About Alice (2 page)

III

A Conversation with Someone Who Can't Believe That Alice Is Fifty

“No way,” you say.
“It simply cannot be.
I would have guessed
That barmen often ask her for I.D.”
“I know, I know.
She has that youthful glow
That still gives young men vapors.
She's fifty, though.
I've seen her papers.”

—Family Man

It had never occurred to me that being pretty involved complications. It wasn't the sort of problem I'd ever had to face. Of course, there are also plenty of advantages to being pretty. I once wrote that when we were in Italy I always referred to Alice as
la principessa
because it tended to improve the service in hotels, but she was often treated like a princess even when I hadn't implied a royal connection. Like a lot of attractive women, she regularly drove over the speed limit, secure in the knowledge that every policeman who had ever stopped her for speeding had given her a warning rather than a summons. At parties, she often attracted what I called “guys smoking pipes,” who wanted to impress her with their suavity or intellectual range. “He wasn't smoking a pipe, by the way,” she'd say, knowing just which guy I was talking about when I mentioned “that guy with a pipe” as we discussed a party on the way home. “In fact, I can't remember any of those ‘guys smoking pipes' who actually were smoking pipes.”

“Is that right?” I'd say. “I could have sworn he was tamping down the tobacco, or whatever they do, when he made that remark about the flaws in Derrida's thinking.”

I wasn't surprised that Alice attracted guys with pipes. They didn't mean any harm, and I'm hardly in a position to criticize people for trying to impress her. What did surprise me—it still puzzles me—was that some men were hostile to her before she'd said any more than “Nice to meet you.” Every once in a while, some man who'd just met Alice—I remember a lawyer in the South of France, for instance, and a financier in Manhattan—seemed intent on being contentious or even offensive from the start. In
St. Urbain's Horseman,
which may be my favorite Mordecai Richler novel, the protagonist assumes that men who responded offensively to the beautiful woman he married were “wreaking vengeance for a rejection they anticipated but were too cowardly to risk.” That might have explained why some men seemed angry at the sight of Alice, but it didn't explain the response of others—the lawyer in France, for instance, who was gay. Why would he be interested in some sort of preemptive strike?

It was easier to explain the quieter but more common hostility from some women. Not long after we were married, I told Alice I'd noticed something about her response to couples we met: when she said something like “That was fun; I hope we see them again,” the female half of the couple was likely to be, in addition to her other qualities, physically attractive. I had been under the impression—an impression that I'd probably picked up from Hollywood movies about Hollywood—that the presence of two particularly attractive women at dinner produced a competitive tension that could interfere with digestion. “Do you feel more comfortable with attractive women because you don't have to worry about being resented?” I asked. She looked at me as if I'd intruded on something that was meant to be private.

The normal complications of prettiness were exacerbated by the fact that Alice didn't look like who she was. At first meeting, her looks—particularly when coupled with clothes of the sort that no dietitian had ever worn and the superficial facts of her background (Westchester County, Wellesley)—could make people expect someone who acted pampered or snooty. Among people who went to public high schools in the fifties, as we both did, pretty girls weren't expected to be smart or even especially nice. Pretty was enough. Alice always insisted that in high school she wasn't known as the class beauty but, embarrassingly enough, as the class brain—an embarrassment that was memorialized in her high-school yearbook by the pairing of her picture with a picture of the smartest boy in the class, a geeky slide-rule specialist in the days before the computer age saved geeky boys from eternal damnation. She often mentioned that in high school she'd been rejected at the cheerleading tryouts year after year and that, presumably because of her reputation as the class brain, she was virtually never asked out.

Her parents hadn't been able to afford any serious pampering. She grew up among prosperous suburbanites in a family that was always in precarious shape financially. Her father, who had left North Carolina as a teenager and never returned, was an inventor, self-taught. In the thirties, he had hit the jackpot with some early coin-changers for vending machines. He got an office in the Empire State Building, where, as it happened, Alice's mother was working in the secretarial pool. They bought a large stone house, with an elaborate swimming pool and a basement bowling alley, in Greenhaven—an expensive Westchester community on Long Island Sound whose residents, in Alice's childhood memories, were exquisitely conscious of their material possessions and of having a couple of neighbors whose names resonated in Hollywood. But the company Alice's father founded to manufacture and market his inventions went under at about the time she was born. He never hit the jackpot again. As far as I can tell, he got by after that mostly with research-and-development money from a series of investors. Until the Stewarts moved to a more modest place, in Harrison, when Alice was about thirteen, they held on to the big house only by renting it during the summer while Alice went to a sleep-away camp, chosen partly for its reasonable fees, and her parents lived in a sublet apartment.

