Extra Innings

by Doris Grumbach

  She was a pleasant, cheerful lady. She wore a gold cross on a chain around her neck and little white pearl earrings and a white-beaded Indian bracelet. ‘He has sinking spells,’ she explained to me. They are from New Orleans and are going home after visiting their daughter in Boston. Their daughter is a registered nurse with two children and a husband who works ‘for the city.’ She chattered on to me. I realized she was glad to have, for the moment, someone to talk to who could listen and respond.

  We landed in Washington, where they had to change for a plane going south. I asked if she needed any help in making the transfer. She said no and then added proudly, ‘My son is coming to meet us. We’ll go to a restaurant with him in the airport. He works for the government.’

  We said goodbye. She added politely: ‘If you’re ever in New Orleans …’ although I do not know their names. It was a pro forma airplane farewell. In the airport, waiting for my luggage, I saw their son moving them toward the terminal, holding each one carefully by the arm. The old man was still staring ahead, his wife was talking happily to her son.… Now I know why the business-suited man with the umbrella on K Street seems familiar. He looks exactly like the dutiful son meeting his parents in the airport. Or so I imagine.

  Almost alone in the Chinese restaurant (it is six o’clock, and Washingtonians, I remember, dine late, usually after eight, while many Mainers, intimidated by the early dark and tired after their early rising, eat ‘suppa’ as early as four-thirty or five), I am seated by the maître d’ in an inconspicuous corner to which single customers are usually consigned. It is as if there was something almost shameful about having to appear alone in public without a proper escort.

  I order a Boodles gin on the rocks with a twist of lime. No, make it a double, I say, and spread out the morning’s Washington Post, which covers almost all of the tiny table. Oh yes, I see. I am back in civilization. I read that two women, threatened by eviction from a Connecticut Avenue high-rise apartment house, jumped, hand-in-hand, from the twelfth floor. One died ‘on impact,’ the other before the ambulance reached the hospital.… Of every thousand infants born in the District of Columbia, 20. I die within their first year of life.… Five young black males died last night in the southeast section of the city from gunshot wounds; three were engaged in the drug trade, the other two were innocent bystanders.

  Further afield, yesterday, in central Texas, a young man smashed his pickup truck into a restaurant window at one in the afternoon, killed twenty-two people, wounded two hundred; then he shot himself in the head.… In Old Bridge, New Jersey, a twenty-year-old college student gave birth to a seven-pound baby in the bathroom of her parents’ house, stabbed it many times with a nail scissors, and then threw it out the window. Her parents did not know she was pregnant. Her father found the dead baby in the bushes and thought it was a discarded doll.

  After I read about the former mayor of this city, Marion Barry, who has now been sent to a more secure prison as punishment for allegedly performing a sex act in the visitors’ room of the jail he formerly inhabited, I close the Post. The chicken in plum sauce has not yet arrived. I order another Boodles and think about what it might be like to live in Ushuaia on the coast of Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost city in the world.

  In the early morning I call for breakfast. A pot of strong coffee and the newspaper are to arrive before seven. While I wait for it, I explore the fifty or so channels on the television provided by cable. I note, as I have many times before, that even with all these channels available, there is very little to watch. In Maine, we are not provided with such vast choices, the cable people having decided that too few people live in Sargentville to make it profitable for them to bring it to us. With the four channels we have, there is still very little worth watching, only a little less than with the fifty-five available here.

  Outside the window of the hotel suite I hear the constant roar of traffic, the clatter of garbage trucks, the sirens of fire engines. Altogether, it is like being subjected to the high whine of a dental drill.

  Scheduled for tonight is a large gathering of delegates and senators to the Phi Beta Kappa triennial meeting, a buffet supper and speeches, to be held at the National Archives building. I’ve been to so many of these affairs in federal buildings that I anticipate interminable standing on marble floors in dress-up shoes (my Nike running shoes are not suitable, I realize, for the occasion) and small, ‘finger-style’ sustenance. So instead I ask the hotel’s concierge to get me a ticket for the Kirov Ballet at the Kennedy Center. He does.

