Extra Innings

by Doris Grumbach

  An admirer rushes up to Franz Kafka (or substitute the name of any great writer little read in his time) and says:

  ‘I am honored to meet you. I have bought all your books.’

  Kafka replies: ‘Oh, you’re the one.’

  I tell the gathering the story about surgeon/writer Richard Selzer in this book, and Joe says he knows another one. Seems that Richard, in his cups one evening at Yaddo, promised the diners at the table a free appendectomy should they require it. Someone said he would take him up on it—he’d been having a bit of trouble in that region recently.

  ‘Would you really do it for free?’ he asked Dr. Selzer.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘But you’ll have to promise to hold very still.’

  My bathroom at the apartment has two mirrors—two too many, as I see it—in which I can observe my failing face. I do not look too often but still, the memory of what I now look like follows me out of the bathroom and remains with me without the evidence of further glances in the mirror.

  Later this evening I pick up a copy of TV Guide and discover how many famous people (‘almost all the people on stage, screen, and TV,’ the magazine says) have plastic surgery on their faces, necks, and breasts. Cybill Shepherd says: ‘I’m aging. I look in the mirror and I see how my face has changed. I see the wrinkles. I know what I used to look like and what I look like now.’ She is forty-two. She believes her career depends on plastic surgery.

  Joan Rivers, a TV comic, says every woman on TV who is over twenty-five has had something or other done to her: ‘A little cheekbone implantation or tummy tuck, a butt tuck, or liposuction around the chin.’ She is fifty-eight, has had her face lifted, her nose thinned, and her thighs ‘vacuumed.’

  When these women, and all the others who have had plastic surgery, look in the mirror after the additions and subtractions have been done, what do they see? The new, artificial, bland, almost blank skin, the plastic, unaccustomed shapes and surfaces. Do they wonder: Where am I?

  In a novel, The Missing Person, I thought about these matters, about a star of ‘the silver screen,’ as they used to call it, who is destroyed by the realization that there is nothing to her but her shadow-thin, celluloid image that moviegoers adore, no person there who is loved and loves. This novel takes place in the last year of silence and the first years of sound in motion pictures, when the star who could not sing was ‘dubbed’ (an ‘absence’ of voice) and often had a substitute in her place on the set called a stand-in.

  Now the image itself is modified. The changed woman may well ask of her own changed face: ‘Who is it?’ For inner identity and outer visage is all we have. We are not a name, given, first, and then often changed in marriage, not a photograph, which belongs not to us but to the eye of the taker, not our reputation, which is always subject to alteration without notice. We are the person that is our bodies and the entity we call our souls (name it psyche or whatever else you wish). These are both affected by the forces of aging and time, but they are all we have of ourselves.

  Our former customer and friend Reggie Wilson has his sixtieth birthday on the same day his new book appears. This is Black History Month as well, so there is a party for it, and for him, at the Southwest Public Library. His wife, Arlene, calls to invite us.

  The Wilsons’ is one of those biracial marriages that prove how mistaken is society’s distaste for miscegenation. These two are talented, energetic, attractive people. Looking at them one could not possibly guess their ages; somehow this very good alliance has kept them both youthful-looking and productive.

  The audience for the program of recitations from black writers and songs is a mixture of races, with blacks in the great majority. Such a condition is healthy, because it makes me realize once again what it feels like to be part of a minority. Together, we sing a song written by James Weldon Johnson with music by his wife, J. Rosamond Johnson: ‘Lift Ev’ry Voice,’ which Sybil has been told is now sung at many black gatherings in the area, even perhaps around the nation.

  Afterwards we eat well from a buffet table. There is no spread of food in the capital as good as one in which the cooking is done by the black community. Ridgewell’s, the caterer of choice for glitzy events here, may be fancier, but it is not better.

  My daughter Elizabeth Cale sends me an expert piece of needlepoint to match the one I already have framed on the wall of my study in Maine. It records my ‘later books.’ She is very skilled at this intricate work, doing it as the spirit moves her, that is, without a plan. She proceeds freehandedly to design and then embellish the canvas.

