Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  Vintage Books Edition, May 1984

  Copyright© 1964, 1965, 1972, 1973, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1983

  by M.F.K. Fisher

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by

  Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in

  Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1983.

  Some of the stories in this collection originally appeared in

  Ellery Queen, Prose, and Westways. The following stories

  originally appeared in The New Yorker: “Another Love Story,”

  “Answer in the Affirmative,” “A Delayed Meeting,” “A Kitchen

  Allegory,” “The Lost, Strayed, Stolen,” “Moment of Wisdom,”

  “The Oldest Man,” “A Question Answered,” “The Second

  Time Around,” and “The Weather Within.”

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Fisher, M. F. K. (Mary Frances Kennedy), 1908-

  Sister Age.

  1. Old age—Philosophy—Addresses, essays, lectures.

  2. Aging—Philosophy—Addresses, essays, lectures.

  3. Ott, Ursula von, b. 1767—Addresses, essays, lectures.

  I. Title.

  [HQl061.F54 1984] 305.2’6 83-40314

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77920-5

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Moment of Wisdom

  Answer in the Affirmative

  The Weather Within

  The Unswept Emptiness

  Another Love Story

  The Second Time Around

  The Lost, Strayed, Stolen

  The Reunion

  The Oldest Man

  A Question Answered

  Diplomatic, Retired

  Mrs. Teeters’ Tomato Jar

  A Kitchen Allegory

  A Delayed Meeting

  Notes on a Necessary Pact

  Afterword

  A Note About the Author

  Foreword

  St. Francis sang gently of his family: his brother the Sun, his sister the Moon. He talked of Brother Pain, who was as welcome and well-loved as any other visitor in a life filled with birds and beasts and light and dark. It is not always easy for us lesser people to accept gracefully some such presence as that of Brother Pain or his cousins, or even the inevitable visits of a possibly nagging harpy like Sister Age. But with a saint to guide us, it can be possible.

  This story about the portrait of Ursula von Ott, a forgotten German or Swiss lady, may seem odd as an introduction to a collection of stories about aging and ending and living and whatever else the process of human being is about. I know, though, that my devastated old piece of painted leather, half eaten by oil-hungry insects when it was already worn with years, has been a lodestar in my life.

  Before I found the picture in a junk-shop in Zurich, in about 1936, I was writing of old people who had taught me things I knew I needed, in spite of my boredom and impatience. And years later, after I had sent away the boxes of notes made in the several decades since I first met Ursula, I realized that all this time when I had thought I was readying myself to write an important book about the art of aging, I had gone on writing stories about people who were learning and practicing it long before I was.

  Sometimes we met for only a few seconds. Probably the old Bible salesman who stumbled to our door at the Ranch did not remember me five minutes later, but he was the one who first taught me that people can cry without a sound, and without knowing why. It was a valuable lesson, and as mysterious now as it was when I was about twelve, watching him walk slowly out to the dusty road again, and feeling the cool new tears run down my cheeks. And I forgot it, for about thirty years.

  Sometimes the meetings with Sister Age’s messengers are long, tedious, even unwitting. For instance, I knew my father’s father for almost twenty years, but we never really met, and certainly did not recognize each other as appointed teacher or pupil. By now I sometimes regret this, because I see him as possessing great strength and dignity that were mine for the taking. I doubt, though, that he felt much more interest in me than I in him. We were as impersonal as two animals of different sex and age but sharing some of the same blood, unaware that we lifted our hooves in a strangely similar way as we headed for the same hay-mangers, the same high hills. Even now I cannot feel any strong reason for making notes about him. But I may, I may.

  Certainly there were violent flash-like meetings, all my life, with people much older than I, of different colors and sexes and social positions, who left marks to be deciphered later. This was the case with the Bible salesman: I did not think consciously of him for a long time (Why should I?), when suddenly I knew that I must add some words about him to the boxes of notes.…

  The art of aging is learned, subtly but firmly, this way. I wrote fast, to compress and catch a lesson while I could still hear it, and not because it had happened to me, so that I was recording it, but because it was important to the whole study. It was, for the time I made the notes anyway, as clear as ringing crystal that such hints are everywhere, to be heeded or forever unheard by the people who may one day be old too.

  So all the notes I took were caught on the run, as it were, as I grew toward some kind of maturity. I never thought of them as anything but clinical, part of the whole study of aging that Ursula von Ott was trying to help me with. I kept on checking dates and places and events, not at all about my own self but simply as a student in a class, preparing a term paper and leaving scraps that might be useful to other workers in the same field.

  By now some of my notes sound like fabrications, invented to prove a point in an argument. This is because it is my way of explaining, and it has always been a personal problem, even a handicap. When I tell of a stubbed toe or childbirth or how to serve peacocks’ tongues on toast it sounds made-up, embroidered. But it is as it happened to me.

  This may explain why I have spent my life in a painstaking effort to tell about things as they are to me, so that they will not sound like autobiography but simply like notes, like factual reports. They have been set down honestly, to help other students write their own theses.

