An ugly story, made especially unpalatable by another story in a glossy section of the same paper, this one reporting on Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s housing arrangements. She has ‘retained her weekend home in Bernardville, New Jersey, because of her membership in the Essex Fox Hounds Hunt Club nearby.’ She has another weekend and vacation home on 425 acres in the village of Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard, an estate worth $4.5 million. It has nineteen rooms, heated toilet seats and towel racks, and a two-thousand-foot circular driveway. Paul Mellon’s wife, Bunny, visits her here on occasion. For those times, Jackie keeps, just for her, a suite of rooms, and Bunny does the same for Jackie in the mansion on her Middleburg, Virginia, estate.
There is also Jackie’s twelve-room New York apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue.… Homelessness will never be a problem for the glamorous ex—First Lady and others of her class, only for the unemployed, the battered, and the destitute, the runaways and child prostitutes, the ‘dirty bums,’ the newly impoverished middle-class sufferers from the recession, and, of course, the hunted red foxes.
Our local library has reduced its hours for the fall, winter, and spring season. It is now open only on Saturdays, from two to four in the afternoon. Whereas the video store in Blue Hill is open seven days a week, from ten in the morning until eight in the evening.
We are in the deer-hunting season. In this state, it lasts a month. No one dares to venture out of the house, even onto one’s own paths or woods, without being decked out in an orange cap, an orange vest, even orange gloves. The gloves have become important. Three years ago in southern Maine a housewife wearing white mittens was shot to death by a hunter within a hundred yards of her back door. He was found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter after he explained that he thought the mittens were the rear end of a deer.
Despite all the reasonable explanations advanced for the need to eliminate the deer (overpopulation, the destruction they wreak on vegetable gardens, fruit trees, and ornamental bushes), I hate this season. I dislike the sound of guns being fired nearby, and the sight of carcasses slung over the hoods of cars or the rear ends of pickup trucks.
Somewhere I have a clipping from the Bangor paper that describes the successful moose-hunting season last month. It lasted a little more than a week. On the first day (when only natives, not hunters from away, are allowed to pursue the moose) three hundred were killed. It was gleefully reported (or so it seemed to my biased mind) that this was one hundred more than last year, and the season was expected to double last year’s ‘kill.’
Now I remember why Helen Yglesias has gone to New York for the month. Native Mainers who are her neighbors have parked their cars and hunted on her land for generations. At first, thirty years ago, she gave them permission to continue. But after a while she grew to abhor and fear the constant explosions near the house. The hunters would drain and clean their kill near their cars. Then her dog would drag the bloody entrails to her front steps. She asked them to stop hunting on her place, and they agreed.… But still, she hates hunting season and goes to New York for the month of November, to see her friends, to see plays and hear opera, to talk to her agent about book business, and most of all, to be away from the sound of guns.
Yesterday, in the bookstore, a young customer told me she is writing a novel about her sixteenth year when she was rejected as a cheerleader for her high school and lost the chance to go to the Rose Bowl. She experienced extraordinarily violent emotions that have affected the rest of her life. So she has a great deal to write about, she said.
Serendipitously, after she left, having bought two paperback volumes of Ann Beattie’s stories, I picked up a book that quoted the composer Charles Ives. He is talking about what he calls the Byronic Fallacy: ‘that one who is full of turbid feelings about himself is qualified to be some sort of artist,’ the mistaken notion that these feelings are as genuine an impetus to art as sympathy for others. I’m glad I found this after the young woman left because, ignobly, I would have been tempted to quote it to her.
Later: A dark, melancholy afternoon, so I abandon the clipboard for my little copy of volume one of Hard Times. I’ve learned that reading Dickens requires the presence at hand of a dictionary. Example: he uses the word ‘whelp’ again and again for one of his young male characters. I had thought whelp meant the young of an animal. No, it is that, but also, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a youth, especially a despised or impudent one.
In a few pages, I learn this meaning for whelp, and then putto, from an Italian word for boy, a drawing of a cherubic infant. And ‘herm,’ a four-sided shaft with a statue of Hermes whose erect penis passersby stroke for luck. All this explains why I am so slow in getting through a Dickens novel. I use it as a vocabulary-building device.
Vachel Lindsay: ‘A bad designer is to that extent a bad man.’ This sentence, written on a piece of torn newsprint that fell out of a book I am donating to the Blue Hill Library, perplexes me. To what extent? For some time I’ve been disabused of my girlhood belief that a good writer must be a good person, and the reverse. Sadly, I now know better.
Is anything, no matter how well-intentioned, without its biases? The AARP Bulletin arrives today, full of concern for the rights of the elderly. I inspect the masthead of the Bulletin and note that the executive director, the publicity director, the editor, three senior editors, and the managing editor, all of the top personnel, are men.
Today, perhaps because of a letter from a former student, and two from elderly but still-active nuns, I spend some time thinking about my dead friend Richard Lucas, whom I met at the College of Saint Rose, my first college-teaching experience.