I've always thought that it must be sadder to be a businessman without money than, say, a poet without money or a coal miner without money. You've failed at the very game you signed up to play. Alice's father never lost his faith in the game, and he seemed confident that it was only a matter of time before he made a comeback. Unwilling to have his daughter on scholarship, he worked out a monthly pay schedule for her Wellesley tuition. He was a sweet man—too openhearted, I suppose, to be in business. He was enormously optimistic, a quality that Alice thought she'd inherited pretty much intact. “You said that much of what appears to be optimism is actually denial,” she once wrote our younger daughter, Sarah. “You are right about this. My dad was in denial much of the time.” Once, after Alice's father was too old to be chasing investors who shared his dreams about, say, a vending machine for dispensing
Playboy
magazines, he and Alice's mother, who was then slipping into what turned out to be early-onset Alzheimer's, had a serious house fire. It was a disaster that followed a series of setbacks, all of which Alice had somehow managed to straighten out. I remember him patting Alice on the hand the day after the fire and saying, “I don't want you to worry about anything, sweetie.” I know he genuinely meant it, even though if Alice had not worried about anything he would have been a goner.

When we were in our early thirties, it occurred to me that one way to divide the people we knew was that some of them were still dependent on their parents—financially or emotionally or some other way—and some of them had seen that role ended or even reversed. I never embarked on a study to see if that distinction was a predictor of how people handled what has to be handled to get through life—the small matters of logistics and maintenance that were known around our house as Administrative Caca, or serious issues of, say, catastrophic illness or financial disaster—but I suppose I always assumed that Alice's early responsibility for her parents had something to do with her tendency to sit down and systematically deal with whatever problem came up. By the time I met her—she was in her mid-twenties then, teaching English at Hofstra University—she had already taken out bank loans to tide her father over when there was a dry period between investors. In the late seventies, she wrote an article about her parents that began, “When my daughter Abigail was three and my mother was sixty-three, Abigail said to me, ‘Mommy, why is it that sometimes you seem like the mommy and Grandma seems like the little girl?'” As the health and finances of her parents crumbled over the years, Alice, their only child and nearly their only relative, acquired a lot more experience in keeping a family on an even keel than any sitcom mother ever needed.

Usually, she was also involved in taking care of someone else—a former student who couldn't find a job or a friend who was having difficulty coping or a great-aunt who couldn't manage to work through the maze required to become eligible for Medicaid or, increasingly, someone who was trying to deal with the terrors and bewildering logistics of being treated for cancer. There were so many cancer patients, and Alice's involvement in their cases was so complete, that I half expected a man from the New York State Board of Regents to walk in one day and accuse her of practicing medicine without a license. At Alice's memorial service, our friend Nora Ephron described those under Alice's protection as “anyone she loved, or liked, or knew, or didn't quite know but knew someone who did, or didn't know from a hole in a wall but had just gotten a telephone call from because they'd found the number in the telephone book.”

Sometimes, noticing the sour expression of a woman sitting across a table from us, I wanted to say, “It's not Alice's fault how she looks,” but that wouldn't have been quite true. She took some care to look pretty. She was quite aware of what she looked like: listening to the reminiscences of Alice and her college classmates, I got the impression that at Wellesley everyone knew precisely who the three most beautiful young women in the class were, in the way everyone might have known precisely who the three best bridge players were. She liked being pretty, usually. Who wouldn't? Traffic policemen are not the only people who tend to respond differently to a pretty woman.

A couple of years after Sarah was born—Alice would have been thirty-five—someone we knew was, for his sins, put in charge of a fashion issue of the
Times Magazine,
and he decided to skip professional models in favor of working women, who would be pictured wearing the new spring lines. The editor asked Alice if she'd be willing to be included. The customary promises were made about the marvelous prints we'd get of the pictures that a well-known photographer, Doug Kirkland, would take of Alice and maybe of Abigail and Sarah as well. Although Alice had been in similar spreads in college, she had some misgivings. Eventually, she agreed to participate, partly because the embarrassment potential of the accompanying article was somewhat limited by the fact that I was to write it. (In it, I said that, since I'd never seen Alice read a fashion magazine, the fact that she was able to answer in detail when I asked her about someone's bizarre outfit always stunned me, “as if I had idly wondered out loud about the meaning of some inscription on some ruin in Oaxaca and she had responded by translating fluently from the Toltec.”) The
Times
headline said “College instructor, mother and wife.”

Later, when writing about how dealing with her parents' problems sometimes made her feel as helpless as she had felt as a child, she said, “When some pictures of me and my children appeared in the fashion section of the
Times,
I found that although I was uncomfortable at the thought that any of my students might see such a frivolous portrayal of me, I was anxious that some of the doctors who had condescended to me over the phone see what a truly acceptable person I was. I even brought an extra copy of the magazine to my father so that he could show it to the people at the nursing home where he and my mother were then living, as if the nurses would respond more quickly to their calls if they had seen their daughter in the
Times
. And I believed they would have. Because when dealing in this area I was reduced to the values of Greenhaven in about 1948, when I was ten.”

