Elizabeth celebrates the lifting of the fog and the warm days by working in the woods, clearing away dead trees and cutting down broken and obstructive ones. I work inside at my desk, watching the to-be-burned pile grow as she adds refuse to it. The pile has been there now for almost a year; we await the ideal time to burn, when there is no danger of fire spreading to the whole rough field and, for that matter, to the house.
The days now seem very long. Quiet and solitude are Procrustean beds that stretch time beyond the usual hours available to work, to think, to eat (these are better, of course, when there is someone else to cook), to look at the natural world coming slowly back to green, growing life, and the white of winter sinking away.
And safe. There is a natural safety in this place, after the threat of Washington, D.C., disturbed only by dire TV and newspaper reports from the outside world. Yesterday there was a terrible accident in Washington Square Park in New York City. A seventy-three-year-old lady driving a large car lost control and drove headlong into the square, killing five people and wounding many others seated on the benches in the park before her car was brought to a stop at the Garibaldi statue. Helen Yglesias’s son Rafe had just walked home through this park on his way to his apartment, which looks down over it.
I thought of all the times in the late thirties I had sat on a bench near the greened-over image of the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi to study for final exams, of the elderly actress I talked to once on that same bench who then, twenty-five years later, turned up unexpectedly in a novel I was writing, of the madam who sunned herself beside me on a bench near the entrance at Washington Square South in 1939 and who tried to persuade me that her profession was preferable in every way to the career in scholarship for which I was preparing.
And I remembered my grandmother, a third-generation New Yorker, who used to go every afternoon ‘to the benches’ that lined the divider strips on Broadway. One day, feeling ill, she stayed at home. On that afternoon a taxi driver, who was drunk, drove up over the curb and killed three of her elderly friends as they sat ‘schmoozing,’ as she said, with each other.
The benches, in Riverside Park where I played as a child without my mother and in Central Park, all once seemed to be oases of safety in the traffic-ridden city, until muggers, rapists, and harassers occupied the parks, and yesterday, when their protective nature was violated by a bloody accident. At best, safety is a temporary and transient condition in cities, a mirage even. My memories are a throwback to a time when most of Manhattan, like a small island, could be traversed safely on foot. Sargentville has no sidewalks, no parks, no benches. It resides on a wooded peninsula surrounded by coves, bays, ponds, and the Reach. It needs no zones of security. As yet.
Yesterday I tried to dig up some of the common daylilies that threaten to smother our rock in June. Elizabeth warns me to stay away from the crocuses almost hidden among the lilies. She says they will wither at the slightest touch. All too true. My shovel slips. This morning two of the brave little purple advance scouts for spring are wilted.
While I uncover perennials and bushes, Los Angeles is in the grip of rioting, looting, burning, and murdering following the announcement of the Rodney King verdict. The police officers who beat the defenseless speeder mercilessly as he lay on his stomach on the road have been exonerated of wrongdoing.
Now the police, more than ready to take the offensive against a single black, are said to be helpless against the rioters. ‘Public Sector is Overwhelmed’ is the Times headline after the second night of turmoil. A whole district of the City of Angels is a giant bonfire, while I sit here in peace and safety, my tunnel vision limited to the silent sea, the burgeoning woods and fields.
Today the National Guard moves into the city. Patty Smith, my companion in Kailuum this winter, comes up from Camden to spend her fiftieth birthday here, bringing some wet suits that belonged to her good friend Myrna. They are intended for Sybil to use in the Cove and stem from a remark Sybil once made that if she possessed a fur-lined wet suit she would venture into the chilly waters of the Cove.
We take the wine Patty has brought, a bottle from Myrna’s excellent cellar, to the beach and drink some of it in the enclosed serenity of the Cove, inspecting the great stones to see how they have wintered over. No one has come back as yet to open the houses I can see across from Byard’s Point, no boats are in the water, the Davies and the Marsden houses, the only other places in sight, look uninhabited from here (although I am certain they are not), and the seabirds have not yet arrived from their winter in the southern sun.