  In this sense, her needlepoints are representative of her way of life. Unlike the rest of the family, she lives without a set pattern. She moves wherever her fancy takes her, frequently, has never married, has no dependents except for her eleven-year-old Toyota, which has been driven almost one hundred thousand miles, and for which she has a maternal affection.

  Elizabeth’s memory is perfect; she recalls everything about her more than forty years of life. Her personality is warm and childlike. Sports are her consuming interest and she knows more about baseball (the Yankees have been her team since she was a small girl) and football (the New York Giants) than most men I have met. She swims laps, jogs, cross-country-skies, and looks ten years younger than she is. When an enthusiasm takes hold of her, even briefly, she immerses herself in it, becomes an authority, and never entirely abandons it, because her memory will not let anything go. Rock and roll, contemporary American art, hockey, the Civil War—she knows a great deal about all these subjects.

  Once she told me that she remembers the exact moment when she became enamored of baseball. She was eleven, and riding in the back of our old Ford station wagon. I was listening to the seventh game of the 1960 World Series on the car radio. The Yankees, lordly champions for many years, and the underdog Pittsburgh Pirates were playing. It was the ninth inning, the score was tied, no one on base, two men out. Bill Mazeroski was at bat with three balls and two strikes against him. Ralph Terry pitched to him (she says she doesn’t remember what kind of a pitch it was), Mazeroski hit a home run, and the game, and the series, were over. The underrated Pirates had won.

  Elizabeth asked me what it was all about. Too impatient to review the rules and the progress of that game (now, she says, regarded as one of the greatest of all baseball games), I said:

  ‘You can read about it in the New York Times tomorrow.’

  She says she did, and from then on became addicted to baseball, and has never been cured. She is impatient for opening day, and thinks of the end of the season as the beginning of a long drought, although she switches to football and the Giants for the interim.

  She finds genuine irony in this story, because it seems that I, an indifferent and occasional sports fan (I think in those days I listened only to the final games of the World Series, for the drama involved, and could not remember from year to year who had won), should be inadvertently responsible for her great passion.

  Every now and then one meets someone who is a remainder (as we say in the book trade) from the sixties, a mature person who still carries with him a young aura of those idealistic years. John Kidner, our many-time mover, is such a man. In profile he is the image of Doonesbury, the cartoon character who is another sixties survivor. John has tried hard to become like the rest of us, but somehow his life is still determined by free-spirited accidents and the unworldly economics of his youth.

  Three years ago, in April, he brought our belongings from Washington to Maine in an old Mercedes truck that drove blindly into our driveway and promptly sank axle-deep into mud—it was that season. A year later he overloaded thousands of books from our Washington bookstore into another Mercedes van, which proceeded to blow two tires, serially, on its way up, a situation that could not be easily or quickly remedied because Maine is profoundly indifferent to tires that fit a Mercedes. Finally the battered vehicle limped into the driveway of the bookstore at six miles an hour, having been sighted all the way from Blue Hill b
y our acquaintances and prospective customers.

  Tonight we talk to John again, wondering if he still has the courage to take much of the contents of this apartment to Maine. Because he is a trustworthy and charming fellow, we have faith in him, remembering that he used to refer to his company as the Manly Movers, a name as indicative of him and his help as, I assume, was the name of the company of women movers in New York City who called themselves the Mother Truckers.

  He assures us he now has new American-made vans, that he no longer uses the alliterative appellation, and that he figures his estimates on a computer.

  We sit in our half-packed-up living room and talk of our lives and fortunes. He tells us about his father, who was a military man, which accounts for John’s conscientious objections to Vietnam, he believes. He has survived all his old anger and now has a good relationship with him. But John’s marriage has collapsed, a state he attributes to his time-consuming efforts for the moving business. He is a gentle, warm-hearted man who reminds me of Elizabeth Cale: they both left the mainstream of society in their youth and, to an extent, are still living in the meanders.