  In the Great Hall of the center, the area before the entrance to the Opera House, I buy a sandwich and a cup of espresso, and sit on the red-carpeted steps to the theater to eat and drink, because no seats are provided. I think about the past, when the center first opened and one could purchase only wine by the plastic glass at the little stands.

  During an intermission of a Wagner opera, Sybil and I, struggling to stay awake, asked the center’s then director, Roger Stevens, whether coffee would be sold in the near future. ‘Never will be,’ he said with some show of irritation. ‘It would be spilled on the new carpet and ruin it.’

  Now I look around for spots in my immediate area and see none.…

  But what a treat live music and ballet turn out to be. The Kirov is an athletic company. The men leap high and land loudly, the ballerinas are somewhat more hefty than the anorexic Balanchine ladies I am used to. The corps dancing in Act II of Swan Lake is perfection. This is a ballet I usually avoid, especially in its complete form. But tonight there is just enough of it to remind me of how beautiful are the Tchaikovsky music and the accompanying movement.… Anthony Tudor’s Lilac Garden, done as an Edwardian love quartet, is dull, as the Edwardian age itself may have been, and the Petipa ballet, Paquita, seems to make dreary, heavy progress despite the expert dancing.

  In the intermission, when people walk about in desultory fashion to stretch their legs and see each other, I think of the stately, formal Promenade we watched at an interval in the Vienna Opera House. To the eyes of a foreigner it was an entertainment in itself. Perhaps conscious of their elegant dress, men and women in formal clothes proceed in a well-defined, elliptical path, marching in almost discernible Germanic time, as if they were exercising or performing some military drill.

  During the disorganized meanderings at Kennedy Center, I hear a young couple discussing the last time they saw the Kirov, ‘in Leningrad,’ the young woman says. ‘No, now it’s St. Petersburg,’ says her companion. ‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ she replies. ‘Like in Anna Karenina. Maybe now they’ll bring back the Tsar and that beautiful royal family.’

  Next evening I was supposed to attend a grand-ballroom banquet for Phi Beta Kappa delegates. I decided there would be too many people in attendance (how my three Maine years have unsuited me for the social life of cities!), so I escaped and went back to the Kennedy Center to see Robert Morse give his one-man portrayal of Truman Capote. The concierge had obtained for me a seat in the presidential box of the Eisenhower Theater.

  It was a spacious, luxurious place. I had it to myself and was amused by the number of people in the orchestra (in the ‘pit’?) who looked up during the intermission, wondering, no doubt, who the high executive-branch official was up there. I felt I should acknowledge their lowly presence with a slight queenly or papal wave. I resisted the temptation.

  The box was so comfortable I did not leave it during the intermission. So I had time to study the curtain, which contained a huge reproduction of the November 1975 issue of Esquire. The caption under the photograph of Capote, paring his nails with a knife, read: ‘More from Answered Prayers. The most talked-about book of the year.’ This was the book, years in the writing because by now Capote has become a society gadfly, that satirized his wealthy friends. When it was published, they all abandoned him permanently.

  What interested me was the description of it as the most talked-about book of 1975. Think of that. Seventeen years later, I wager, no one in this aud
ience, or in this city, and few of the literati of the country, have read this book, or even remember that it appeared. The ‘most talked-about book’ may be the kiss-of-death label for the endurance of the written word.

  From Washington I call my daughter Jane. The news is less pleasant; in fact, the tumor has taken a new turn into the sinus cavity and must be removed. One neurosurgeon adds ‘quickly.’ There is some danger that the optic nerve has been affected, putting her sight in question if the tumor is removed in entirety.

  Jane says she will go to Philadelphia with her sister Kate, who is a physician, to talk to neurosurgeons there: Kate feels this is a very good place, so Jane will make the visit. But she seems to prefer having the operation performed in New York, near her home, her husband, and her friends.

  A heavy shadow falls on my days and nights. The threat of mortality to a child is far worse than the thought of one’s own death. It is terrifying—and unnatural.

