Extra Innings (6 page)

I call or write a long list of churches, finding each call a trial because I hate using the telephone but more because I dislike asking for anything. I devise a mental stratagem to drive me to the phone. I think of Carlos Calderon, my AIDS patient two years ago at Capitol Hill Hospital in Washington. When he left the hospital, I followed him to houses and apartments provided by the Whitman-Walker Clinic where he was able to stay when he could no longer live alone. Once he told me he wanted to see Wayward Books (our bookstore on 7th Street). He climbed painfully into my car, and I drove across the city and helped him into the store.

He had no energy left to look at books but I remember him saying: ‘I like being in a place where there are books.' His gaunt, handsome face looked happy; he shook hands heartily with Sybil as though she were part of the ambience he liked.… Remembering all this (and Carlos's death six months later, one week before we came down from Maine last year) made it possible to make those telephone calls.

Why do I hate to beg? Which of course is what we were really doing. Even in a good cause. Because, I suppose, I was taught ‘to pay your way,' never to ask for anything, to live honorably. I think it would be easier, were I in need, to steal than to beg. The act of stealing is private, involves some skill, I would think, and a sense of accomplishment in the face of the danger of discovery. If one ‘gets away with it,' a sort of victory over peril is achieved. Whereas begging is public and ignoble, and is only accomplished by assuming a lowly attitude of need and unworthiness.

Last night we had dinner with friends Gail and Celeste. The other guest was John Preston, a writer with whom I had corresponded and for whose books (on AIDS) I have written blurbs. He now lives in Portland and is not entirely well, having had one stay in hospital. But he is full of intellectual (and physical) energy, has contracts and plans for two or three books, and has just taken on the care of a new puppy, an exuberant vizsla dog he tells us is a Hungarian breed, overfriendly, but yet a good guard dog, used in the past to protect the Hungarian border.

Next day: A young woman comes by, accompanied by a photographer, from the
Bangor Daily News
. It turns out she is an entry in my Small World file. After the interview she tells me about herself. She was born into a working-class, German-American, Catholic family, the first of six children. She has Washington, D.C., roots, was a student at American University during the time I taught there, and raised a child born out of wedlock while she studied. She had no classes with me, she says, but used to walk by the closed door with my name on it, and wonder about me. She has battled depression (as well she might have), but now works as a journalist, doing the arts interviews for her paper.

The photographer takes so many pictures that, at last, I put a stop to it. I dread being photographed, more than I ever have. Not being photogenic makes one dislike the camera, the way Sybil, who fears heights, hates bridges.… At seventy, I wrote about my discovery before a full-length mirror of the decadent changes in my body, a section of the book that, to my horror, was often quoted in reviews. Interested in what the review had to say, I was forced to read that odious description again and again.… Now I am sure his pictures will reveal all the aged ridges, lines, valleys, sagging and blotching of my face and neck, the unreal mask I think my face has become in order to hide the unseemly youth I see in my mind's eye.

New York: Another radio interview, this one from New York by satellite to Philadelphia. Then I go to lunch on the east side of the city with my friend Hilma Wolitzer. She is enveloped in middle-aged contentment, having four good novels ‘out there,' her novelist-daughter Meg happily married to a former student of Hilma's (and mine) in Iowa, a first, new grandchild, and a beautiful apartment that looks out, from a saving height, at the glories of the city of New York.

There is something about long blocks of cement paving and horizontal walls of buildings that threatens my stability. Uncertain about how much farther I can walk without repeating my custom of tripping, or turning my ankle, I go into a coffee shop that is kitty-corner from Carnegie Hall. A few young women are sitting alone smoking and drinking coffee. The ‘help,' as we used to call waiters and cooks, are all of Central American or Oriental extraction, having replaced,
in toto
, the Irish girls who constituted the help at Schrafft's and Stouffer's and Childs when I was young.