We are alone in all this sane, pullulating splendor while across the country a city burns, and men and women lie dead in the streets. There is a striking inequity in the life I am permitted to live, and the one the blacks of East Los Angeles are forced to endure.
‘But time runs on, runs on,’ writes William Butler in ‘I am of Ireland.’ (I am reading his The Tower):
What shall I do with this absurdity—
…
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog’s tail.
I remember a riot in Harlem when I was quite young. My father’s friend owned a men’s clothing shop there on 125th Street. My father considered him a fool for staying in that location, but Mr. Silverman liked his customers and often gave them large discounts when he knew they were up against it. At three o’clock in the morning of the riot (I no longer remember what caused it but I think it might have been the way an anti-dispossession rally ended, the same one that Ralph Ellison wrote about in The Invisible Man), the police telephoned the Silvermans to tell them the store had been burned to the ground. Mr. Silverman took the call, fell to the ground, and died of a heart attack. Mrs. Silverman (this begins to resemble a soap opera, but it is tragic fact) attended her husband’s funeral, came home in a state of shock, served a supper to the other mourners, and, when they had all departed, jumped from a window of their eighth-story Riverside Drive apartment house, and died. There were no immediate survivors.
The frowning child that I was: Martie Dickson told me during dinner last night that when she was a child she believed that all her thoughts were prominently displayed on her forehead for everyone to see. People always knew what she was thinking; she had no place to hide.
Two foolish sentences, heard this week when I listened to two young women discuss their friends, and themselves: ‘She needs to feel good about herself’ and ‘I need to find myself.’
I read in the paper that newsreels of the years 1914—1950 are turning to dust because they were made on nitrate-based film. This is another way that history is wiped out: aging technology fails. The fragility of history becomes greater all the time, with every new invention for preserving it. We, of course, are part of the fragility. We forget, or ignore it, or rewrite it to suit our purposes. Every time I see the word ‘revisionist’ in the subtitle of a new book on history I shudder.
I have come to believe that the best history is fiction, the impressionistic, egocentric views of the past that have all the validity of acknowledged selection, formulation into ‘good’ style, and conscious omissions. Read War and Peace, The Red Badge of Courage, The Naked and the Dead, and Going After Cacciato for the true histories of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812, the Civil War, World War II, and the Vietnam War.
Last night we watched the film Amadeus on VCR. It is splendid, moving entertainment and the music is fine, but I am aware that its portrait of Mozart is dubious, as is its view of Antonio Salieri. Is it history? Well, I suppose, of a kind. Millions of viewers will accept it as ‘the truth.’ It will be all they will ever know of Mozart, which is too bad in a way, but better than complete ignorance. Absolute truth (if that is ever possible) is rarely the best entertainment.
This morning an ax fell. My agent telephoned to tell me that our tenant-to-be had bounced six rent checks at her previous house and had failed to pay agreed-upon utility bills listed under the landlord’s name. In our trusting innocence, we h
ad not checked her references, had not even given it a thought, because, after all, she was one of us, part of the moral literary sorority.
I remember my youthful conviction that only good people wrote good books, and evil persons inevitably produced bad ones. I had to surrender that belief quickly, and now I know that good writers are not necessarily honest, and bad ones may well be the soul of probity. Sybil’s disillusion and disappointment are sad to see, because she was so delighted to think she would be able to keep the apartment for another year.
My feelings are different. I have wanted to live full-time and permanently in Maine. I am fearful of cities and glad to think about having all my books and belongings in the one place I think of as home. I am tired of lugging my heavy computer from place to place, and of trips back and forth, thousands of miles each year in cars overloaded with new things for the house and old things for the apartment. But, knowing her frustration, I say nothing of this to Sybil.
