Coming into the End Zone (7 page)

Clearly she was comforted by the number of deaths she had survived. I can still see her, dressed in her decorous black caracul coat, her black fur cloche set firmly on her white head, a matching muff over one gloved hand, in the other hand the Union Prayer Book, walking slowly from the Hotel Milburn, where she lived for many years, towards Amsterdam Avenue.

Once I walked with her as far as the door to Campbell's. We stood among the mourners, waiting for a plain pine coffin to be carried into the building.

‘It must be an Orthodox Jew,' she said. Of most of the rites of her faith she was ignorant; she refused to attend Temple Rodelph Sholom, which her mother had helped to found, because it had begun the practice of charging a hefty fee for the use of the pews. But from her constant funeral-going, she knew, and much admired, the frugal Orthodox practice of using a pine box instead of an expensive ‘casket.'

She added with evident pleasure, ‘It will be a long and very sad event. A lot of crying. All in Hebrew, the prayers I mean of course.'

She went in. I went home.

The day after. I have survived the twelfth. It is a clear and lovely early morning. I am, kindly, left alone on the deck. In my nightclothes I sit here and watch the light grow stronger. I too grow stronger as I drink coffee and consider this new day. The day after. I have survived
that
day, I have made the turn.

I begin to read galleys of a novel I brought with me,
The Swimming Pool Library
by Alan Hollinghurst. It is an account of gay life in Britain in the sixties, when sexual activities were free, joyous, unshadowed by the specter of fatal disease. The characters are cultivated young upper-class men who speak affectionately about well-known homosexuals and go to baths seeking constant stimulation with young boys, handsome blacks, other beautiful young men of their own class.

Hollinghurst describes their unending sexual adventures most graphically, in pickup motion-picture theaters, in salons of great private houses, at pools and body-building spas. The narrator, William Beckwith, is the grandson of a judge-aristocrat, Lord Denis Beckwith, for whom he has great affection. At a bath, William saves the life of aged Lord Nantwich, and thus becomes involved in his life and the proposed editing of his diary.

His grandfather tells William about being at the first performance of Benjamin Britten's opera
Billy Budd
, and hearing E. M. Forster criticize some of the music, especially Claggart's monologue:

‘He wanted it to be much more … open, and sexy, as Willy puts it. I think
soggy
was the word he used to describe Britten's music for it.'

Years later, the young narrator, his lover, James, and Lord Beckwith see the original tenor of the opera at a performance: ‘Pears was shuffling very slowly along the aisle toward the front of the stalls, supported by a man on either side. Most of the bland audience showed no recognition of who he was, though occasionally someone would stare, or look away hurriedly from the singer's stroke-slackened but beautiful white-crested head.… James and I were mesmerized, and seeing him in the flesh I felt the whole occasion subtly transform, and the opera whose ambiguity we had carped at take on a kind of heroic or historic character under the witness of one of its creators. Even though I felt he would be enjoying it, I believed in its poignancy for him, seeing other singers performing it on the same stage in the same sets as he had done decades before, under the direction of the man he loved.'

Hollinghurst manages to suggest in this passage a parallel between Pears and Britten, Captain Vere and Billy Budd. This performance of the opera, ‘an episode in his [Pears's] past,' is somewhat like the elderly captain's memory of the blessing of Billy Budd. But I may be reading this into it; Hollinghurst may not have intended the suggestion. More than this, the portrait of sick and aging Pears being almost carried to his seat by aides is as poignant for the reader as the opera must have been for the tenor.

The old, gay lord's diary contains a moving portrait of dying Ronald Firbank: ‘I had noticed a solitary figure sitting across the room, also drinking freely, even heavily. He was slender & beautifully dressed, of indeterminate age but clearly older than he wanted to be. He must in fact have been about 40, but his flushed appearance & what might well have been a discreet
maquillage
gave him an air of artifice & sadly made one feel that he must be older, not younger. He was not only by himself but in some heightened, almost dramatic way, alone. He squirmed & twitched as if a thousand eyes were upon him, & then composed himself into a kind of harlequin melancholy, holding out his long ivory hands & admiring his polished nails. His gaze wd wander off & fix on some working-boy or freak until an appalling rasping cough, which seemed too vehement to come from within so frail & flower-like a body, convulsed him, doubling him up into a hacking, flailing caricature. After these attacks he sat back exhausted & quelled the tears in the corners of his eyes with the back of his trembling hands.'

I suppose these tender, intense portraits of the sick and the aging through the eyes of young men (the young lord goes with his friends to join Firbank for the evening) strike my sympathies now as they might not have twenty years ago. I read on, further than I intended this morning, compelled by the force of these portraits.

