Extra Innings

by Doris Grumbach

  Are these gargantuan extensions of the modest sandwich (itself named for the eighteenth-century Earl of Sandwich, who must have been the first person to insert cheese or meat between two pieces of bread), and if they are, what was wrong with two mouth-sized sandwiches instead of this one, unapproachable one?

  After we acquire our weekly supply of groceries, we stop at the place that offers subs. Sybil orders one, I, conservative and old-fashioned to the end, and feeling unheroic, order a tuna-fish sandwich.

  Today I receive a letter from a poet whose acquaintance I made, briefly, during a Literary Lions gathering at the New York Public Library a few years ago. Vartan Gregorian, who headed the library at the time, had instituted these yearly gatherings to which wealthy supporters bought tables and invited their friends to share the table with them. At each table sat one writer, a Lion for the evening. This elevation was not unlike Queen for a Day, the old television show. For most of us it was a great moment. Usually our lives more closely resembled that of mice.

  My poet friend reminisced about his table at the affair, taken by Mrs. Vincent Astor, a remarkable elderly woman, very wealthy, who spends her days in volunteer service to the library. He said it had made him realize that if the robber barons had once been both rapacious and charitable, their descendants are often extraordinarily generous with their time and their money. ‘Remember all those music halls and the 2,800 libraries that old Andrew Carnegie put up in every state of the union? Well, Brooke Astor is in that tradition,’ he wrote.

  I remembered the host at my table some years ago, an elderly, chatty man named Milton Petrie, who is a large donor to the library. For much of the time, while we ate an elegant dinner, he proceeded to tell me why.

  He was born to Jewish parents in Salt Lake City, where his father, a policeman, was killed in the line of duty. As a teenager he had to leave home to make his living. In Detroit he worked for the Hudson Department Store, having changed his name to Petrie to avoid the company’s well-known anti-Semitic hiring practices. But when he discovered he was the only Jew working there, he departed for New York to start his own business, a tiny store on 42nd Street in which he sold women’s hosiery and gloves. Aware of his need for further education, he crossed the street in the evenings to the New York Public Library, sat in the general reading room, and called for books on every subject.

  From a modest beginning he became owner of a string of department stores throughout the country. Now an extremely wealthy man, he takes a table each year for sixteen thousand dollars and invites eight of his friends to share the evening with him. He regards this as paying the library for his tuition.

  Someone seated at his table told me that Petrie provides funds for families of slain police persons in the five boroughs of New York City. Someone else said he was fine bridge player and every afternoon met with three other elderly men to play at a bridge club. Across the table from me sat Jerzy Kosinski, Petrie’s Lion of last year, looking very fit, handsome, elegant, and full of good humor. I recall this only because two years later, Kosinski was dead by his own hand, having become ill and unable to write.

  The last time I saw Milton Petrie he was being wheeled in a chair into the great hall at the library for the ten-year reunion banquet of Literary Lions. I think of him often, of his justifiable pride in his Horatio Alger—like business success. Like other Americans who made the same great progress, he was moved to give back to American society a thousand times what he received from it.

  Lovely oxymoron on a sign over a furniture store in Bangor, Maine: AUTHENTIC REPRODUCTIONS

  Autumn comes early to central Maine. Sitting on the deck facing the water as I work is possible only in the hours around noon, when the sun has warmed the chairs and the wooden boards of the floor, and the wind from the water has died down. By three o’clock I have to move, resenting the cold air that has chased me inside. For a person who likes to write outdoors, this is an unwelcome expulsion.

  But today I come in early to answer the door. The UPS man delivers a large box from Norton, my publisher, containing copies of my new book. Seeing all these clones is a jolt, a multiple reminder that all my worries about word choice, sentence direction and structure, exclusions and inclusions, are now immutably settled, set in concrete print, unalterable. Nothing can be done about any of it, no improvement is possible.