  And now my very long, devoted collecting is over. The reports are stored in some academic cellars for younger eyes to piece together, perhaps. The stories that stayed behind are mostly about other people than myself, and may at least prove that I have been listening for clues that Frau von Ott has tried to show me. Some of them may be useful, in moments of puzzlement as to what to do next in our inevitable growth.

  So, with the usual human need for indirection, I introduce my Sister. St. Francis might call her, in a gentle loving way, Sister Age. I call her my Teacher, too.

  The first time I met Ursula, and recognized her as a familiar, I was walking with Tim down a narrow street off the main bridge in Zurich.

  Tim was to die a few years later, except in my heart, and Zurich was a cold secret city in Switzerland in 1936, and probably still is. We were there because we lived near Vevey and Tim was silently involved with some of the Spanish fighters living in Zurich during the “revolution” in their country.

  We were innocent to look at, and Tim was useful in getting drawings and paintings out of war-wracked Spain, and I was strangely adept at drinking good coarse wine from a skin held far from my open mouth and then keeping it firmly shut, while all the men talked in the small dim cellar-cafés. We were treated with care. I was greeted politely and then put into a corner, with an occasional squirt of roja to remind me of true Spanish courtesy, while the schemings went on in more langu
ages than Spanish and French and German.

  At home again, we did not talk much about these smoky meetings, but usually they meant that Tim would be away from Vevey for a few days, always carrying a tightly rolled umbrella, like any proper Anglo-Saxon gentleman. Four or five years later, there was a big exhibition in Geneva, of treasures secreted from the Prado, and it was odd to walk past etchings and even small canvases that had come into Switzerland inside that bumbershoot, that prim old Gamp.…

  So … one day Tim and I were walking down a narrow street in the old part of Zurich. There was a small shop ahead of us: junk, castoffs, rummage. There were a couple of bins of rags and a table of shabby books outside. Two or three empty picture frames leaned against the dirty glass of the dim window, and Tim stopped to look at them because he might be able to clean them to use for some of his own drawings. A man shuffled out of the shop, impatient to get rid of two tourists before he might have to turn on his lights for them.

  And I saw the picture of Ursula, Sister Age. It was behind the old frames, and I pulled it out rudely, fiercely, so that Tim was surprised. In the twilight it seemed to blaze at me, to call strongly a forceful greeting.

  I said, “We must get this.”

  Tim looked quickly at the dirty old picture and then at me. “All right if you say so. But we can’t take it along to the meeting.”

  The junk-man said, “If you buy it you take it. I don’t keep it.”

  I said, “Of course. I’ll take it now, back to the hotel. I’ll meet you at the café, Tim.” I knew that he needed me, to add to the bland casual tourist-look the Spaniards seemed to want for whatever they were planning.

  “No. We have time,” he said, because he recognized the abrupt necessity in me, and we left the junk-man staring with surprise at the money in his hand, and hurried down to the bridge in silence. Under a streetlight Tim took the picture and looked at it and asked me what had happened, and I tried to tell him that it was the book I was going to write. What book? When? How did I know? I felt irked, as if we both had always known all about it, although it had just been born wordlessly in front of the drab little shop.

  I was going to write about growing old, I told this dear man who would not. I was going to learn from the picture, I said impatiently. It was very clear to me, and I planned to think and study about the art of aging for several years, and then tell how to learn and practice it.

  One fine thing about Tim was that although, a lot of the time, he thought I was funny, he never laughed when I was not. So that evening as we ran on over the bridge above the thick rushing water, he said seriously Yes and You are right and Get busy … things like that. We stopped again under a strong streetlight, and in it the remote, monkey-sad eyes of the old woman stared far past us from the picture as she thought perhaps about a letter in her dropped hand. Her face was quiet, but ugly veins stood out on her thin arm, as if her blood ran too fast for comfort.

  “She will make a wonderful cover for the book … rich, dark, rewarding,” I said.

  “She’s an ugly old lady,” Tim said. “That moustache. She looks like a monkey, all right … that long lip, and melancholy eyes.”

  “Yes. She’s removed from it, from all the nonsense and frustration. She’s aloof and real. She’s past vanity.”

  Tim said the book cover was already a fait accompli. Why not? “Go ahead,” he said. “Get busy.”

  Neither of us questioned the strange unemotional decision that had been made, and after another wine-fed smoky night in Zurich Tim went away for a few days, and I waited in Vevey and looked long and deeply at the picture. It hung above my desk, as it was to do in many other climates, on its strong leather thong, and every time I looked at the old face, she reminded me of what I would do.

  The picture is painted on leather, stretched clumsily on a heavy frame of unmitred fruitwood, about nineteen inches by twenty-five. It is awkwardly executed, in thick rich oils, by a fairly well-tutored young man full of romanticism and fashionable disdain. He was provincially worldly, probably the pampered son of affluent merchants, filled with the stylish yearnings of his peers in 1808. His work is cluttered with leaves and drooping boughs, an ornate marble pedestal carrying his stark white bust, small canvases of amorous conquests in his young life, always with the same beautiful hero lying like a half-clad exhausted child between ripe rosy thighs of uniformly blonde goddesses.