Thirty years ago, when I first taught there, Saint Rose was a small, quiet, church-related girls’ school. Its curriculum was heavy with theology and Thomist philosophy courses. All the rites of the Catholic Church were observed with role-model gentility by a well-educated order, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet—Cee Ess Jays, as they were called by irreverent lay faculty and students.
I enjoyed my teaching, having started with evening classes in English composition and world literature while two of my children were still at home. When they were well established in a nearby private school with their older sisters, I taught full-time, four courses a semester for a small salary. Usually my first course was at eight o’clock in the morning. Harried and incommoded by getting a gaggle of little girls to their school before I arrived at mine, I would arrive at the classroom building, passing the composed, sedate Sisters returning from Mass.
None of these difficulties seem to have been important to me, because the Sisters, from the grimmest and most doctrinaire to the freer spirits, treated the lay faculty well and what was more, gave me a chance to teach all sorts of singular courses (for that time, the early sixties, and in that place, a Catholic girls’ college) such as Black Literature, Proletarian Literature of the Thirties, the Novels of Henry James, Nineteenth-Century Humor, and Mark Twain. I had designed these courses, not because I knew very much about the subjects, but because I wanted to educate myself in them.
The campus, set down in the middle of a large capital city, Albany, New York, suggested the intellectually and socially isolated nature of the college. The school consisted of a rectangle of buildings, fronting on two broad avenues. In the center were fine stands of trees, bushes, and grass, crisscrossed by walks to the backs of classroom and dormitory buildings. A statue of Our Lady, lovingly planted with flowers, stood near one of the entrances to the campus. The buildings were named for saints, respected clerical founders, and, of course, St. Joseph.
Once inside this enclave I felt safe, embraced, even hugged (some felt stifled, almost suffocated, but not I) by the secure warmth that omnipresent priests, nuns, and rituals engendered. We were all, Catholics and freethinkers alike, prayed for at the Sisters’ early Mass every morning. Mary was crowned Queen on the first day of May and students marched down State Street carrying religious banners on her feast day. Classes opened, de rigue
ur, and closed with a prayer. Since its founding at the beginning of the century, Saint Rose had been a haven of classical studies (Latin was a required subject; medieval history, rhetoric, Greek were offered), feminine strength and friendship, and (at least on the surface) undisturbed faith.
I go into all this in detail because much of it came to an end in the late sixties after Vatican II adjourned. When Pope John XXIII opened a window to air out the must of unexamined doctrines and ancient practices unchanged since the Council of Trent, the college, like most Catholic institutions, began its slow but unstoppable journey toward change. It was not simply that the curriculum was scrutinized and then ‘renewed’ and revised. The very atmosphere on the grounds and in the classrooms and library seemed to change. Male students were admitted, more lay persons assumed positions of authority as chairmen and administrators, the requirements for theology and philosophy were reduced to a minimum, and, after a long, unbroken line of presidents who were always Sisters of the Order, the college hired its first layman.
I had served on the search committee for a new president. I had expressed my doubts about the enthusiastic choice (after three other men had turned us down) of the board of trustees and some of the nuns on the committee, but in the end, as we were then schooled to do, I voted with the others for the candidate.
Alphonse Miele, possessed of a rather unfortunate name (I remember thinking), came to the college from an executive position at the Air Force Academy. He was a genial-appearing but authoritarian fellow who enjoyed the power and unilateral sovereignty of his position. He made pro forma moves toward confraternity with the faculty senate and then settled in happily, issuing edicts about matters the faculty believed (but very recently, of course: Saint Rose was slow about matters of academic freedom) were in its purview.
The faculty knew almost from the beginning of his reign that it was going to have trouble. At his installation, which came months after his arrival, and as president of the faculty, I remember reminding him that a college was its students and its faculty, and the administration was there merely to hold their coats. At the reception afterwards, Miele and I eyed each other warily. I suspected his absolutist inclinations; he quickly knew me to be what one of my grade-school daughters said her teacher called her, ‘a scurvy elephant,’ that is, a disturbing element.
The climax came close to the end of Miele’s first year as president. Word reached the faculty senate that he had sent terminal contracts to two very popular priests in the theology department (which then had four members, all clerics). Sent to interview Miele on this clear breach of the recently established procedures of the rank and tenure committee (the committee itself was only two years old), I learned that a member of the theology department had reported to him that the two priests were gay.
It is hard, at this remove, and with all the changes in the society’s (and thus academe’s) treatment of such matters, to reconstruct the repugnance in Miele’s voice when he told me about this. He said he had discussed his decision with the chairman of the board of trustees (a local banker) and had been affirmed in his view that the accusation should be accepted as true, without further question or notoriety, and the priests dismissed. He said he had told me about the unsavory matter in confidence and relied on me to talk to no one about it.