  The only pleasure I feel now is in looking at the jacket, which contains a photograph, taken by Jim Holdsworth, an acquaintance in nearby Sedgwick. It is of an old car, belonging to another Sedgwick resident, Bill Petry, the agent who sold us our house and later our friend. It sits in a field in Blue Hill that now houses the Episcopal church moved recently from Penobscot. Tall, yellow grass almost obscures its wheels. It looks worn but sturdy and wears its seventy-four years with a certain resignation if not grace. And what is most gratifying, like me who am almost the same age, it still runs.

  I regard it as a fitting metaphor for me, rickety but in some ways still somewhat serviceable, of a respectable vintage and a discreet color (black). Both it and the one manufactured a year later, the year of my birth, lack chrome because the Great War was making use of that metal.

  The mail brings more reviews. Every time I see those Xeroxes in their fat Norton envelope my heart sinks. Sometimes I have to put them down and compose myself before I have the courage to read the fine print. Today there is one from Dave Wood, a long column that he writes for the Minneapolis Star & Tribune. He makes the appropriate admission that he is a friend of mine (from our joint service on the board of the National Book Critics Circle) and then says End Zone surprised him because he never thought all this was going on within me.

  I understand this comment. It is curious to read books written by friends or acquaintances, especially if they are autobiographical, and to realize how little one has really known about the writers, how much one has been unable even to guess about them. Finding their lives fixed strangely to the page by their own hand is something like being in a foreign city and coming upon a married friend from home accompanied by a lady not his wife. Shock. Why is he here? Who is she? What is going on? How is it I never guessed? Did I really know him at all? Truly, we know almost nothing about each other, no matter how close or closely related we are, and what we think we know often turns out to be mistaken.

  This is my third September in Maine, the third time I have watched leaves turn abruptly to yellow or occasionally to red. (As early as the sixteenth century, the OED informs me, the word ‘fall’ appeared in the English language for the season in which the leaves drop.) So this season is as properly called fall as autumn.

  I sense the water in the Cove growing chilly and hostile to swimmers, seabirds, and summer boats.… Working on a new novel, I find it hard to shut out entirely the world of cities, Washington and New York, that I thought I had left behind. The telephone rings often from those places. End Zone is making its gallant little way into areas beyond the Cove. People call, or write, or stop by to say they have read it. Norton’s Fran Rosencrantz, who handles such things, makes a few plans for me to ‘appear.’ Radio hosts ask for interviews. These I do not mind doing, since on radio I do not need to worry about having my hair cut or wearing makeup, procedures I had to suffer through the year I did book reviews once a month on The MacNeil/ Lehrer News Hour. Oh, the anguish, the shock of recognition, at seeing one’s face on a TV screen, looking large, lined, and elderly, even with hair cut and lipstick applied.

  A few radio interviews are scheduled—one with Noah Adams at my old home station, National Public Radio. This kind of ‘promotion’ causes me to wonder: How much more of interest do I have to say that I have not already said in the book? Will not some of the same people hear more than one interview, and be taken aback at the poverty of my replies? Will I not repeat myself, thus sounding somewhat senile? Except to hope that talking about the book may sell a few copies, I can think of no reason for this further indecent exposure.

  End of the month: At six o’clock last evening a longti
me acquaintance, Morris Philipson, called. He is a good novelist and a fine editor (he directs the University of Chicago Press). He says he is much taken with End Zone. I listen with embarrassed pleasure while he goes on about its virtues. He adds that he would like to publish, in paper, two of my novels now long out of print. At this point my pleasure knows no bounds. I ask him to talk to Tim Seldes, my agent. He says he will, I thank him. When we say goodbye and hang up, I have to sit down.

  But, as always with me, I cannot accept praise without strong doubts arising at once. I note the time—five o’clock where Morris is—cocktail hour in Chicago. No doubt, I tell myself, his compliments are the result of euphoria engendered by shots of Boodles gin or Johnny Walker Black Label scotch.

  I see that Kitty Kelley’s biography of Nancy Reagan is on the best-seller list, as predicted. Sybil, my daughter Elizabeth Cale, and I went to the publishing party for her and her book last spring. It was a lavish, Washington-style bash, with wonderful food. The catering is Sybil’s department: she cases the food table and directs me to the special goodies, while I talk to the literati and journalists at the party.