  From home (that is, Maine) comes word that a sixty-one-year-old woman who now lives near Portland has decided to try to reverse the poor economy in the state. She has opened a bank, after two of the state’s major banks failed. Elizabeth Noyce’s ex-husband, Robert, was the co-inventor of the integrated circuit chip, the basis of the modern computer. She has a fortune of more than one hundred million dollars, and what she calls, in a newspaper interview, ‘disposable income.’ Her needs, she says, are modest. ‘I don’t like a lot of frills. I don’t like to travel. I’d much rather be home raking the leaves and sawing off extra branches from spruce trees.’

  Mrs. Noyce, a native of Massachusetts, has given the state millions of dollars before—to hospitals, museums, and other nonprofit organizations, more money than any other individual in Maine’s history. But now she is worried about the depressed economy, so the new bank, which is doing very well at the moment, is intended to demonstrate her confidence in the state’s future.

  I find this wonderfully heartening. I wonder if it is the result of a new warming of her heart as she settled permanently into the little fishing village of Bremen, which has less than seven hundred inhabitants and sits quietly on Muscongus Bay, or whether she has always been a generous woman. I see her there, piling her leaves into the compost heap, clearing the brush, walking to the small village store to pick up the local paper and her groceries, determined that henceforth she will be unburdened by great wealth, indeed by everything but the milk, bread, and tea in the paper sack she is carrying.

  I get lost in another fantasy: Settled permanently into the little village of Sargentville, which sits quietly on Billings Cove and Eggemoggin Reach, inhabited by less than three hundred persons, I put into the local bank whatever excess income I have, much as Katherine Schaff did in New Jersey. When I die, it is discovered that my entire fortune (?) has been left to purchase all the now-available land on the Reach to be used for low-income housing, built by Habitat for Humanity, one house to an acre, the shore of said property to be, not private, but made available to every hiker, sailor, clammer, fisherman, and swimmer who wishes to use it. Up to the high-water mark.

  March 6, Michelangelo’s birthday, 517 years ago. This year, this Friday, the day will be remembered because of a dire technological threat. It is feared that a virus, maliciously programmed into recent software, will wipe out the contents of the hard disks of thousands of computers all over the world.

  Like every one else, I worry. I ask computer-wise persons I know what I should do. Change the date on your disk. Leave the computer on all day. No, unplug everything. Don’t turn it on. In the end I decide to stay far away from the machine (am I afraid it is contagious?), and write by pen on white lined paper on my clipboard, feeling that any sort of contact with the PC, even with it turned off, would activate the evil invader. Of course, nothing very much happened to anyone. For the most part, it was a false alarm. The effective little monsters went on operating as efficiently as ever.

  Secretly, I fantasized about the prospect of wipeout. To have all that stored data destroyed on a predicted day, at a single stroke, appealed to my sense of the fitness of things. Any breakdown of my IBM clone (after, of course, I have it all backed up and printed out), any failure of this incomprehensible contraption, in contrast to the old reliability of the manual typewriter, or the #2 lead pencil, or the Sheaffer fountain pen, pleases me.

  I liked to imagine that my computer, and millions of others, had contracted a fatal illness, a deadly virus for which there was no cure. If the virus was catching, it might have infected elaborately programmed toaster ovens, keyboard touch telephones and their answering machines, five-disk CD players, and preset VCRs, all of which I have still to master.

  With impunity, should all this happen, I will go back happily to making toast in the oven, getting my party on the telephone by jiggling the handle and summoning up a human voice, playing my old, still serviceable 78-rpm records with a reed needle on a wind-up Victrola, and, with a flourish, writing with a quill pen.

  ‘Toute heure blesse l’homme, la domain letal.’ ‘Every hour wounds a man; the last one kills.’ I try to find the source of this aphorism, without success.

  Sybil has returned from ‘doing’ a New York book fair. She wanted to stay within a short distance of the Greenwich Village school where the fair is held, so she took Helen Yglesias’s advice and reserved a room at the Markle Residence on West 13th Street.