  A light note. Back from Washington and in the haven of Sargentville, I spend half a day sorting through and reading mail. It is full of bills, catalogues, advertisements, and some good letters from readers. But the most interesting piece of mail is an invitation from a lady in Richmond, Virginia, to subscribe to her service for devotees of historical romances. It is published quarterly and divides the huge genre into convenient subdivisions, listing the authors of each. For example, if I subscribe, I will receive the names of writers of romances in every period of history: the Civil War, the Age of the Cowboy, the American Revolution, the Middle Ages, Western Expansion (different from books about cowboys, apparently), highwaymen, pirates and privateers, Indians (different from those about Western Expansion and cowboys?), the Renaissance, Victorian England, Tudor England.

  Most of the writers listed are women, many with romantic names like Jude Devereaux, Linda Ladd, Thea Devine, Robin Leigh, Katherine Deauxville. I suspect these are pseudonyms, perhaps for the same prolific writer of historical romances, whose real name may well be Mabel Butts.

  The circular ends with an imperative: ‘TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS!’ I decline to do this, and the invitation to subscribe, by throwing away the circular.

  Leaving all the catalogues, circulars, and junk mail for Don Hale, our weekly trash collector, who is, in the way that Mainers are often more than one thing, also a sail maker and repairer, a substitute mail-delivery man, and volunteer fire chief for Sargentville, I light my woodstove, coax it into burning, and sit near it to read a chapter of Barnaby Rudge.

  As usual, I am stopped by a word I have never heard before, ‘link-boys.’ I resort to the OED, and discover they were lads who accompanied gentlemen through dangerous, dark-night streets in the time before street lighting. But why ‘link’? I take the heavy L volume over to a stand and learn that a link was a torch made of tow, pitch, or tallow, carried by the boys who … Pepys, in his Diary, says he was lighted home by a link-boy.

  But then, what exactly is ‘tow’? I haul out the T volume, to learn that it is the fiber of flax prepared for spinning by scutching. Or it may be the shorter, less desirable flax fibers separated from linen fibers by hackling.

  ‘Scutching’—what is that? It is, I find (in the S volume), dressing flax by beating. I would like to know exactly what ‘hackling’ is, but it will appear in yet another volume, and my arms are too tired to lift it from its place. I shall probably never know.

  I am making my usual, Dickens-slow progress through Barnaby Rudge.

  The first hard freeze. Twenty-six degrees at six in the morning. The short grass has taken on its shredded-wheat look. I sit at the kitchen table to read morning prayers and watch the sun rise over the subdued-by-ice landscape. Then I celebrate the event by slipping on the back steps on the way out to the garbage pail. Nothing is hurt, mirabile dictu. I attribute this to the wearing of so many layers of clothes in Maine in winter that I am protected from injury by padding.

  We decide to provide all the entry steps to the doors of the house with tar-paper strips, provision against further such mishaps.

  Mademoiselle, the magazine in New York City I worked for briefly in my early twenties, just out of graduate school, is having a reunion. Someone sends me a list of more than four hundred names, persons who have worked for it since 1935. I recognize five. One, with whom I am still in touch, Dorothea Zachariah, always called Zach, is here mistakenly listed as ‘Zeke.’ She has been an editor of Gourmet magazine for many years. Barbara Probst I think of as a friend, although our contact has been somewhat spasmodic over fifty years. Jean Condit’s name is followed by an asterisk, meaning ‘We are missing her address.’ So am I: I have not seen her or heard from her since I left the magazine, although I have often thought about her. I remember a few raucous evenings we spent together in 1940. We went to a French restaurant on the East Side where sailors, pompons rouges, right off the Richelieu, gathered to drink, and we joined them, imbibing so much vermouth cassis that the way those nights ended is not entirely clear to me. Geri Trotta is listed. I believe she is still an active and productive journalist, writing about travel. And I am there; however, my name is misspelled.

