Extra Innings (25 page)

Maya is taking the new arrival rather hard, with the usual moments of regression and audible objection. She showed me her baby doll, whose eyes she was wiping with her favorite blanket.

‘She is crying,' she said.

‘Why?'

‘Because her mommy and daddy went away.'

Kate tells us that one day Maya was acting badly at dinner and was sent to her room to stay until she felt calmer. Nothing was heard from her for a long time. Kate went to look in on her and found her piling up her dresses and diapers in the middle of the floor.

‘What are you doing, Maya?'

‘I'm leaving,' she said.

I express my contentment at leaving Washington, perhaps too often and too openly for Sybil's taste. But as I do it, I think that my pleasure is not entirely unalloyed. I shall miss the
Times
at the door at five in the morning, the good afternoon coffee and pastry at the corner, the Saturday-morning farmer's market across the street and the flea market on Sunday, and the unexpected, pleasant encounters with friends and acquaintances as I walk the streets close to our apartment house, making me think of E. B. White's ‘the cordiality of geese,' for some reason. I shall miss the wandering city gulls I see from the balcony on the roof of the garage, the same roof that now is sprouting daffodils, grasses, and small bushes. I shall miss the lovely high-church, Anglo-Catholic liturgy of St. James Church, a ten-minute walk from where I live.

Simone Weil once made a note to herself: ‘As soon as one has arrived at any position, try to find in what sense the contrary is true.'

While I pack I read Anatole Broyard's extraordinary book about how he dealt with dying (his style was to make fun of it, to disparage it). Titled
Intoxicated by My Illness
, it is a fiercely literary and literate small book, detailing how he prepared to die of cancer. Broyard was a well-known book critic and essayist whose writing life was led mainly at the
New York Times
. I knew him slightly and always felt a connection to him because he appeared to share my preference for reading and reviewing short books. Occasionally we talked on the telephone when, in his last years, he would ask me to review a book. I remember once saying to him (of a short book by a black writer) that I would do my best. His charitable and comforting reply was: ‘You usually do.'

In these essays Broyard is witty and astute:

‘So much of a writer's life consists of assumed suffering, rhetorical suffering, that I felt something like relief, even elation, when the doctor told me I had cancer of the prostate.'

Because he was a writer he turned his terrifying experience into good prose: ‘As I look back at how I used to be, it seems to me that an intellectual is a person who thinks that the classical clichés don't apply to him, that he is immune to homely truths. I know better now. I see everything with a summarizing eye. Nature is a terrific editor.'

Broyard rejects the polite treatment of him by his friends: ‘all these witty men suddenly saying pious, inspirational things.' His view of himself is never pious, always sharp, funny, honest, and critical. He, the patient, examines his doctors, and finds them lacking in imagination, in the ability to converse, to listen. After all, ‘the doctor is the patient's only familiar in a foreign country.… It may be necessary to give up some of his authority in exchange for his humanity.'

I admire Broyard's untamed courage, his ability to move into himself in a metaphoric, poetic way, to use language wildly in order to write paeans to the self he discovered at the center of his suffering. Introversion of this acute sort is often the result of being terminally ill. There is usually not another easy path into the core. (Good health encourages extroversion.) Broyard's gift was to make exuberant, intoxicated literature out of the fourteen months of his illness.

He thought ‘books about illness are too eloquent … so pious that they sound as if they were written on tiptoe.' This is true of so many self-help books on aging, and of letters I receive from persons angry with me that I am not eloquent in my praise of its virtues. Growing old, facing old age, being old, are all, in Broyard's words, ‘a matter of style.' Like him, I cannot write on tiptoe. My style, if indeed I have one, is to stand flatfooted, terrified, at the edge of the pit.

After dinner at a nearby Chilean café, we take an unusual turn into East Capitol Street. Through the growing dark we come upon a wonderful procession. The traffic has been halted by motorcycle policemen so that elephants can make their way up the avenue, the little ones holding on to their mothers' tails with their extended little trunks, followed by four zebras, elaborately covered horses, and two majestic llamas. The circus has come to town, pulled in at Union Station, and these creatures, alien to the Hill, are making their way to the Armory, where they will perform tomorrow. There is something fine about their incongruous appearance on streets usually reserved for streams of indistinguishable cars and buses. I go home feeling extraordinarily good.

