Nevelson sees this as a process of bringing these found objects to life, giving to them a new and vitalizing order. So, it seems to me in fiction, writers ‘find’ what they need in the junk piles of their minds, where everything they know is stored. What results is a conglomeration not unlike Nevelson’s walls and panels. Like Nevelson, the writer considers the result better than the real world: ‘The essence of living,’ she says, ‘is in doing, and in doing, I have made my world, and it’s a much better world than I ever saw outside.’
Nevelson and I share an affection for Yucatán. It was, she writes, ‘a world of forms that at once I felt was mine.’ I read this to Sybil, who says that, to the contrary, she has always preferred European architecture precisely because it was composed of rounded forms.… Nevelson compares the United States to the Mayan world and decides that ‘truly we are the primitive people’ and they are the sophisticates. She comes out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, looks into the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, and thinks: ‘How barbaric we are.’ No one meditates on the land around this sacred church (as the Mayans did at the pyramids). There is no possibility of a ‘larger spiritual experience’ on Fifth Avenue and 49th street.
I stop reading, call my travel agent, and make reservations for the end of March for a visit, yet one more, to the great deserted cities of Yucatán. One more time I will stand at the bottom of El Castillo and think about the sacred moments of worship a thousand years ago.
Jane telephones to report that she is doing very well at home. The pain is diminishing with the swelling. She is able to eat. Her good friend Blaine Trump has sent her a hatbox full of fine turbans to wear over her shaved head.
So much for literary fame: Sybil tells me the story of a waitress in a Chesapeake Bay restaurant who whispers to a customer, and then points: ‘We have a very famous man eating here tonight.’ The customer looks. James Michener is having dinner at a nearby table. ‘Frank Perdue!’ says the waitress.
Sybil has another good story today. This one comes from a bookstore-owner friend she met on Seventh Street recently. A struggling bookseller wins the million-dollar lottery.
‘Will you give up your store now?’ he is asked.
‘Oh, no. I’ll go on with it until I run out of money.’
I am trying hard to work regularly on this notebook, on reviews, and on the untitled novel (like a week-old baby for whom the parents cannot agree on a name). It is comfortable, warm, convenient in this narrow study where I work. But I cannot recover from the feeling that I am in exile. I spend too much time looking up at the enlarged photograph of the Cove and wondering how long it will be until my visa arrives. In my regrettable state of suspended animation I keep trying to remind myself of Lambert Strether’s dictum in The Ambassadors: ‘Live all you can, it’s a mistake not to. The right time is any time that one is still lucky to have.’
February
I have nowhere to go and nowhere to go when I get back from there.
—A. R. Ammons
Letters forwarded to me here: one from a former student in the days I taught high school. She is now a physician, a psychiatrist, I think, and she sends me her mother’s words on the subject of aging: After fifty years in existence things become antiques. They have moved up from being discardables to collectibles.
Another, from Doreen Kelly, a former Saint Rose student, who reminds me that I provided a bit of spice to her English class. She recalls that I once explained the plethora of wire coat hangers by suggesting that they copulated and reproduced on the floor of closets. Odd what students remember. I cannot even remember thinking this, let alone saying it in the early sixties to a class of proper Catholic girls. Well, perhaps they were not as proper as I thought they were at the time.
If ever I have cause to create a character who is a fifteen-year-old boy, I will be able to use a valuable piece of background detail just given me. An acquaintance, Nancy Wittig, who is an Episcopal priest in Philadelphia, had dinner with us this week at Saigon Gourmet. She is on sabbatical and working, reading, and writing at the College of Preachers on the Cathedral hill. She told us that her son and his teenage friends leave pennies all over the floor of his room, never bothering to pick them up because they regard them as utterly useless to them in today’s economy. My grandmother would have been shocked. Regularly she lectured to me about her first rule of thrift: ‘Save your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.’
I have been thinking of my grandmother today. Sarah was a kindly, gentle, parsimonious lady who lived to be ninety-three. She was one of six sisters, and had a brother who was the seventh child. Her mother, Rosa, a strong-minded emigré from Germany, was left widowed in her thirties. She took over her dead husband’s secondhand furniture store on the Bowery and raised her seven children on its profits, demanding that they, in turn, leave school to work in the store until they married. She was a moderately religious woman. When her husband died she assumed his place on the building committee of Rodelph Sholem, at that time a tiny progressive congregation on the Lower East Side of New York.
I still can see my grandmother’s sly little look of triumph when she told me the story of her mother’s conduct of the family. The rule about marriage was inviolable: the girls had to marry in order, that is, no one could become affianced until the older sister had married. My good-looking grandmother was third in line, and she told me, with some sly pleasure, I thought:
‘My two older sisters were … not good-looking.’
‘So, what did you do?’
‘Well, Carrie [her closest younger sister] and I had beaux. Max wanted to marry Carrie, and Moe wanted to marry me. We told them Mama’s law. They could marry us if they found husbands for our older sisters. So they did. They brought around two … not very handsome men whenever they came calling on us, and after a while it was all fixed. Emma and Lena got married, and right after that we did.’