  It turned out to be a wonderful choice, reminiscent of those old-time residences that used to be common in the city, a place for single young women or older women to reside, protected from the lascivious approaches of urban gentlemen. This one is for senior citizens, young businesswomen, and graduate and undergraduate students. It is possible to live here permanently, with two meals a day, for a very moderate sum, or, on occasion, to have a room with meals as a transient. No drugs or alcohol are permitted, on pain of eviction, and no gentlemen visitors are allowed in the rooms.

  Sybil returned from her two-night stay somewhat chastened.

  It seems to have happened the first morning when she came down to a sumptuous breakfast feast. ‘Everything you can think of that might be offered at that meal,’ she said. She filled her plate, took her tray to a table in the corner of the room, and settled down with the fresh New York Times she had gone out of the residence to buy. She said she felt in a fine mood, privileged to be able to read the paper the morning it was published instead of having the usual Sargentville delay.

  Still gloating about her triumph over distance and late delivery, she was tapped on the shoulder. A waitress said: ‘I’m sorry, but newspaper reading at breakfast is not permitted.’ Without asking the reason, Sybil hastily, guiltily, stowed the offending paper under her chair and continued to eat her enormous, solitary breakfast.

  We thought about this stern injunction and decided it must have had to do with the threat of newsprint to the white tablecloth. But this did not seem to console her. She said she felt like a freshman early in her first semester at college.

  ‘I flunked breakfast,’ she said.

  Baby Doe Tabor: Sandy Kirschenbaum, my friend who founded and edited Fine Print (now, sadly, no longer being published), is in Leadville, Colorado, for a conference. She sends me a postcard about the legendary lady, the same one who is the heroine of the opera The Legend of Baby Doe. There is a pouting, golden-curly-haired picture of her, clearly a most beautiful woman, who closely resembles the singer Madonna.

  The story on the face of the card is this:

  Baby Doe had married and divorced many times by the time she was twenty-five. She met a Colorado silver baron named Horace Tabor, twenty-four years her senior. He divorced his wife and married Baby Doe, who was considered a ‘gold-digger,’ creating a great scandal in Leadville and Washington, D.C., where they lived. Scorned by society, they nonetheless lived an extr
avagant and happy life with each other, until Horace’s fortunes were wiped out in the Silver Panic of 1893.

  To everyone’s amazement, Baby Doe stood by her ruined husband and sold her lavish jewels to pay his debts. They had two daughters. Six years later he died, and it was said that all he had to leave her was the worthless Matchless mine in Leadville. Legend has it that on his deathbed he made her promise to hold on to it at all costs. Fact was, True Confessions magazine fabricated that detail.

  But fact again: After his death, Baby Doe went to live in the manager’s shack at the mine, and stayed there for thirty-five years, living in rags as a recluse. The children grew up and ran away as soon as they could. One of them was scalded to death in the red-light district of Chicago at the age of thirty-five. Baby Doe stayed at the mine until her death in 1935.

  She had become a poverty-stricken ‘hag,’ the story goes. Hers is a classic tale of rags to riches to rags, from poverty to great heights and then into the lowest depths, a role Lillian Gish (I remember Greed in the silent days) might have played. Sandy thinks it would make a wonderful movie. We ought to write the script and persuade Madonna to play Baby Doe.

  Mexico, for two weeks: Last year I did not visit the Yucatán ruins and the Kailuum campgrounds because Sybil was unwilling to make the trip, and I was unwilling to make the trip without her. This year, once again, she hesitates to go. Her reasons are various. Primarily, she distrusts the food, having once been ill there, and later having witnessed the long and miserable case of hepatitis that our friend Tori Hill brought back from the campground.

  Ted Nowick, Bob Taylor, and I meet in Washington. Sybil drives us to Dulles Airport, says goodbye with no regret, clearly, and heads back to her beloved city. The plane is full of snowbirds, as they are termed with some derision in central Maine, where leaving the state for the South even for a short time in the winter is regarded as an act of moral weakness.