  But this party was different. There were no literary friends there, only members of all the media, who followed Kitty around the room as she walked under a specially arranged traveling spotlight. I could not get near her after the first hugging at the reception line. Sybil, Elizabeth, and I ate hugely, tried not to be trampled by the men lugging TV cameras, and then watched the antics of the press. Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio asked me who was important here for her to interview. I could think of no one. Later I saw her, desperate, engaged in a serious on-the-mike discussion with another member of the press. I surmised they were interviewing each other.

  October

  A friend asked Yogi Berra:

  ‘Do you know what time it is?’

  Yogi Berra: ‘You mean now?’

  The 1st: This month begins with good weather still holding. All the boats have been taken up, so the water in the Cove is smooth, clear of everything but the vestigial red dots of buoys. We have begun to collect pine branches to cover our bushes and perennials. We are told that the time to spread them is after the first ‘hard’ frost. The scarlet expanses of blueberry fields, so unexpected a sight to a newcomer to these parts and so startlingly beautiful, make it seem unlikely that winter is almost upon us. Yet local wisdom assures us snow might well fall before this month is out.

  I talk to Jane, who reports she is still experiencing the same strange taste and odor sensations. She has a distant appointment with her neurologist, and meanwhile continues to control the unpleasantness with Valium. She inquires about the weather. I say the summer is definitely over.

  A mistress of the hyperbole and no aficionada of this state, she says: ‘Over? It was over on July 25th. And began on July 23rd.’

  Kate, with the reluctance to discuss her own symptoms characteristic, I believe, of most physicians, says she is ‘okay,’ which probably means she is being typically stoic, at least when she speaks to me. I believe doctors think they will lessen their authority with the lay world if they admit to being sick themselves.

  Patty Smith, our friend in Camden, Maine, who is slowly recovering from the loss (from cancer) of her longtime companion, Myrna Basom, is going to Edisto, South Carolina, for a short rest. ‘Aha,’ I say, ‘I’ve read a fine novel about Edisto and Hilton Head, by Padgett Powell.’ She asks me to send it to her.

  Before I do, I reread it. The narrator, a boy named Simon, wants to be a writer when he grows up. He says, ‘This is my motto: Never to forget that, dull as things get, old as it is, something’s happening, happening all the time, and to watch it.’

  And the black family servant, Theenie, tells him, ‘Sim, you ain’t got to do but two things. One is to die, and thuther is to live till you die.’

  Elizabeth, my most iconoclastic daughter, telephones to say she has read ‘the book’ and finds it unsettling to discover what was going on inside her mother in that dire year. I find it odd that no one, including Sybil, with whom I live so closely, seems to have been aware of the depth of my despair at growing old and feeling my age.… Barbara Wheeler, oldest of the women who are my daughters, reports that Elizabeth warned her that she would find End Zone very, very dour. ‘It is like reading through chocolate pudding,’ said Elizabeth.

  Why do old people so often hide their deepest despair? Is it unpopular, unsociable perhaps, to confess that one hates being old? The more acceptable stance is cheery acceptance, ‘The best is yet to be’ proclamations, the happy assurances of sanguinity. And if old people do not feel this, they find it more politic to profess it.

  The Sunday New York Times Book Review arrived today (Tuesday). A biography of the Sicilian novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa has appeared. Vaguely I remember his only novel, The Leopard, a large and, I recall, fascinating but difficult book which I read years ago but cannot now remember clearly. It appeared a few months after his death and sold extraordinarily well—fifty-two printings in its first year, I learn from the review.

  I have always wondered about big, serious, well-praised novels that have large sales. In their first year, they seem to appear on coffee tables in every literate, well-to-do household. Are they bought and then read? Or are they displayed as witnesses to the fact that the owners aspire to a certain level of ‘culture’? Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is such a book. Two years after its publication it began to arrive among the used volumes Sybil bought for Wayward Books. Copies of the first printing that she acquired were in surprisingly good shape, dust jackets intact, a sign, I believe, that they had served more for decoration or display than reading matter.

