before heading out on our marches, especially when the pastor quoted verbatim from Martin Luther King, urging us all to “open the doors of opportunity to everyone, all of God’s Children. . . . We have to let justice roll down like water and let righteousness flow like a mighty stream.” At four years old, how could I know what those words meant? Somehow, I did.

  In the books I read as a kid, parents gave out advice, or if not parents, some kind of authority figure did. Ole Golly in Harriet the Spy was always quoting Dostoyevsky, Cowper, Emerson, and Shakespeare while advising Harriet on how to live her life. But my parents were not that way. They lived according to their own principles, and expected us to follow along, or not. How or if we followed along, and all the big and little decisions, were left to us to decide.

  Not all my decisions were good ones. I smoked in high school and drank, pilfering bottles of Chivas from the basement, gifts to my father that he didn’t keep track of. I wasn’t drunk the night I hit a police car and ran from the scene of the accident. I was completely sober that evening, and just trying to help out a friend whose car was blocked by another car at a party. He had to get home, and having noticed that the keys of the blocking car were in its ignition, I offered to move it out of the way. No matter that I was fifteen and had been in driver’s ed for only two weeks. I jumped in, turned the key, and backed down the driveway, never looking behind me. I will never forget the sound of the crash or the sudden jolt of impact. I got out of the car, saw the smashed-up front of a black-and-white police cruiser, and took off running. I ran through yards, and then went up and over a high fence. I fell down hard onto the other side, twisting my ankle. Hobbling all the way, I made it home to find the police already there, waiting. I had to sit in the back of the police car all by myself, while my parents followed behind in their car.

  Other than spending a terrifying night in the police station, I got off easy. When my court date came, no police officers showed up to testify against me, and all charges were dropped. The punishment I received from my parents was fair: I was grounded for six weeks. The punishment I got at school was worse. I was teased, and kids I didn’t know pointed at me and sniggered. Friends dropped me when they realized I could no longer go out after school or on the weekends, or because their parents advised them against hanging out with me. A few loyal friends stuck close, and my sister Natasha stayed in nights to keep me company. Anne-Marie was already off at college, and she thought the whole incident was hilarious. Looking back now, I realize how lucky I was that I didn’t hurt anybody, and I can see that the weekends spent at home cured my too-early habits of smoking and drinking. At the time, I remember turning to my book of quotations. I used the words I found there to shore myself up and get through the mess I’d made.

  I still have that high school journal of favorite quotes. The mix of obvious and obscure lines reflects my adolescent mind’s struggle for answers. There are two lines from A Separate Peace by John Knowles: “An arrogant determination to live had not yet given out,” and “Only Phineas never was afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone.” I walked through the school hallways after my traffic accident, head held high, repeating under my breath, “never afraid, never hated anyone. . . .” From Marg
aret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind I’d copied “After all, tomorrow is another day,” and this one also I recited in my head, walking along. At night before going to sleep, I reread more quotes I’d penned in, like Dickens’s great line from A Tale of Two Cities: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done” (Backing a car into a cop car and running away? Hardly!); and the quote I’d copied out in great, sweeping letters, “People do not complete us, we complete ourselves,” taken from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.

  I needed words again. I needed guidance from books. Yes, I still wanted to follow Knowles’s “arrogant determination to live,” but the “how” of living needed bolstering and fattening and enriching. I had to reopen and restock my vault of wisdom. I needed again to hear from authors about their experiences. In reading about experiences both light and dark, I would find the wisdom to get through my own dark times.

  According to the historical evidence, Constance Fenimore Woolson either jumped or fell to her death at the age of fifty-three, suffering from influenza and depression. But Maguire imagines a different ending for her character. She has Woolson discovering that she has a tumor in her head, and that she has only months left to live. Maguire herself became ill with ovarian cancer while writing The Open Door and finished the novel during the final months of her life, before she died at age forty-seven. Did Maguire write her ending so that Woolson’s character could serve as the voice for Maguire’s own fears about death and eventual acceptance of what was coming? I am certain that it is Maguire talking when she has Woolson say, “Hard to believe, but once I had absorbed the shock, a certain giddiness followed. Suddenly I had a reprieve from the minor oppressions of everyday life. . . . It was like having a pass to be one’s most selfish and unsocial self.”