(Suddenly I remember that in Manhattan in my youth, jobs tended to be filled by members of the same nationalities. Janitors in apartment houses were very often German and very exacting. I remember my friend Dolly's father, Mr. Sudermann, who would not permit the tenants of 130 West 86th Street, where my family lived for many years, to come into the basement for fear that ‘they will upset it.')

Gallant, ageless old Carnegie Hall is still there, having, from what I can see, not changed at all, except for its newly cleaned facade, from the days in the thirties when I went every Friday afternoon and paid fifty-five cents for a student ticket. I sat on the floor of the second balcony, leaning against the last row of seats with my back to the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, John Barbirolli conducting, often following a score, and always, whatever the music, in a state of uncritical bliss.

In the coffee shop, a waiter drops a tray of dirty dishes into a metal bin from a great height, or so it sounds to me. I am the only one who jumps at the noise, marking me as an outsider, now a citizen of a quieter place who, sixty years ago, gave up her Manhattan citizenship.

In the coffee shop I hear someone behind me begin a sentence with the word ‘unalterably.' I cannot resist turning around. He is a very pale middle-aged man wearing a bowler hat, a Cambridge University blue-and-white scarf, and a black velvet-lapeled overcoat. I cannot see the lady he is speaking to; her back is to me, and they are about to leave. He passes my table, carrying a rolled copy of the
Manchester Guardian
. It is chance encounters like this I have left behind in moving to Sargentville, where the chap seated at the counter in the Eggemoggin general store will be dressed in baseball cap, plaid shirt, jeans, and boots, and reading the
Bangor Daily News
. Unalterably.

I stay in the apartment of my children, the Wheelers, who live on the sixth and top floor of a Morningside Drive building. Last evening the sun set over the low skyscape of Harlem, making that section of the city look quite beautiful: the large windows facing west took it all in. It made me homesick for the morning glory of the Cove.

The apartment is a fine example of what New Yorkers can do when they live in a relatively small space. Sam and Barbara have replaced their old kitchen with a handsome, useful one, almost witty in its clever use of space and color (if black and white are colors). They have covered the walls of the other rooms with good paintings, a Oaxacan quilt, and rubbings from English tombs, and built shelves to display Barbara's collection of Southern folk pottery and their books and records. While he is away at college, Isaac's room is now arranged for guests, with a work space for his mother's computer. Sam's small study is lined with his linguistic-scholarship books as well as hooks for everyone's outerwear. If you squint through the small window in this room you can see the spires of Riverside Church and a slice of Amsterdam Avenue.

Sam grinds and brews fresh coffee very early in the morning (my best hours) and then the two of them take off for work, he to his boys' private school where he teaches Latin, Spanish, and an occasional stint in sex education, and she to Auburn Theological Seminary a few blocks away where she is president.… I settle down to write a speech I have to give this evening, luxuriating in the silence (only at a distance do I hear an occasional siren; my poor hearing rules out whatever other street noises there may be), the comfort of this aerie of an apartment, and the solitude.

Although I am enjoying the silence of the telephone I find myself using it to talk to Jane Emerson, who lives thirty blocks away. She is feeling better, but her strange affliction recurs on occasion. Her appointment to see her neurologist is next month.

In Barbara's well-lighted bathroom mirror I see, close up and clearly, my wrinkled face. So seldom do I look in a mirror that, for long periods, I am unaware of unsightly changes. Sometimes when I do look to see if I have remembered to comb my hair that morning, I am in such a hurry that I fail to notice very much. I have come to believe that wrinkles must be far more evident (and horrifying) to women born with beautiful faces than to those of us who have never had a reason to inspect closely our plain visages.

In the cab to the airport to return to Maine, I notice how skyscrapers now affect me. I feel the need to withdraw from them in order to protect myself, to move inward and away from their confining, narrow, vertical menace. Recently, when we were driving through the Berkshires, I noticed that mountains act upon me the way Billings Cove does. They decrease my self-centeredness, they draw me out, elevating and extending what I daringly call the soul.