Sarah’s life was made ‘comfortable,’ as she always put it, by Carrie’s marriage to Marcus (Max) Loew, the fur peddler turned movie mogul who borrowed money from his brothers-in-law to help finance his early nickelodeon adventure, and repaid them all handsomely with stock in his companies, Loews, Inc., and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. When Moe died Sarah was left with money to invest. The lawyer for M-G-M offered to handle this for her.
‘Irving’ (I don’t think I ever knew his last name) did very well for her, finding stocks and bonds in addition to the ones she already owned that made her very satisfactory profits. But my grandmother was either extremely lucky or a genius. Once, she called Irving to tell him she wanted him to buy a new stock that had just come on the market.
‘What stock is that?’ he asked.
‘Well, I can’t pronounce it but it’s spelled X-E-R-O-X.’
‘What kind of stock is that? I haven’t heard of it.’
‘Well, I don’t know. I read about it. It’s twenty-five cents a share, I think. Just buy it.’
She bought a goodly amount of the unknown stock, and continued to buy after it (and she) profited. When she died, because of that stroke of genius, other astute purchases, and her generous will, I was able to help my husband send our daughters to private schools, a good university, and Seven Sister colleges.
She believed firmly that ‘charity begins at home.’ I never knew her to contribute to any charity or even to the uptown avatar of the temple her mother had helped to found. She was very free with money to my sister and me, but she refused to attend the high-holiday services at the temple when she was told that there was now a pew fee to pay. I can see her clearly: seated at the window of her bedroom, dressed in her services-going best black dress, reading the Union Prayer Book all morning on Yom Kippur.
Her frugal ways increased as she entered her nineties. Despite Irving’s assurances to the contrary, she believed her money would not last her lifetime. So she imposed stringent rules upon her seventy-two-year-old housekeeper. When Grace (I think her name was) wanted to buy lemons by the bag for their tea, so that sh
e would not have to take the long walk to the greengrocer’s on Broadway so often, my grandmother objected:
‘Buy two lemons,’ she said. ‘That will be enough for a while. I don’t want them left over when I die.’
I have known people to use a teabag twice. My grandmother’s custom was to use one three times before she discarded it, saving it between times in a saucer on the stove.
Except on the high holidays, my grandmother wore ‘house dresses,’ made, at that time, of a thin, inexpensive flowered material and varying only in pattern and the length of the sleeves. These suited her well, because in the last years she rarely left her overheated apartment. Grace secured them from a maids’ outfitting store, but only on days when they were on sale. Then they cost three dollars, or two for five dollars; I never knew my grandmother to allow Grace to purchase more than one at a time. I believe she hoped to arrange it so that not one would be ‘left over’ after she died.
Her death was peaceful and very fast. I had come down from Millwood, a suburb of New York, where we lived at the time, for my usual Wednesday visit, to discover that she had fallen the night before in her bathroom and hit her head. When I arrived she was barely conscious. Grace hovered about in a state of confusion about what to do, and my father, who never could face unpleasantness of any sort, let alone dying and death, had taken to his room and shut the door.
My grandmother had soiled the bed and herself, but Grace and I were not strong enough to move her. I called the doctor to come at once, and the Yale Registry to send a trained nurse. She arrived before the doctor and did all the proper things to make Sarah ‘presentable’ to the doctor, as she said. I sat on the bed, held my grandmother’s hand, and felt the moment when she loosened her grasp, and died.
The doctor examined her and then wrote a certificate of death, called the funeral home, offered me his condolences (my father still refused to come out of his room), and left.
After Riverside Chapel, the funeral parlor nearby on Amsterdam Avenue, had taken her body away, an attendant carrying her black dress and coat, stockings, shoes, and a round caracul cloche hat which she had said she wished to wear in her coffin, the nurse and I went into the kitchen to have a cup of tea with Grace. (I invited my father but he was still unwilling to appear.) The refrigerator was almost empty. Grace apologized. She cut the remaining half a lemon in three slices, made strong tea, and then placed the tea bags in the saucer on the stove.
It was two o’clock. While we drank our tea, the nurse explained that she had to charge me for the entire day, although she had been here only five hours:
‘The rule of the Registry,’ she said.
I said: ‘Of course. I understand. Only fair.’
Then, writing the check, I smiled to myself and thought: If my grandmother had known that I would have to pay for the whole day, she would surely have held off dying until the eighth hour.
A few weeks later, when I came down to the city to help my father dismantle the apartment, I found that he had invited a secondhand furniture man in before me. The man had bought much of my grandmother’s well-kept old furniture at a dealer’s customary low prices. No matter. The linen closet was intact, the neat stacks of sheets, cases, towels, and facecloths held in place by strips of satin. The sheets were from my grandmother’s trousseau, I believe, made of cotton so thin they were now almost transparent. Most of them were patched with her small, neat stitches in many places and, I noticed with pleasure, many of the patches had been patched.
As a memento of my beloved Sarah, I took one of these home and kept it at the bottom of my uneven and shaggy stack of poorly folded sheets. I don’t seem to have it anymore. I don’t know what happened to it. My grandmother would be shocked.