Mid-April. The car is packed to overcapacity. We leave the garage at seven in the morning and make a block's detour to pick up a copy of the
Times
from the box at the corner near the Metro. At Pennsylvania and Seventh street, around our corner, the drugstore, the little Irish pub, the Egg Roll King take-out, and another new restaurant are all cordoned off with yellow police tape. In front of the restaurant there are an ambulance and four police cars. When Sybil gets out for the paper, she asks a bystander what is going on.

‘Restaurant's been robbed. And there's a dead body in there.'

We drive on in silence, she thinking (as she later told me) that it had been a mistake to make that detour, and I telling myself: ‘I will never live here again.' When we moved here, almost twenty years ago, Washington was the most beautiful capital in the free world. Now it is the sordid murder, crack, and mugging capital of the country.

At one point on our drive, as we approach Great Neck on Long Island, we become unsure of which road to take, and stop to ask a pedestrian for directions. His instructions turn out to be wrong. We ask two other persons. After the third counselor has misled us, we stumble by accident upon the right road. I speculate on why it is that most persons will not admit that they do not know how to find the road you are searching for. Can it be that they have lived here all their lives and are embarrassed to say they do not know?

We stop in this suburb of New York City so that I can read to a women's group. Charlotte Marker, a college classmate, has lived in Great Neck for almost forty years. She went to medical school at Bellevue, became a psychiatrist, and married Arthur Zitrin, who is in the same profession. Their children, both lawyers, are grown and ‘away.' We rest at their house, have dinner with them and the officials of Womanplace, and then, after the reading, go back to their house.

Over coffee and late-night, notably good little cakes, we rehearse our lives as we have lived them and as we live them now, announce cautiously our political and social views (which, fortunately, turn out to be compatible), and try to bridge the gap of fifty years that separates us, what we were, what we have become. I remember meeting Charlotte's brother when she lived with her parents in Coney Island, where she was born. I ask about him, and she tells me that while at law school he had an emergency operation and died under the anesthetic. Then a medical student, she was devastated, and still, after all this time, she seems affected by his death.

We leave very early the next morning, eager to be on our way to Maine. They are both up to give us coffee and bid us goodbye. The atmosphere is friendly and, I suspect, compounded of pleasure and relief. We all liked each other, but of course we had no way of knowing that we would. I, for one, felt no disappointment: Charlotte is as I remembered her, thoughtful, honest, unassuming, with nothing of the professional physician (lofty, pedantic, vain?) about her.

The drive to Maine is quick. We hardly stop. We both are eager to be home again. We consider stopping at May Sarton's but decide it is a bad time; she will be resting. So we aim for Nickerson's Tavern, our favorite restaurant, an hour or so from Sargentville. For miles we do nothing but plan what it is we are to eat—the duck perhaps? the fresh fish of the day? We race against time (do they close at eight?) to get there, and we lose. We make it by seven-thirty. No cars in the darkened lot. It is closed. Glumly we push on to Bucksport, where we have a dull meal, made even less interesting by the weight of our disappointment.

We have left spring behind. It is very cold and bare as we pull into our driveway and frigid in the house. Sybil brings in my computer for fear it will freeze in the car, remembering Ted Nowick's experience with his PC. Seems he kept it in his guest room, which is usually forty-five degrees, and couldn't get it to start in the morning because it had ‘taken a cold,' as my grandmother would have said. He used a hair dryer to warm it up. The dryer melted it down. So I am as nervous about the state of health and comfort of mine as I would be about that of a child or a pet animal, especially since she (I believe it is female but I cannot be certain) is six years old, ancient for a PC. I feel I must take care of her in her last years.