Absorbed by the poignancy of these scenes, I suddenly remember sitting in the orchestra of the new Metropolitan Opera House (it will always be the new one to me), watching the aged Maria Jeritza being brought to her front-row seat by two stalwart, handsome young men. She leaned heavily on their arms; but her majestic head in its customary white fur hat was held erect. Her face was so heavily powdered it was almost unlined, ‘whited out,' it seemed. She wore dark sunglasses, her body was small and soft. She seemed ageless and frail. The young men deposited her carefully in her seat, the patrons around her applauded. She bowed her head from side to side in gentle acknowledgment of the recognition she seemed grateful for.

From time to time I looked her way during the performance of
Der Rosenkavalier
. She never moved her head, she seemed to be absorbed in listening. I could not see her eyes behind the dark glasses.

‘Doesn't Jeritza look wonderful?' I asked the man in the seat next to me during intermission. ‘She always does,' he said. ‘That floppy hat, that wonderful face. You'd never know she was blind.'

Radio up here is a movable and most uncertain feast. After an hour of National Public Radio, a music commentator with a delivery even slower than mine takes over. He occupies long minutes with his tortoiselike news report, so plodding that I cannot bear to hear him out. A nuclear explosion could have taken place somewhere. At the rate his announcements are made, I would never listen long enough to learn of it.

Turning off his news in the middle makes me feel unaccountably free. No news is good news, the old saw goes. On the air, on TV, in the newpapers, good news is an oxymoron, an impossibility, since so little good is happening, and what there is does not make for interesting ‘segments.'

In our time, ‘news' means tragedy: car accidents, rapes, murders, robberies, train and airplane wrecks, deaths from cancer, heart attacks, and AIDS, criminal acts in the high places of government, academe, the Church, highly-placed-family feuds, and lost, stolen, or battered children. Mistreated wives. The homeless and mad who freeze on the streets. The unemployed and desperate lower middle class. The hungry poor. Wrongly discharged mental patients. Drug addicts, dealers in coke, heroin, crack, and smack: what hard, almost vicious names for the false escapes that the displaced lower and unhinged middle and upper classes indulge in. Corruption. Bigotry. Revenge. Terrorism. Rebellion. Nuclear threats, leaks, breakdown, wastes. The breakdown of the environment: polluted water, air, destroyed forests, reduced ozone layer. The greenhouse effect. All news.

At the same time, when we are told about them, these catastrophes are so common and expected that they pass along the semicircular canals of the ear to the auditory nerve without creating a single tremor in the heart or the mind. It is not that they are bad news, they are hardly news at all. They
are
. We hear and read about them, see them on the screen, and accept them as accompanying, almost unnoticed, the act of being alive in a bad time.

The absence of TV and radio and the ten miles we would need to drive to town for a newspaper are no deprivation. They are a respite, a lull in the customary, numbing avalanche of human misery and despair, the decline, perhaps the imminent destruction, of the race.

We have dinner with our friends up the road. There is kiwi fruit in the salad. I had always thought kiwi was a long-beaked bird to be seen in New Zealand, but recently I have learned it is a fruit with a rough brown skin and tart green interior. Very fashionable. I have tried it before but cannot develop an affection for it.

I realize that foods introduced to me in childhood and adolescence occupy all the available space for acceptance by my taste buds. Mousses, spaghetti squash, pastas of all sorts, radicchio, pita bread, and a hundred other new arrivals on menus: I cannot grow to like them. My enduring passions for food are tied to ancient memories. When I was five, my nurse took me to a pork store on Broadway. The butcher offered me a slice of liverwurst, the casing carefully removed. I still shiver when I think of how wonderful that taste was; I still try every kind of liver sausage in a vain attempt to recover the intense pleasure of the first piece.

I remember the first spear of fresh asparagus, bathed in butter, that my mother offered me. It has never tasted quite the same since. If ever I am blessed with a garden I will try to grow that wonderful vegetable in an attempt to recapture the initial bliss. Other such irreplaceable memories: the first sweet potato, creamed spinach from a glass box at the Automat, mashed turnips and carrots, the soft remains from the broth of a boiled chicken: carrot, celery, livers and gizzards, parsnips and onions, one glorious mishmash of flavors, eaten from the strainer with a wooden spoon. Wonderful.

No kiwi, no papaya or mango, can come close. My tongue and taste glands are incapable of further education. If there is not a long, comfortable, worn precedent for the food, it is now too late. I grew up in an age of somewhat colorless American cooking; the new interest in foreign and native cooking has passed by my old-fashioned palate.