Shall we try to find a new sublessee? There is very little time between now and the date Sybil is scheduled to leave Washington for Maine. You decide, I say to her, and hang up on the hour-long debate we have had on the subject. Next morning she says, ‘I’ve made up my mind to bite the bullet. Let’s give it up.’ I agree to come down in a week to help her pack and prepare to relinquish the apartment.
My fantasy life has sometimes been aided by the help-wanted ads. I read them carefully and, completely forgetting my age and infirmities, seriously consider the possibility of employment. I read there is a search for a new director of the Peace Corps. Without a moment’s hesitation, I think: That would be an interesting job. Or a manager of a pet store is sought: I think I would enjoy taking care of animals, fish, birds. That’s a good job for me. In those fine, dreaming moments I am able to consider making a living as the night clerk in a Holiday Inn, the secretary to a dentist, an assistant librarian in a small town in Nebraska, a teacher of the blind (‘We will train you’). I am especially taken with ads that contain the consoling sentence ‘No experience necessary,’ because I know how scant is my experience in almost everything. Then harsh reality steps in to remind me of my age, my condition, and the fact that being old is the single great limitation upon potentiality. There is not time to become anything else. There is barely enough time to finish being what it is you are.
It is still cool, usually foggy, always muddy, and quite often raining up here in April. Sybil calls to boast that, in Washington, ‘it is beautiful, in the eighties, and everything is in bloom.’ Nothing is in bloom here but, I console myself, everything will be, soon.
I spend an evening going into Ellsworth to the Grand Theater to see a mediocre film. To do this I drive forty-four miles. Coming home that night on dark, winding roads I have a sudden flash of memory about the Loews theaters I used to attend.
When I achieved the age of nine I was allowed to walk the two blocks from our apartment on West End Avenue to the Loews 83rd, as we called it, every Saturday noon. With me I carried the precious little red book of passes my family was given every year by virtue of our being ‘related’ to Marcus Loew, my great uncle, the builder of all those grand palaces that set off my childhood imagination.
Enterprising Max Loew started with peep machines installed in a penny arcade. From this modest but profitable beginning (I think it may have been from the cascading of pennies in that first 14th Street arcade that my grandmother derived her saying about taking care of small coins), Loew made his fortune, and we got our annual book of passes.
I never knew in advance what ‘the picture show,’ as we called it, would be. There were always two pictures, known as a double feature. I did not care; I liked everything that was shown. Before going in, I would always buy two cupcakes, invariably a vanilla and an orange one, at the Horn & Hardart’s at the corner. Then I would present my pass to the man in the box office and enter a side-aisle door. There a solid-looking matron in a white dress would point me towards the section she oversaw.
I was never permitted to choose my seat, but this did not bother me. I rather liked the security of the children’s section. In those happy days, this was the quietest place in the vast theater. Children like me were in tremendous awe of the whole experience and rarely moved from the moment when we groped our way down the dark aisle and into the black row, pushed the seat down behind us, and sat, never once having taken our eyes from the screen from the moment we entered. We were hypnotized, enchanted, captivated, obsessed by the miracle of the moving picture.
So I grew up, fed by at least 120 films a year, some of which I remember, most of which, in the early years, I did not fully understand. My view of the world I hoped to enter was Hollywood’s, my only concept of the entrance to that world my Uncle Max’s theater. My small triumph always came when classmates called the theaters Lowees, and I would correct their pronunciation.
‘How do you know?’
‘He’s my uncle,’ I would proudly announce.
It was inevitable that, leaving graduate school with a useless degree in medieval studies, I would look for a job in ‘the family business,’ as we always called Loews, Inc. I was hired in 1940 to work in an office on Broadway and 45th street, in the Loews State building, on the tenth floor. I wrote subtitles for films going abroad and stayed at this mechanical occupation for about a year, until I was fired for irreverence toward one of the pictures I had to subtitle.