I did not need to keep the secret. The two threatened priests told a friend on the faculty, who, in the way such things go, told another. Indignation flooded the campus and reached the students. We were about to witness what no one had ever heard of before on that decorous campus, a full-fledged rebellion. Seven-eighths of the faculty and staff (some untenured) signed a petition for Miele’s removal to be sent to the board of trustees. Most of the innocent nuns signed, appalled by the accusation. They did not believe in the possibility of its truth, and thought a terrible injustice had been done to their beloved priests. Students abandoned classes to sit in the halls protesting the president’s act. Banners reading REMOVE MIELE and AFTER YOU, ALPHONSE appeared on the well-kept lawns of the campus and in classroom windows.
The board of trustees, at an emergency meeting, reaffirmed their faith in the president. Matters then got worse. Miele found it difficult to enter his office over the outstretched legs of striking students, who said they were resolved not to take final examinations if the president remained. But of course, not everyone was with us. I received a number of anonymous letters, one of which accused me of being the Antichrist. One irate parent standing behind me in line in the bank one day blamed me for her daughter’s unaccustomed sedition:
‘I sent her to Saint Rose so she wouldn’t turn out like all those hippies at Columbia and those places, and now look,’ she said.
The events had a happy, and then an unhappy, ending. The board of trustees, stunned, I think, by an insurrection it believed could only happen on secular, godless campuses, asked for Miele’s resignation. He left the campus, students went back to the classroom for their finals, faculty members settled back into the routines of grading and commencement. Except for Father Lucas, one of the priests accused. He decided not to sign his contract because, I believe, he could not bear the strain of hiding any longer what he knew he was.
Richard Lucas left the campus, the city, the Church, went to New York, became a respected editor at Doubleday, and then a successful sales manager on the West Coast for Harper & Row (in its religion department) and finally, until his death of AIDS three years ago, for the University of California Press. He had been a good priest at a time when there was no acceptable place for him in the Church.
I hear that the college now flourishes, with new buildings, new computer equipment and courses, a whole new secular face as the number of available teaching nuns and priests fell off. The outside world, I am sure, with its accepted revelations about the varieties of human sexuality, now has affected those once-protected acres. Mary’s chaste spirit may well be somewhat in retreat and Richard’s unconventional soul may walk the protected lawns and scrubbed corridors of the college.
The world of pre—Vatican II is firmly rooted in my memory. As Yogi Berra, my resident sage, is alleged to have said: ‘It is a case of déjà vu all over again.’
Jeannie Wiggins, our over-eighty, sharp-witted, humorous, and active neighbor, comes by our place on occasion walking with her dogs, looks around at our gardens, the new porch, the deck, and always says to us: ‘You kids have done a great job here.’
Last evening we kids had dinner at her house, together with some other elderly folk. Sybil, aged sixty-two, said she enjoyed being the youngest guest there. Someone told us the story of a friend, now ninety-five years old. She has rolled up all the rugs in her house to make sure she will not trip, like so many of her friends. Recently, she told her granddaughter, whom she was visiting:
‘Can’t stay long. I’ve got a ticket for a revival of Jesus Christ Superstar.’
Another story garnered from the dinner party, I think from Connie Darrah. She is a descendant of the founding family, the Sargents, of our village, and gave us a fine old photograph of Ella Byard and her friends. (It was Ella who built our house.) She told us about a woman in central Maine who was driving her Subaru when she collided with a moose. She was injured and is suing the manufacturer of the automobile, claiming the company did not provide her with sufficient protection.
Later: I enter these stories, and realize that keeping a journal thins my skin. I feel open to everything, aware, charged by the acquisition of interesting (to me) entries, hypersensitive to whatever I hear, see, guess, read, am told. Matters that once might have gone unnoticed are no longer lost on me. I may sue my publisher for not providing me with sufficient protection against assault by whatever sensations are out there.
La Rochefoucauld: ‘Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily.’
Yes. At seventy that was what I did. I looked at death too steadily and too long. I held it aloft and reviewed it from every angle, like a potter with his pitcher mounted on a rotary stand, like Hamlet with Yor
ick’s skull. I inspected its terrors, and saw its threatening effects in my body, in my diminished hearing and unstable gait.
Now, having passed that melancholy landmark and looked more steadily at my fears, I take heart from this small victory and no longer stare at death’s imminence with so cold an eye. Having been reproached by people who read of my anguish and scolded me for it, I find I have taken note of their rebukes (sample: ‘I am eighty-one and damn glad I’ve made it thus far,’ and ‘What are you whining about? Have you considered how lucky you are?’) and vow to try to sin no more in that direction. I’ve been trying to turn what seemed tragic into what it would be nice to think of as comic:
Woody Allen, twenty-seven years younger than I: ‘I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’
But still, death is the great mystery, life’s great puzzle. To be present at the solution requires that we not exist as we have come to know existence. It must be what James Joyce meant when he asked on his deathbed, ‘Does nobody understand?’ It was not the enigmas of Finnegans Wake he was referring to, I suspect, but the meaning he saw at the moment of his death. No one but he, at that moment, understood.
Word from Jane in New York that the first neurosurgeon she consulted thinks she might not need an operation for what is a slow-growing tumor, at least not yet. She is relieved. But she says she has an appointment with a neurologist to make sure of the diagnosis. Then she will decide what to do, and how soon.
Extra Innings Page 7