  Maggie de Mille, Betsy Talbot Blackwell, George Davis, the other contemporaries I remember, are dead. I do not know about Bernice Peck, who later wrote wonderfully chatty fashion pieces for the Playbill, distributed in New York theaters. The whole staff in 1940 I remember as talented in maintaining the proper respectful tone toward the world of fashion. Mrs. Blackwell, editor-in-chief, was a member of New York society who lived in Tuxedo Park. Her young son was a member of the prestigious Knickerbocker Blues regiment, and his picture, in full uniform at the age of twelve, sat on her desk. She was small, dark, elegant, smart. She sat at the kidney-shaped antique French desk hardly big enough for an opened book, always wearing a hat. This was because the millinery industry, members of which advertised in Mademoiselle, had reported to her that women were abandoning this practice. For good financial reasons, Mrs. Blackwell was determined to respond personally to the complaint, and asked the whole staff to follow her example.

  I remember arriving at the office on 57th and Fifth Avenue wearing a tam, the only hat I owned. I had bought it the year before when I was a graduate student at Cornell to protect my hair from the rain and snow. By now it looked pretty tatty. Mrs. Blackwell stared hard at my head, I remember, at my penny-loafer shoes, at my omnipresent Peck & Peck plaid skirt, turtle-necked wool sweater, and tweed jacket, and said nothing.

  Almost from the first day, being in the habit of removing both my hat and my shoes as soon as I arrived at the proofreading desk and took up the day’s page proofs, I knew that I was not destined to be long for the fashion world. I was advised politely by fashionable Maggie de Mille, the footwear editor, who wore a stylish, broad-brimmed black hat and bejeweled pumps, that it might help my career if I bought a pair of ‘real’ shoes. That I never did, together with the ratty tam, the Peck & Peck uniform, and irreverent, undiplomatic, tongue-in-cheek wisecracks, accounted for my rapid disappearance from the masthead.

  Six months before I left, at Betsy Talbot Blackwell’s unsmiling request, I had been elevated to the rank of assistant copywriter. In this capacity, and because my new office was across from the fiction editor’s, I got to know George Davis, rotund, brilliant, amiable, tragically blocked fiction writer (after a great success with his first, and only, novel, The Opening of a Door). George was the owner of a large house in Brooklyn Heights on Middagh Street, where Wystan Hugh Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee, and other literary and musical persons all visited or stayed, from time to time.

  On occasion, during the year and a half I worked at Mademoiselle, I was fortunate to be a silent, awed young dinner guest at the Davis ménage. I remember wild, exuberant, contentious talk at ten o’clock in the evening when we finally got around to eating the dinner composed of whatever everyone thought to bring, usually what each one preferred, with enough for one or two other portions. I was so
intrigued by the interests, plans for the future, and intelligence of the persons who inhabited this cosmopolitan world that I ate almost nothing, and felt, as I rode back to Manhattan on the subway after midnight, that my ears ached from trying not to miss anything that was being said.

  Once, the ecdysiast, Gypsy Rose Lee, came to the office to have lunch with George. At the last minute he was summoned to an important editorial meeting (the tyrannical editor-in-chief excused no one, no one, from such a gathering). I, being so low on the editorial scale as to be entirely unnecessary to decision-making, was the only one available to take Miss Lee, as George introduced her, to lunch. I had met her once before, in Brooklyn, but she did not remember me. Terrified, I agreed.

  That day, Gypsy was a sight to behold. She was swathed (one could almost say, in the Old English use of the word, wrapped) in black satin, low at the neck, high at the knees, and everywhere very close to her handsome body, revealing a fine décolletage and excellent, long legs. A straight black line went up the back of her flesh-colored nylon stockings. Her black hair was piled high on her head, and in it (or so I seem to remember) were tall black ostrich feathers. She wore elbow-length black kid gloves and black patent-leather pumps with heels at least three inches high. Gypsy was a very clever businesswoman: she dressed to call attention to herself, to advertise her profession.

  I, of course, expecting to eat my homemade sandwich at my desk, was underdressed. That is to say, I was wearing my usual graduate-school outfit. In my scuffed loafers I must have been a foot shorter than Gypsy; without makeup and sporting a badly cut short hairdo, I felt like a pale, insignificant shadow of this glamorous vision.

  George decreed that we would lunch at Stouffer’s, a classy tearoom across the street from the office building. He said he would join us when his part of the meeting was over.