We did indeed get some nice prints from the photo shoot. One of them is still on my bedside table. It's a portrait of Alice in a hat. That was not the picture on the cover of the program at her memorial service. The picture on the program—chosen because I knew it was one of Alice's favorites—was taken on a trip to Italy to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. Eleven years after that trip, I wrote a sequel to her fiftieth-birthday poem called “An Explanation to Someone Who Still Finds It Hard to Believe Alice Is Fifty—Eleven Years Later.” The first stanza was:

“You josh, by gosh,

Or need some better specs.

The lass I see

Must surely be

From Generation X.”

Yes, still, they stare,

They're dazzled by her flair.

The sight of her sends young men's hearts askew.

So how come she remembers World War II?

Around that time, while we were spending the weekend at a place we had in New Jersey, Alice returned from an annual trip she made to a plant nursery and said, “Well, it's happened.”

“What's happened?”

“I got a speeding ticket,” she said. “It was the same cop who gave me a warning in the same spot when I went to get the plants last year.”

“But I think maybe that's what a warning means,” I said. “If you do it again in the same place, they're pretty much obligated to give you a ticket, even if you're an absolute knockout.”

She seemed not to have heard that. “I guess I've lost my looks,” she said.

“I hear they're taking in a lot of gay cops these days,” I said. “We're all in favor of that, of course, but it's bound to change the whole equation.”

She smiled. She didn't laugh, but she smiled.

IV

Having a family intellectual available, I can always arrange to have words like “holistic” or “heuristics” translated if it should prove absolutely necessary—if they turn up on a road sign, for instance, or on a menu or on a visa application.

—Uncivil Liberties

Sometime in the late sixties, I happened to mention to an older writer at
The New Yorker
that I showed Alice my rough drafts. He told me, in an avuncular way, that this was unwise. He pointed out that the response to a rough draft hoped for by any writer, even one who knew full well the weaknesses of the manuscript he'd just handed over, was “Brilliant! Don't change a word!” Honest responses on a regular basis, he said, would be a strain on any marriage, and he had no doubt that honest responses were what I'd get from Alice. He was right about that: there were times when I could actually hear a sigh as she read a draft, a sign that the report was not going to be cheerful. Once, as I was leaving town for a reporting trip, I gave her the rough draft of a book I'd done on a college classmate of mine. When I returned, I found that she had written me a two- or three-page memo that made the case, in some detail, that the book would be much improved if I'd write it less as an observer and more as someone who had a lot in common with the subject. I pretty much started the book over again. When I was informed by the older writer that my marriage would profit from my being willing to forgo Alice's help, I told him that what he'd said made a lot of sense, but that it was too late for me to take his advice. I said, “If I thought that there was any chance I could get along without it, I would.”

It wasn't as if I had married a biologist or a financial analyst. Alice had a particular talent for reading people's manuscripts and offering constructive criticism; she regularly did it for friends, including one who had written a sixteen-hundred-page novel. (She suggested some cuts.) She had a great eye, and, like Mary Francis, she was better educated than her husband. She had spent a year in the graduate program in English at Yale. She had copyedited books at Random House. She taught English and composition in college for years. She had designed the content for an educational-television series about the writing process. When she felt she had something to say, she became a writer herself, often on the subject of coping with serious illness. I regularly run into people who tell me how deeply affected they were by “Of Dragons and Garden Peas,” a 1981
New England Journal of Medicine
piece by Alice that's still used in some medical-school courses; or by a
New Yorker
piece that she wrote in 2001 about the decisions that had to be made a decade earlier after a collection of symptoms seemed to indicate a recurrence of the cancer she'd had in 1976; or by
Dear Bruno,
a book based on a letter she had sent to Victor and Annie Navasky's son, then twelve, after it was discovered that he had a malignant tumor in his chest. You could say, I suppose, that she was in the English-language business, and I was her sideline—the pro-bono case being handled by a high-powered corporate lawyer. That sort of help wasn't easy to turn down.

She actually did translate words like “heuristics” for me. Usually, though, what I was asking was more on the level of what some foreign-language movie we'd seen was about. “I don't get it,” I'd say. “Was that a swimming movie?”

“It was not a swimming movie.”

“Well, they seemed to be in the water most of the time.”

Around the time Alice and I met, the coverage of American racism finally burst out of its regional boundaries; Northern universities were beginning to look into what they were doing to educate minority students who were, by conventional measurements, not qualified for admission. Alice got involved in a small program of that sort at Hofstra, and in 1967 she moved to City College to teach in a program called SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge), which employed remedial courses and tutoring and counseling and stipends as a way to integrate underprepared students. A friend of hers at Hofstra, Mina Shaughnessy, went to City with her, and for the next dozen years they were allies in the intense struggle over the role that a place like the City University of New York should play in what was sometimes known as remedial education.