The last, fine day on the bank of Morgan Bay. I have not grown weary of looking at the water, doing nothing, thinking idly in a haphazard sort of way. Thoreau began his book
Cape Cod
(I have an edition republished by Houghton Mifflin in 1896 with delicate little watercolors by Amelia Watson that appear in the margins of the text) by denying this is so. ‘When we returned from the seaside, we sometimes ask ourselves why we did not spend more time gazing at the sea; but very soon the traveler does not look at the sea more than at the heavens.' How long would I have to stay before this indifference set in?

Before we leave Maine to go back to the humid, unpleasant city, I telephone Richard in San Rafael. His voice is thick, as if his tongue were swollen.

‘I have thrush,' he tells me with an effort. I think first of a small speckled brown songbird, shake my head angrily at the inappropriate thought (much as I had last night to kiwi), and say something stupid like ‘I see.' Then I remember. In the old days, children got thrush, white spots in their throats, a fungus, I think. Richard, my young friend, so hopeful when last I saw him, is now host to a childhood affliction, together with all his other adult infections.

Washington. I come home to the mail, an avalanche of brown boxes and envelopes, about fifty review books for the ten days we have been away. My daughter Elizabeth, who lives around the corner, has watered the plants, fed the fish, and stacked books in large piles. The mail fills a post office bin. I think of something I read recently, by Marina Tsvetayeva: ‘I am indifferent to books.… I sold off all my French ones; whatever I need, I shall write myself.' This would be a good resolution for me.

Sybil has gone off happily to work in the bookstore, relieved, I think, to be back in her familiar milieu of friends dropping in to talk about books, neighbors, customers, other dealers. She is a social soul. I often think she finds the isolation of a long vacation with me and only a few occasional friends very trying.

I, on the other hand, sink back into hours of solitude in the carriage house with great pleasure. Does one enjoy solitude more in old age because it is a preparation for the long loneliness, as Dorothy Day called it in another context, of death? Once settled into my study, I move out of my growingly unresponsive body into my head, where I can reside comfortably for long periods of time. It is an effort to come out. Time passes slowly in that abode, more slowly for me than in the world of events, noise, movement, and people.

The first day back: I cannot settle into writing. I forget to bring the clipboard over from my luggage in the house, so, naturally, I cannot write a word. I decide to stretch out on the hardbacked, hard-cushioned couch and find myself making a list, in lieu of anything better to occupy me. I decide to do it in the form of questions rather than statements of fact, because assertions no longer come easily to me. Questions are a more suitable rhetorical mode.

a] (better, more algebraic and ambiguous, than
I
) Is there anything of significance I still wish to acquire?

b] Is there anything I have that I no longer wish to keep?

c] Is it possible, at this late date, to lead a life based on principles, a guiding or ruling philosophy?

d] Do I take as seriously as I should the fact (this one irrefutable) of my mortality?

After all my childhood joys and terrors, and shallow adolescent anguish; the shock of October 24, 1929, when the stock market crashed and my father, ‘wiped out' as he said, put his head down on the dining-room table in the middle of dinner and cried, at about the same time that my best friend's father, whose name, I recall, was Robert Dince, took his life by jumping from a window of a tall building in the garment district of New York; and after the exhilaration of learning how to learn and reason in college; after the suicide (or accidental death) of my friend John Ricksecker, who jumped (or fell) from the roof of the School of Commerce on the last day of classes of our senior year, his arm catching on the no-parking stanchion, stopping his fall for a moment, and then coming off at the shoulder; after the war, in which we women served, and were served by the elevating symbol of the uniform we wore and the power of elating and irresponsible love affairs; after the short-lived postwar optimism during which I had children because I believed the world was going to be better, we would be extraordinarily successful and, someday, very rich; after the slow descent into the present, marked by the dissolution of family ties by death and divorce, by the dilatory liberation of blacks and women, by the minute beginnings of a recognition of overt sexual diversity and androgyny (what in my youth was called ‘perversity'), by the gradual disappearance of traditional forms of religious belief, of hopes for peace after Korea and Vietnam and Cambodia, of faith that the forests were protected, the rainwater, springs, and water table pure, the cities safe, interesting, and clean; and after my sad loss of patriotic conviction that this is the smartest, most ethical, richest, and most trustworthy country on the face of the earth, of certainty that medical science's injections and pharmaceuticals are a sure protection against most viruses, bacteria, germs, fungi, I have come to this age of anxiety, despair, and hopelessness. All this has happened in my lifetime, in two-thirds of a century. This morning, listing it all as I lie on the couch, I still have no firm answer to the question that continues to plague me: