Extra Innings (3 page)

It is almost unbelievable. This morning on the radio President Bush claimed that the “so-called” recession is only a matter of “pessimistic attitudes” on the part of an uncooperative citizenry. I suppose it is possible to think this if one lives in a majestic house surrounded by acres of lawn, uniformed guards holding guard dogs, and a tall iron fence to keep out the disturbing presence of the homeless and the hungry who camp across the street in Lafayette Park. Cheerfulness and optimism are rather easy to maintain under such opulent conditions, but much harder up here where heating oil and wood for stoves are expensive, where snow and ice cover the frozen ground for almost half the year, where there is only seasonal employment or no jobs at all, and too many people live below the poverty level. In winter, darkness descends before four o'clock in the afternoon and remains inexorably until after seven in the morning. All of this provides a natural culture for pessimistic attitudes and despair about the economy.

One house, on Route 15, opposite the brave little sign a neighbor Annie Tobin has had put up at her own expense
(WELCOME TO SARGENTVILLE)
, boasts a fine view of the sunset. It has been for sale or for rent for as long as we have lived here. Recently the sign came down, and now lights appear in the evening in the living room. A car is parked in front of a closed barn. I wonder if there are new tenants, or if the old ones have given up their attempts to leave and have settled back into residence in sight of the red-gold glory of the evening sky.

The winter enemies of the year-round population are the dark and the cold. A humorous story is told of an elderly Maine farmer who lived on the Maine—New Hampshire border. He is visited by a state engineer who wishes to survey the area. After he has finished, the engineer tells the farmer that, he is sorry to report, his farm is not in Maine but in New Hampshire.

‘I'm glad to hear that,' the farmer replies. ‘These hard Maine winters were getting too much for me.'

Funny, but also sad. That is about as far as elderly inhabitants would be able to move, for the most part, to escape the cold.

Right after Labor Day, the Sargentville—Sedgwick—Blue Hill—Brooksville area begins to divest itself of visitors. The first sign is the closing of the roadside drive-in restaurant near us called Milton's Dream, where very good fried fish of every kind, carbonated drinks, and ice cream are sold from windows in a long shack. Sybil has discovered that it also dispenses a small ‘kiddie cone,' as it is called, for twenty cents. Much as I tend to rejoice at the departure of tourists and the restoration of the stores and roads to year-round residents, she mourns the closing of Milton's Dream for the winter and the loss of her tasty bargain.

September 23: Lee Eitingon Thompson, a friend since we worked together at
Architectural Forum
in 1940, telephones to say they are selling their property in Mahopac. All summer she has been showing it to prospective buyers. She and her husband are both ‘getting older,' as we say of the elderly when we wish to be kind. Ed is ill, the place is too much for them, they need to live in less demanding surroundings. A garden apartment will be easier for Ed to get in and out of, and less upkeep and responsibility for Lee.

When first the Thompsons came to New York State from Washington, D.C., where Ed had founded and then edited
Smithsonian
magazine after he had been managing editor of
Life
for many years, Lee raised peahens on the beautiful estate called Rock Ledge Farm. I always looked forward to stopping there, on my way up and down the coast, to swimming in their old-fashioned pool after a long, hot drive, to sitting beside the beautiful, acre-sized pond where transient ducks and geese rested on
their
way north or south, to watching their overpopulated bird feeder. Then we would have a superb dinner cooked by Lee in one of her two professional kitchens (she had been a food columnist for the
Washington Star
), and much good, reminiscent conversation.

Sadly, places pass out of one's life the way people do. It is hard to think that my passage from Maine to Washington or New York and back again will not always be interrupted by a stopover with Lee and Ed. I don't like to think about getting acquainted with their new and probably most elegant apartment, although I will of course always want to see them. But in the space until the next visit I prefer to imagine them in the long dusk sitting with their drinks beside the pond on Rock Ledge Farm, waiting to open the gate when our car arrives.

I pay a bill from Dr. Ramey, a specialist in glandular malfunction. I consulted him in late spring about possible parathyroidism (held in check at the moment). While I waited for him in his office, I read the diplomas on his wall and learned he attended Yale Medical School.