I miss the Cove badly. Early mornings in the apartment I find myself returning to it. I am back reading at the kitchen table in Sargentville. The sun rises, coloring the windows and then the pages of the Book of Common Prayer. I drink coffee and, feeling a welcome jolt of energy, take out my notebook and put down some of what I sometimes refer to, with intentional irony, as immortal prose.
Later this morning I make a third attempt to read Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul. Of its more than eight hundred pages I have progressed to page 223. Twice I had to start over, feeling like Sisyphus pushing his stone almost to the top of the hill, only to have it roll back against him time after time.
By noon, the sun having risen over Hines Junior High and settled on the roof of the parking garage only a few yards from our living-room window, I know I will never finish the novel. In recent years I have lost my ability to enjoy long, difficult fiction as a scholarly reader would, relishing its problems and complexities, collecting images and seeing their significance, analyzing metaphors and making consistent sense of them, searching the underbrush of the writer’s ambiguous language for hidden clues to meaning. This is the job of literary criticism, often a satisfying game, in which the critic loses herself in pursuit of an original ‘insight.’ I read Finnegans Wake in this way, and Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Pynchon’s V and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
But Brodkey: while I have an idea that there may be more to the total design of his book than I will ever persevere to discover, I am going to abandon the old pleasure of making the summit and settle for an easy descent to base camp. This morning, reading Morning Prayer and Mary’s prayer, the Magnificat, I was stopped at the line ‘He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.’ I have not a clue to the meaning of this lovely-sounding sentence, but I twist it to explain my attitude toward The Runaway Soul: the prideful critic stopped in her tracks by a failure of affection for the writer and his book.
Here in the apartment there are times when my somewhat-but-not-entirely-diminished Weltschmertz and Sybil’s low spirits occur at the same time. My despair builds on hers. We enter a period of dark distance from each other, filled with silence. It is impossible to know how it starts or who instigated it, but there it is, sitting like a great mountain of anthracite between us.
This must happen to many couples who live together a long time, a natural, downward progress of early vital cheerfulness. We rarely grow used to each other’s bleakness, only to our own. Custom erodes the sunny edges of our patience with each other. There is no longer anything unexpected to be expected, not even bad moods.
The sight of the word ‘reception’ on an invitation in the city of Washington sends me to the trash basket. Today there is one from the Canadian Embassy to meet the eminent novelist Robertson Davies. My response is very much like my young daughter Barbie’s when her kindergarten teacher, Miss Bechman (strange how we never forget the names of kindly teachers, even forty years later), wrote on her report card: ‘Barbie is a bright little girl, but every time I ask the class to come to the circle she walks in the opposite direction.’
There is one characteristic of receptions, meetings, gatherings of any size for which I have acquired a profound distaste. Arriving at the door, you are asked your name and then given a name tag. The worst kind reads: ‘HELLO My Name Is ————’ Others are printed with your name in large block letters, some are handwritten, some are intended to be pinned to your blouse or, occasionally, hung around your neck. Sometimes you are asked to write in your own name.
Whatever the location or the method, these are impertinent impositions, suggesting that you wish to have your name attached publicly to your person, to be read by those few who care and many more who do not. It is really a private matter, one’s name, especially if, in a small way, it has already become somewhat public.
(I recall Auden’s lines: ‘Private faces in public places / Are wiser and kinder than public faces in private places.’)
What happens is this: A person approaches, stops, looks hard at the tag on your breast before looking at your face. You can see him wrestling with himself, trying to determine whether or not to bother to speak to you. Finally he does, or turns away and does not. You might have been a signpost or a door, the name
is all, the person nothing … or, as the case may be, everything.
Is it ego that keeps me from wearing my name tag? Am I saying, by refusing to put it on, if you don’t know who I am, too bad? I am not going to bother informing you by means of a tag. And if, without the ugly little cardboard designation, you do know me, is it a victory over obscurity? If I attend another gathering where this odious requirement is in use, I might be tempted to write HETTY GREEN or EMMA GOLDMAN or LEONA HELMSLEY or MOLLY IVINS in large block letters, and then wait to see if someone approaches, looks, lights up with pleasure, and then talks to me for the duration of the meeting.
I decide to decline the invitation to the Canadian Embassy.
In September of 1912, Houghton Mifflin published Autobiography of an Elderly Woman, anonymously. Sybil rescued an old copy from a barn full of books in Southwest Harbor, thinking it might be interesting to me.
It was. It is a very well written account of the life of a seventy-five-year-old widow who lives with one of her daughters and reflects upon the indignities and well-meant concerns inflicted upon an aging woman. I was entirely convinced by the old lady’s voice, wry, ironic, self-deprecating, clear-eyed. But today I visited the Library of Congress, where I discovered once again how deceptive the most persuasive autobiography can be.
Autobiography of an Elderly Woman is a novel, and, what is more, it was written by thirty-two-year-old Mary Heaton Vorse, who, I surmise, did not put her name on the book because by then she was well known as a young journalist. It would seem that she wanted it to be accepted as a fictional autobiography. The narrator whose convincing voice I so much admired was the age of Vorse’s mother.
Extra Innings Page 14