  Of course his memorial bust is handsomer than any living youth could look; his neck is longer, his nostrils flare wider, his lips curl in a more fashionable sensuality than any mortal’s could, even in 1808 in a provincial burg like Frankfurt or Zurich or Bonn. It is all a fine dream, down to the pinkest fattest Cupids born to hold up his nonchalant sketches of a would-be rake’s progress from leg to leg or at least lap to lap of every available Venus, all exactly alike in his plainly limited field of pursuit. And the flowers that climb and twine are his own favorites; all in full bloom at once to symbolize his eternal loss. The flags in bold bas-relief on the pedestal are from the stylish regiment he may or may not have joined, and there are bold hints of more than a couple of noble family crests, in case he might marry well before taking off in search of Napoleon and glory.

  Another dimmer pedestal to the far left in the picture is doubtless meant for his mother’s urn, when her long empty life has finally wept itself to a close. It is crudely made, with plaster crumbling off, and a few bricks showing. There are no escutcheons or regimental flags to ennoble it. It is as plain and ugly, by stern design, as the old woman who waits to escape to a shabby urn atop it, in the shadows of the fine marble monument to her brave son.

  And suddenly this angry and impatient adolescent becomes, for one moment, a painter. He learned the rudiments of perspective on a tour of the Greek Isles with his tutor in 1805, and his political caricatures titillated his classmates at the local Gymnasium in 1807, and then for a few seconds in Time, he seized the image of Sister Age herself. He was too blinded by ignorance of himself and his model and Life to see anything but the cruel cartoon of a once-beautiful bitch turned into a lorn crone abandoned to her grief. He did everything ugly he could, in his escape: her lined face is like pallid clay, with a full moustache and even the shadows of a shaven underlip. The one eye showing in half-profile is red-rimmed and shrunken, and her large ear is plebeian: pink, swollen, revolting, with its full lobe promising a hellishly long life. Her hair is grey and thin, topped with a tiny round black cap like a rabbi’s but with two gold leaves on it to prove something like her Christian gentility. Her gaze is remote, behind her big masculine nose (his nose, but meant for a hero, not an old biddy …).

  On the back of the painted leather, in strong black characters, is a legend in surprisingly schoolboyish German, that says it is a picture of Ursula von Ott, born in 1767, the mother of several sons, the last of whom has created, before leaving for the battlefield in 1808, this forecast of his death and the inevitable loneliness of his bereaved parent.

  So here is the picture of Ursula that for so long hung above my desk or over my bed, speaking to me about life and death, more than I thought there was to learn. Tim never laughed at me, and nobody ever questioned the ugly dark old picture hanging by its crude thong on walls in Switzerland and then wherever else we were. It was a part of the whole, like wine or air.

  I began to clip things I read about aging, because I felt that the picture was teaching me. I thought all the time, in a kind of subliminal fashion, about the anger and blind vision of youth, and the implacable secret strength of the old. I thought about human stupidity. It began to be a family joke, but not a foolish one, to transport my boxes of “information,” as we moved here and there.

  In perhaps 1970, long after too short a life with Tim, during which he subtly taught me how to live the rest of it without him, I found that for the first time since I was about two years old I was without commitments, responsibilities, dependents, emotional ties, and such-like traps. I decided to look at some familiar places, to see if they were new again
. I closed a few boxes of clippings, to keep them from wind and dust, rubbed the painting of Ursula with good oil on both sides of the leather, and left. (Perhaps it is odd that I never thought of returning to Zurich.) I had gone away many times since Tim died, and had always put oil on the picture, so that its dream of weeping willow leaves and fat Venuses and Ursula’s moustache would be alive and ready to welcome me back again.

  This time, though, there was what I can only think of as an accident in Time. Silverfish, beautiful elusive predators, devoured most of the pigments on the ripe old leather, and then much of that too, so that held up to the light it is translucent, like dirty lace … except for one part.…

  Ursula is still there. The omnivorous insects did not touch her. The striped respectable costume, the black cap on her thin grey hair, are all there. Her resigned stocky body still lays one hand with firm dignity on the pedestal under the bust, although the marble is shadowy. Her other skinny arm still hangs, swollen veins and all, against her skirts, and she holds listlessly the letter telling of her noble son’s death. Her sad eyes, always tearless, look brighter than before.

  There are still hints of drooping faded boughs and blossoms, but all the voluptuous rosy goddesses in their lush draperies, in their golden frames propped up by fluttering Cupids, and all the pictures of their young hero lying between their knees, and even all the crossed regimental flags and carved escutcheons are gone, digested by a million silent bugs. Nothing is left but Ursula von Ott, and the picture that was meant to be a cruel caricature painted in youthful frustration by a sentimental boy may well be final proof that even the least of us is granted one moment of greatness.

  Nobody can know now whether Ursula’s son came back from his dream of heroism and noble death and became a good Swiss burgher. All I can see is what he, and Time, and the silverfish have left for me: the enigmatic, simian gaze of a woman standing all alone. She is completely alive in a landscape of death, then and now. She does not need anything that is not already within her, and the letter of information hangs useless. Above her big strong nose, above the hairy shadows around her subtly sensuous mouth, her eyes look with a supreme and confident detachment past all the nonsense of wars, insects, birth and death, love.…