  As a storyteller herself, Maguire channels the storyteller in Woolson to relate her own struggles: “Storytellers live in the future tense. All my life I had pulled myself out of low spirits by imagining what might happen next. Now there was not going to be any next. Everything needed to be experienced as it was. This was a test of my pragmatic soul.” Her words exalt the desire of living on through her words, through readers’ witnessing of her own experience: “Gone . . . it is impossible to conceive of oneself as gone, isn’t it? . . . In my imagination, I was still there, watching from the heavens. . . . It seems I am just a small hole dug in the sand by a child’s shovel, to be erased with the next turn of the tide. I would rather be a mountain, to stand purple and glorious for all time.”

  I use the words of Maguire, imagined for Woolson, as a proxy for the lost murmurings of Anne-Marie, and to fill in all that was left unsaid between us that afternoon in her study. I put myself back on the brown couch, my arms close around my sister, and smell again the damp, fresh leaves of her perfume. I hear the words Maguire wrote, and I find comfort. When I return to my purple chair, the low winter sun outside my window and fat cat in my lap, I reach to touch the sleeves of the gray sweater I’m wearing. Anne-Marie is “still there, watching from the heavens.”

  How I wish I could get the message to Maguire—Your words have whispered to me!—and let her know that she indeed created a “mountain, standing glorious for all time,” a mountain for me. A mountain made up of words, and offering wisdom. Through the door she opened between us, Maguire counsels me that life is precious and fragile. She advises me to live like her wonderful character Woolson, with spirit and intelligence and bravado. She comforts me that while death is scary, it is also inevitable, for all of us, and that if she could face it head-on, Anne-Marie could too.

  Maguire used Woolson as a guide and a cipher. Now I would use both women. Four months into my year of reading, and their words found me. They whisper to me and urge me on. I’ve packed the quotes into my vault, to carry along with me, and to return to again and again.

  Chapter 11

  Where Warmth Is Found

  “Nothing don’t matter,” he said, looking up at the ceiling but not seeing the ceiling.

  “It matter to me, Jefferson,” she said. “You matter to me.”

  ERNEST J. GAINES,

  A Lesson Before Dying

  I’M ALWAYS COLDEST IN THE LAST WEEKS OF WINTER. My body is worn out from keeping itself warm for months, and I can no longer fight against the chills coming in under the door. In an effort to find sun and warmth, I read Scat by Carl Hiaasen on the last day of February. I knew Hiaasen would take me to Florida, immerse me in heat and humidity, and make me want to live out of a canoe, traveling around the sprawling wildernesses of southern Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands. I had a great trip, but when I rose from my purple chair, the grass outside my window was still brown. Snow survived in dirty clumps, glistening wet and icy under a cold gray sky. I wasn’t in Florida anymore. I was in a Connecticut winter, and it was ugly.

  I went to my computer to read over again the Facebook message I’d received just days before. It was from Andrew. Twenty-seven years ago I’d promised to love Andrew forever. A month ago he’d lobbed a friend request my way, and I’d accepted. Friendship I could renew. But love? When I made my promise of undying devotion all those years ago, the promise was more like a threat: he was breaking up with me, and I swore I’d never forget him. “And you’ll never forget me,” was my final curse.

  I fell in love for the first time when I was away at horseback-riding camp. I was twelve, and so was Tim, a kid from Milwaukee. We worshipped the ground each other rode on. After the four weeks of camp were over, we never saw each other again, but I liked thinking about him for months afterward.