I ask him, ‘Do you know my friend Richard Selzer, once a surgeon at the hospital in New Haven and now a writer of fiction and nonfiction, usually on medical subjects?'

‘O yes, very well,' he said, and then proceeded to tell me a rather scurrilous but funny story. It seems that Dr. Selzer was asked to perform a small surgical procedure, the removal of a carrot from the rectum of a homosexual man. Afterwards, he patted the young man on the shoulder and said: ‘Sir, learn to chew your food better.'

I am reading Rose Macaulay's last book,
Letters to a Friend
, published in 1962. Her friend was an Anglican priest, Father Hamilton Johnson, and the letters are good, if somewhat strange, reading, full of the kind of fanatical, absolute devotion to a new faith that converts often have. Macaulay returned to the Anglican Church after a flirtation with Catholicism. She writes that she is reading widely in Anglican texts and yearning to celebrate every one of the liturgies available to her.

Now, at the end of her life, after extensive travel and writing about what she saw (I am especially fond of
Pleasure of Ruins
, perhaps because she shares my fascination with the mysteries of Mayan civilization) and writing excellent fiction, she is exploring anew the importance to her of her old faith. The tone of her letters reminds me of my editor at Doubleday many years ago, Naomi Burton, who talked of very little but ‘the' Church after her conversion to Roman Catholicism.

I think about Naomi. This spring, after a long, almost twenty-year silence, I heard she was in Washington visiting her daughter-in-law, Nora Smith, once a student of mine at American University. Naomi was famed in publishing for bringing her friend Thomas Merton's
The Seven Storey Mountain
to Harcourt, and she edited my second novel at Doubleday, a far smaller (and entirely uncelebrated) accomplishment. My first two novels were ‘secretly' published in the early sixties, as the critic John Leonard once said of his own fiction.

Naomi and I talked on the telephone. She told me she had celebrated her eightieth birthday recently, her husband, Melville Stone, had died, she had sold the fine English-style house they had built on the ocean at York, Maine, and was now living in a retirement apartment in the same village. We explored the possibility of meeting again, but, of course, as happens to such plans that are long delayed, it was not to come about. She went back to York, I saw May Sarton there on our way north, but there was no time to seek out Naomi.

One thing from the telephone conversation surprised me. When the subject of the Catholic Church came up (how, I cannot recall), she indicated that her enthusiasm for it was now much diminished, in fact that she (as I did) left the Church because of its inexcusable treatment of women and had returned to the Episcopal Church. I could hardly believe that her passion, which at the time I knew her pervaded every reference she made and every sentence she uttered, had not survived to the very end of her life.

The life history of religious fervor, in those persons whose lives are touched by it, often follows a predictable pattern, I've learned. In direct proportion to its initial ardor it diminishes and disappears, leaving behind a curious bitterness that it ever affected them. Sometimes the contrary conviction sets in hard—passionate atheism or agnosticism. I suppose this might be true of political zealots as well: I recall the number of ardent Communists in my youth who suffered violent revulsion against that philosophy and then became fervent conservatives.

I hear from two of my daughters, who live hundreds of miles apart and yet are suffering the same strange ailment. Kate, who is pregnant with Maya's sister (Maya is a year and a half), has a continuing bad taste in her mouth, and Jane, who fifteen years ago had a benign brain tumor removed, has both the bad taste and a constant unpleasant smell in her nostrils. For them, only eating diminishes the sensation. Kate, a physician, suspects hers is connected to her pregnancy; Jane does not know the cause of hers—it may be the aftermath of a bad eye infection. But she is certain it has nothing to do with the recurrence of the tumor (although she was told by her surgeon that, slow-growing as meningiomas are, they can recur). A small amount of Valium makes things better, she reports. But she agrees to make an appointment with a neurologist to be sure that her own diagnosis (‘It's not a tumor. I know what a brain tumor feels like') is correct.