  Early this morning thick fog from the sea arrived to obscure the wild field in front of our house. Its very existence seemed to be threatened. Death must be an atmosphere like this: the slow approach (‘on little cat feet,’ Sandburg said of fog, but to me today it appeared more like the claw feet of tigers) of dim, impenetrable, grey-fog light, until it turns into the dark, fills one’s throat and ears, closes one’s eyes (Emily Dickinson: ‘And then I could not see to see’), and then obliterates existence itself.

  The fog remains throughout the day, deadening even the activity in my study. I write nothing of interest or use in the novel, and instead of battling my infertility I settle into the old rocker beside the unlit wood stove (fog outside often makes an indoor room seem warm, somehow) to read, as desultorily as I was writing. I pull from the shelf a volume of John Ruskin’s Choice Selections published by John Wiley in New York in 1884. Out of it falls a leather bookmark I must have put there sometime in the seventies when I was a contributing editor to the Saturday Review. It is embossed with a finger pointing upward and contains the admonition KNOW THY PLACE.

  At last, after so many years of spiritual wandering, I know mine. It is here, in this study or on this deck, whether in productivity or blockage, in bright sunlight or fog, in autumn/fall, but always in sight of the infinitely varied Cove.

  Next day: Surprisingly, I find I am caught by Ruskin. I remember finding him hard to read for any length of time when I was in graduate school. Now I have grown more patient with writing on ethical subjects, a sign of age, I imagine. For instance, he advises me that ‘Man’s use and function … are to be the witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness.’ I like the adjective ‘reasonable’ here.

  Or again, in a selection titled ‘Man’s Business in Life,’ Ruskin says it is ‘first, to know themselves and the existing state of things they have to do with, secondly, to be happy in themselves, and in the existing state of things, and thirdly, to mend themselves and the existing state of things, as far as either are marred or mendable.’

  I know why I copy this out, and then sit looking at the sentences. Because so many of the letters I have received about End Zone in the past four weeks reproach me for my seeming ingratitude at ‘the existing state of things’ for me. And t
his is true in some of the reviews. Joan Dietz writes, in the Boston Globe, ‘Enjoyment of the present and anticipation of the future came hard for Grumbach,’ and Kay Haddaway in the Fort Worth Morning Star-Telegram, ‘I found myself growing impatient with Grumbach’s dark emphasis on the losses in her life.’

  There are other reprimands, in print and in correspondence, that I take seriously, and wonder: Was the mood of that time of my seventieth birthday, and so the first half of the book about it, undeservedly, unaccountably bleak? In the light of all that I still had at that age—successful children, a beloved companion, and many friends, a good house in a cherished place, relatively good health, a satisfying occupation from which I do not need to retire because in it I do not grow over-age in grade, as we used to say in the Navy—should I not be cheerful, grateful, optimistic?

  The only answer I can give, to myself and to the others who write to rebuke me for my ‘acerbic,’ ‘suspicious,’ ‘cranky,’ ‘bitter,’ ‘grim,’ ‘bleak,’ ‘flinty,’ ‘quirky,’ ‘crusty,’ and ‘grumpy’ self (this list of adjectives was culled from recent reviews of End Zone by Sybil when I could not bring myself to do it), is that sadly, unfortunately, I wrote as I felt. I would like it to have been different. I would have preferred to be, in Ruskin’s terms, happy in myself and contented with the existing state of things. I wanted to be honest, and so I wrote of my despair. As Walter Cronkite used to say when he signed off from the CBS Evening News: ‘And that’s the way it is.’

  At eight this morning I drove into Ellsworth to take the Maine driver’s test. My Subaru station wagon (so omnipresent that it is often called the State Car of Maine) is now registered here, and I vote and pay taxes in the town of Sedgwick. So it was time to change my license. Last night I studied the thick little manual, memorizing the strict laws about OUI (operating a car under the influence …) and all the fines for every kind of minor and major offense.