From the start, some senior professors had been muttering about the decline of standards. As academic jobs began to dry up, some younger faculty members—people who had looked forward to a life of dropping graceful aperçus about “The Waste Land” to enthralled students on ivy-covered campuses—were dispirited or even enraged at finding themselves instead in gritty urban universities, correcting seemingly endless errors in grammar and syntax. Alice and Mina, who were there because they wanted to be, had a completely different response. It was encapsulated in the title of a speech with which Mina, by then a star in a field that hadn't been expected to produce any stars, electrified an annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, in 1975: “Diving In.” Instead of throwing up her hands in despair at all the errors her students made, Mina had analyzed four thousand essays, found patterns of errors that could be addressed, and explained all this, in a tone of optimism and commitment and absolute confidence, in a book called
Errors and Expectations.
In later years, when Alice was producing programs for educational television, she'd occasionally take an unusual teaching job—at Phoenix House, the drug-treatment program, for a while, and for one semester at Sing Sing—and she always took it for granted that people who wanted to learn could be taught, no matter what their background.

Mina was fourteen years older than Alice—in a way a mentor and in another way a big sister. She had no children, and for our girls she became something like a fairy godmother; she once convinced Abigail that the necklace she was about to hand over had been given to her on the subway by a princess who was changing professions—getting out of the princess game—and therefore no longer had need of it. Mina was marvelous looking—the actress Maggie Smith was usually mentioned by those describing her—and she wore marvelous clothes. If Alice had ever been in danger of accepting the notion that doing good works carried a requirement for dowdiness, Mina's example would have been enough to convince her otherwise. A biography of Mina by Jane Maher includes an anecdote told often by the scholar and critic Irving Howe, who had become one of Mina's great admirers at CUNY: When she met him one day at the graduate center, having come directly from teaching a class, he commented on her outfit and asked if Mina's students, virtually all of whom were strapped for cash as well as for correct verb endings, were put off by her stunning clothes. “But, Irving,” she replied. “My students know I dress up for them.”

Apparently, she had also dressed up for doctors and nurses and medical technicians. Mina had been operated on for ovarian cancer at thirty-eight, the age Alice was when she was operated on for lung cancer, and I think it was from her that Alice learned the morale-boosting value of showing up for treatment looking your best. It also occurs to me that Alice responded to having cancer the way she and Mina had responded to what at first seemed the insurmountable academic problems of their students. Alice said in a speech once that the worst thing cancer can do is to rob you of your identity. Her identity included engagement and optimism and enthusiasm. One of the most negative words she could use in describing someone was “passive.” I don't think I ever saw Alice just sit back and observe a group conversation; she was always a participant. After she'd had surgery and radiation at New York Hospital, she was discouraged from investigating what other treatment she could get at Memorial Sloan-Kettering; among some non-cancer doctors at that time, Memorial had a reputation for subjecting patients to debilitating protocols that might be more valuable for long-term research than for the patient's well-being. But Alice was accustomed to attacking a problem partly by seeking out the people who knew the most about it. Looking back years later, she thought it unlikely that the additional treatment she received at Memorial made any difference in her condition, but she liked it there. Among other things, she liked being in a place where the doctors had seen some people get well. She loved telling the story of encountering a teenaged boy in the elevator on her first day of treatment at Memorial. The boy was bald, presumably as the result of chemotherapy. “Are you a nurse or a patient?” he asked Alice.

“Patient,” Alice said.

“What kind you got?”

“Lung,” Alice said.

“Around here,” the teenager said, “they treat that like the common cold.”

Alice's response to having cancer was a reminder that an intellectual is not just someone who might be able to translate “heuristics” or someone who liked to spend her summers reading nineteenth-century novels or a pile of biographies of physicists. It's someone whose instinct is to analyze anything that happens and try to make some sense out of it. “Of Dragons and Garden Peas” was not an account of the doctors Alice had seen and the procedures she'd undergone. It was an essay on how having cancer is “an embodiment of the existential paradox that we all experience: we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.” She examined the talismans people with grave illnesses use to distance themselves from death—the magic of doctors, the power of the will to live, a concentration on the details of daily life (like growing peas in Nova Scotia, where we lived in the summer). They all had limits, she concluded, mentioning a friend who “wanted to live more than anyone I have ever known. The talisman of will didn't work for her.” The reference was to Mina, whose cancer returned and metastasized about the time that Alice had finally managed to get back to her garden peas. After a year and a half—and eight operations—Mina was dead.