Thinking about the Berkshires reminds me of something I learned the other day: People who drive through these lovely mountains in the fall to see the foliage (and those who do the same thing in Maine) are termed ‘leaf peepers' by the natives. They are welcomed for their trade but scorned for their obstruction of the highways.

Other nomenclature: At Dartmouth at the beginning of this month, where I went to give two talks to a breakfast (and then a luncheon) audience about the fictional nature of memoirs, diaries, and journals, we were served a dish which I could not identify. Turned out to be a local favorite, made with blended cold beets, and called ‘Red Flannel Hash.'

News reaches us from southern California that our friends Diana and Mary, both librarians at UCLA, have won the state lottery. Their share is seven and one-half million dollars. Sybil, an inveterate buyer of lottery tickets in whatever state she happens to be, gloats. She telephones the winners to congratulate them. What will they do with their prospective riches? Diana says she will buy, first thing, an electric pencil sharpener for her office, something she has always wanted.

Having never known anyone who won money in a lottery, even a small amount of money, I am amazed, and, for the moment, silenced. I have always scorned investing in such enterprises, claiming that they are a fraudulent and seductive way of parting the foolish and the poor from their money. And still … but now …

Sybil decides she will buy tickets when next she is near a state that has a lottery. I decide I will not be moved by Diana and Mary's incredibly lucky strike. I already own an electric pencil sharpener.

Almost no one in Sargentville or surrounding areas knows about the publication of
End Zone
, and that is a good thing. I am egotistical enough to enjoy being ‘known,' but only beyond the radius of about one hundred miles from where I wish to live in peace. Once in a while, someone ‘from away' brings a copy of the book into the store and asks Sybil if I would sign it. I do, but always I remember the story of Sophie Tucker's autobiography, which she published herself. We once bought a signed copy of it for the bookstore and asked Bob Emerson, who owns a theater bookstore in New York, what it was worth.

‘Almost nothing. The trick is to find an unsigned copy.
That
might be worth something.'

If one is concerned for posterity, there is a moral here.

Coming back to Sargentville after the speeches, the bookstore visits, the signings, and the speeches at breakfasts, I am depressed by the thought that everything I have done for more than a week was, somehow, ignoble. Selling, signing books: why does it matter to a reader if the writer has put her name in the book? Parading from place to place, always in behalf of a book that should be making its own way in the world without all the peripheral folderol of ‘appearances,' feels unworthy. The English have a nice word for it: ‘hedge-born,' meaning what it says, I suppose, and in general referring to activities that are low or demeaning. Today I feel hedge-born.

I am home. The Cove has waited for me, calm, patient, the last thing I looked at before we drove south to the cities, the first think I sought out when I came back to where I started from.… This morning, two-thirds of the way through the month of October, is heavy with fog and the promise of rain. I watch a crow make her royal progress across our uncut, rough field. Decorously, she acknowledges her constituency, a flock of smaller birds that seem to live in the woodpile we are preparing to burn. She walks on, as somber, black, and erect as a funeral-home director, having made a long ceremonial advance out of Rebecca Peterson's woods, across our field, and then onto Jeannie Wiggins's land, out of sight.

I realize how seldom I look for very long at large birds. I tend to be interested in tiny, multicolored visitors to our feeder and to the boxes on the deck, especially purple and gold finches, chickadees, and hummingbirds. Of course I exclaim with pleasure over the presence in the Cove of large water birds like egrets, cormorants, and an occasional osprey. But the crow, with its lustrous black plumage (in some light as iridescent as the hummingbird's), I take for granted, registering its appearance as a sign of approaching rain, instinctively denigrating it for its murkiness, dismissing it, and then looking at something else.

I had forgotten that Edgar Allan Poe immortalized its cousin the raven, and Wallace Stevens recorded ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird':

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendos,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

Gone from sight, the crow's raucous cry still hangs in the air, reproaching me for my avian prejudice.

There was a pile of mail and books waiting at the post office where Frances, our omniscient postmistress, had saved it in a large box. She handed it out through the door. ‘Glad to be rid of it,' she said.