The only virtue of the job was getting to know one of my fellow title writers, Felicia Lamport. She was a witty Vassar graduate, prosperous (I surmised), and a very clever practitioner of the craft I never mastered. I didn’t know how talented she was until her books of light verse and short satiric essays began to appear in 1961. Even the titles of these volumes were witty: Scrap Irony and Cultural Slag and Light Metres.
I remember how delighted I was with the first sentence of a satire on Henry James in her first book: ‘Author Winner sat serenely contemplating his novel.’ Last week, going through my shelves of poetry to eliminate volumes I will never read again, I came upon three books of hers, and found a verse she wrote soon after Watergate, called ‘Sprung Lamb’:
After a sudden religious conversion
The shrewd politician can get off the hook
By answering any who cast an aspersion
‘The Lord is my shepherd and I am his crook.’
Reading Felicia’s ‘Southern Comfort’ I recall Sybil’s unspoken pleasure (or did I imagine it?) when she heard about Maine’s terrible weather:
No meter can measure
The infinite pleasure
Of people in tropic resorts
Who squirm with delight
Through the sweltering night
At their home town weather reports.
Ogden Nash. Dorothy Parker. Phyllis McGinley. Felicia Lamport. Who in the eighties and nineties has been able to take a humorous poetic view of mankind and its corrupt and polluted world? It may be that no lyrical breasts contain light hearts, that it is not possible to laugh aloud at ourselves and at others, for fear we will be thought frivolous and uncaring, or unaware of the great tragedies of our times.
In a mood for more levity, I am pleased to receive from Bob Emerson a clipping from Newsday published in New York City. It contains some lovely Yogi Berra witticisms: ‘You come to a fork in the road,’ Yogi once said, ‘take it!’ And ‘You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going. Because you might not get there.’
But no matter. This is no time for humor. I call the airline and make a reservation to fly to Washington in a few days, to help with the misery of yet another move, this one, we both swear, to be our last. A vain threat: For everyone alive, the final move is into Emily Dickinson’s ‘House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground’ with its ‘Cornice—in the Ground—.’
May
When a man tries himself, the verdict is in his favor.
—Thomas Williams, The Hair of
Harold Roux
Washington: Packing. Every da
y I come upon something I know I can live without. I place it in the ‘Sell’ or ‘Give Away’ or ‘Throw Away’ heap. Sybil returns in late afternoon from the Vassar Book Sale, inspects the piles while I am in the bathroom or at the computer, and removes two-thirds of my discards to the ‘Save’ or ‘Pack’ collections.
I remind her how much that object will cost to ship. She reminds me how much it will cost to replace. I think she errs in being too saving; she thinks I am wrong in being so profligate. So it goes. I suppose it is often true when two people live together: one is a hoarder, one a disposer, and each thinks the other is making terrible mistakes.
La Rochefoucauld: ‘If we had no faults we should not find so much enjoyment in seeing faults in others.’
To us, the Vassar Used Book Sale is a movable feast. Once a year, wherever we happen to be, sometime in the month of April or May, it is necessary for us to be in Washington for this fabled event. In the old days, that is, the seventies, I remember that it was held in some huge, vacant ground-floor store. Book dealers, collectors, readers, and buyers would begin to line up outside at midnight, settling down in sleeping bags or cushions on the street near the building to await the opening of the doors at ten in the morning.
The first year we went to the sale, the leaders in line were Larry McMurtry, the co-owner of Booked Up, an excellent used-book store in Georgetown, and his friend Calvin Trillin of The New Yorker. Sybil and I were late: we arrived at five in the morning, so we were quite far back in the line. Volunteers would leave for coffee, their places being saved for them while they performed breakfast errands of mercy. In later years an enterprising dealer thought up the gimmick of handing out numbers to early arrivals to enable them to go home for a few hours of sleep. This worked for a while, until the stalwarts who stayed in line objected to those who drove by, picked up a number, and returned to get in their numbered places at a quarter to ten.
Extra Innings Page 20