We go to Ellsworth, a shopping town about twenty-two miles from our Cove, to get groceries and household supplies. We pass a roadside drive-in where ‘heroes' are offered. I am startled by the term, but Sybil, more learned in fast-food terminology than I, explains that they are long sandwiches, made on pseudo-French bread and filled with salami, cheese, chopped-up lettuce and tomato, onions, and hot peppers, and soaked with garlic-oil-and-vinegar dressing.

Her description makes me feel slightly sick. But she assures me that these elongated products are quite delicious even though biting into one requires a heroic spread of the jaws. The names for such gustatory monuments are varied, depending on the part of the country in which they can be found. They are called ‘hoagies' in Pennsylvania, so named either for the pork (hog) contained in them or for the person capable of eating them. In New England they are known as ‘grinders,' the origin of which is not certain; my guess is that the term refers to the necessarily excessive use of the teeth. Another title is ‘sub,' from ‘submarine,' an obviously graphic designation. Add ‘torpedo' (clearly for the shape, not the effect), ‘spuky' (for what? I do not know), ‘wedge' in Rhode Island, and ‘poor boy' in New Orleans (called ‘po' boy' sometimes) because it contains such a variety of fillings that it resembles the many courses of a meal combined into one sandwich.

Are these gargantuan extensions of the modest sandwich (itself named for the eighteenth-century Earl of Sandwich, who must have been the first person to insert cheese or meat between two pieces of bread), and if they are, what was wrong with
two
mouth-sized sandwiches instead of this one, unapproachable one?

After we acquire our weekly supply of groceries, we stop at the place that offers subs. Sybil orders one, I, conservative and old-fashioned to the end, and feeling unheroic, order a tuna-fish sandwich.

Today I receive a letter from a poet whose acquaintance I made, briefly, during a Literary Lions gathering at the New York Public Library a few years ago. Vartan Gregorian, who headed the library at the time, had instituted these yearly gatherings to which wealthy supporters bought tables and invited their friends to share the table with them. At each table sat one writer, a Lion for the evening. This elevation was not unlike
Queen for a Day
, the old television show. For most of us it was a great moment. Usually our lives more closely resembled that of mice.

My poet friend reminisced about his table at the affair, taken by Mrs. Vincent Astor, a remarkable elderly woman, very wealthy, who spends her days in volunteer service to the library. He said it had made him realize that if the robber barons had once been both rapacious and charitable, their descendants are often extraordinarily generous with their time and their money. ‘Remember all those music halls and the 2,800 libraries that old Andrew Carnegie put up in every state of the union? Well, Brooke Astor is in that tradition,' he wrote.

I remembered the host at my table some years ago, an elderly, chatty man named Milton Petrie, who is a large donor to the library. For much of the time, while we ate an elegant dinner, he proceeded to tell me why.

He was born to Jewish parents in Salt Lake City, where his father, a policeman, was killed in the line of duty. As a teenager he had to leave home to make his living. In Detroit he worked for the Hudson Department Store, having changed his name to Petrie to avoid the company's well-known anti-Semitic hiring practices. But when he discovered he was the only Jew working there, he departed for New York to start his own business, a tiny store on 42nd Street in which he sold women's hosiery and gloves. Aware of his need for further education, he crossed the street in the evenings to the New York Public Library, sat in the general reading room, and called for books on every subject.

From a modest beginning he became owner of a string of department stores throughout the country. Now an extremely wealthy man, he takes a table each year for sixteen thousand dollars and invites eight of his friends to share the evening with him. He regards this as paying the library for his tuition.

Someone seated at his table told me that Petrie provides funds for families of slain police persons in the five boroughs of New York City. Someone else said he was fine bridge player and every afternoon met with three other elderly men to play at a bridge club. Across the table from me sat Jerzy Kosinski, Petrie's Lion of last year, looking very fit, handsome, elegant, and full of good humor. I recall this only because two years later, Kosinski was dead by his own hand, having become ill and unable to write.

The last time I saw Milton Petrie he was being wheeled in a chair into the great hall at the library for the ten-year reunion banquet of Literary Lions. I think of him often, of his justifiable pride in his Horatio Alger—like business success. Like other Americans who made the same great progress, he was moved to give back to American society a thousand times what he received from it.