  My next bout of love was with a boy I met in Seville, Spain, when I was seventeen years old. I was in town for ten days with a group from my high school, and I met him on my first day there. He was a friend of the girl with whom I was staying. Alicia was a nice girl but a little wild, with heavily lined eyes, deeply painted lips, and a pack of cigarettes always sticking out from her back pocket. Her father was a strict man, a professor and a conservative Catholic, but he just adored his daughter. As long as she got good grades, she explained to me, he let her do pretty much as she pleased. And it pleased her to go out with her boyfriend late at night and stay out until early in the morning. Our first night out together, the two of them introduced me to Alfonso.

  Alfonso was handsome, with curved lips and big brown eyes. He had a straight nose, perfect cheekbones, and a dimple when he smiled. He was a little unkempt, with greasy hair, pants that hung down from a notched-up leather belt, and a shirt that rose off his back when he leaned forward to shake my hand. He was polite and gracious and not a bit confident. He made me feel comfortable. We hung out in the local bar that first night, drinking beer, and then left for one of Seville’s public parks. While Alicia and her boyfriend kissed on the bench beside us, Alfonso and I muddled on in conversation, his English just a little bit better than my Spanish.

  Alfonso loved his city, and he told me all about her. Seville had been a Muslim capital for hundreds of years, he explained, which accounted for the Moorish architecture everywhere. Then Ferdinand III, the Catholic king from the north of Spain, came along and ran all the Muslims out. He moved himself into the Alcazar, the former Muslim palace.

  “You must visit it. It is so beautiful.” Alfonso took my hand and went on talking.

  The Cathedral of Saint Mary of the See in Seville was built on the site of the former mosque of the long-gone Muslim rulers. Beside the cathedral is the Giralda, a tower originally built as a minaret. Instead of stairs, the tower had ramps inside, allowing Muslim muezzins to ride to the top on horseback.

  Alfonso told me the Sevillan motto, “No me ha dejado,” explaining that it meant Seville would never abandon her people.

  “And I will never abandon Seville,” he promised, holding tighter onto my hand and looking soulfully into my eyes. I was hooked.

  For the next six days, Alfonso and I spent every afternoon and evening together. Semana Santa (Holy Week), traditionally a week for Catholics to make final penance befor
e Easter, had begun. The days were marked by long processions of men wearing white robes and hoods walking behind floats carrying painted polychrome Madonnas. The men were called nazarenos, and they bore large wooden crosses across their backs to commemorate the sufferings of Jesus Christ. Onlookers cheered the men on and attached money, trinkets, and flowers to the floats, following the procession to the end with singing and wailing.

  When the parades ended, it was time to hit the bars. A favorite drink of the holiday was the postura, a mixture of gin and white wine. I liked the crisp taste of the drink, the way it hit the back of my throat and then slid down, a slither of fire down to my belly. The bars were packed with people, and the smell of sawdust from the floor mixed in with the smoke from Ducados and Marlboros. For a girl from the Midwest, this was life straight out of Carmen, brought to modern times, and with my own handsome bullfighter beside me. We made out in the dark corners of packed bars and fed each other off tiny plates of fresh shrimp, garlicky potato tortillas, and meaty green olives.

  One day toward the end of the week it was Alfonso’s turn to carry a heavy wooden cross down the streets of Seville. I couldn’t tell which of the hooded men he was, so I just cheered on everyone who passed. The next day Alfonso took me home to meet his parents. He lived in a huge stone house off a quiet square of orange trees and yellow cobblestones. We sat in a room with ceilings fifteen feet high and walls lined with patterned wallpaper. Heavy, dark portraits hung around us, and we sat in ornate wooden chairs just like the ones I would see ten years later in the furnished rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The parents spoke English beautifully and offered me orange soda to drink and almond cookies to eat. Suddenly the mother of Alfonso leaned over to take a closer look at her son. A closer look at his neck. The same neck I’d been passionately biting less than eight hours earlier.