The first morning home: We walk our property, noting that everything is in early bud. Our boats are where we left them and seem in good shape, and the covered bushes and perennials seem to have ‘wintered over' quite well. The sun comes out at noon, the air warms to almost fifty degrees, but it begins to darken early. We celebrate being home with a good, early dinner, reclaiming the kitchen and trying to remember where everything is stowed. Sybil opens the bookstore, which is even colder than the house but shows no signs of winter damage. Tracy has painted the floor, and everything is as Sybil left it. She sighs at the prospect of finding space for the cartons of books she bought in Washington. The store, which looked big enough when we first built it—someone suggested it would make a fine bowling alley, and someone else thought we should put a pool in its center—now is filled to capacity. Books, I've learned, reproduce themselves like wire hangers.

We remembered to have the water turned on, and the furnace, but we never gave a thought to the telephone. So, for two days until Good Friday, we are without it. I find its silence very pleasant, having grown to dislike the instrument. Sybil cannot understand how this can be. When she is in a good mood she is moved to make long-distance calls.

I am not certain why I feel as I do. In its advertisements, the phone company urges us all to ‘stay in touch' with our friends and relatives. I think it is the disparity between the concept of talk and the idea of staying in touch that offends me. Except in emergencies, I think letters are better agents for communication than telephones.

One of my daughters once said she liked letters better than calls. ‘I like to be able to read them over.' Letters are history. They are the savored and saved past, the instigators of memory. Telephone calls are the ephemeral present and play a part only in the immediate future.

Today, the 18th of April, it is snowing. (Someone at the gas station told me, when I wondered at it, that it could snow in June in Maine.) We have had almost three inches. Yesterday's warm landscape has turned quite beautiful, but icy and, along the edge of the Cove, frozen. A useful indoor day: I hook up my PC, put my files away, and restore my study to the state of order it must be in for me to be able to work.

Odd. Some people enjoy writing in disorder, feeling pleasure in bringing order out of it in the process. The obstacle to progress in my writing is that I cannot get to it until everything around me is in order—my desk, my study, the kitchen, the rooms between. Sometimes I try to avoid this foolish necessity by ignoring the confusion in the house and going to the deck to work, only to find that the rock garden needs weeding and the spaces around the bushes require some mulching. I must do those things before I can sit down to the pen and paper.

Absurd. We are creatures of irrevocable habits, I believe. And if we were not, would we come apart, fall to pieces, without the glue of custom? Are habits somehow the cement of character? Somewhere I read that habits begin by being cobwebs and end as cables. And then there is that old Latin proverb:
Plura faciunt homines e consuetudine quam e ratione
—Men do more things though habit than through reason.

By three the snow begins to melt. Helen Yglesias, who now lives alone in her Brooklyn house and is at work on a new novel, is coming to dinner. So we begin our life as full-time, permanent residents of this place, with a friend, the cables of our lives firmly in place.

Sybil went back to Washington this morning for her annual trek to the Vassar Book Sale, and to prepare the apartment for our tenant. Elizabeth has come from Lake Placid to spend her vacation with me. For the first three days of her stay, there is nothing but fog. She had expected time in the sun to renew her tan, so she is a bit disgruntled. I remind her that we live close to the sea, so fog is our natural and very constant element, and bright, clear sunny days a dispensation from it, an unexpected gift.

Crocuses follow the snow, brave little flowers that act to assure me that the winter is almost finished. But the house still seems cold to Elizabeth, who is crocheting an afghan for her sister Jane. She feels better when it is big enough to wrap around her legs as she works.

More fog, which I find I like because it keeps me inside working, without regret that I cannot be out clearing the flower garden of its protective covers. And the silence of fog is a boon. Perhaps dying is like this: walking, without stopping, into absolute, complete, silent fog toward an inscrutable clearing at the end.

We watch movies in the evenings on a tape that Bob Emerson sent. The first is a long and very slow story,
The Fabulous Baker Boys
, a movie set in the world of lounge music starring the Bridges brothers, sons of Lloyd Bridges, whom I remember from my moviegoing days. Neither of his sons resembles him.… The second is a terribly violent account of how dishonest policemen are detected by a special branch of the police department. The hero is a current movie favorite named Richard Gere who is handsome and attractive, and very clever in his undercover criminal activities. The good guy who brings him to justice is ordinary-looking, and a stiff actor. I found myself hoping Gere would not be caught by him. This is the power of the screen image, to be so biased toward the beautiful and the powerful that one is persuaded against one's better moral judgment to root for the villain.