Extra Innings (10 page)

Richard Lucas left the campus, the city, the Church, went to New York, became a respected editor at Doubleday, and then a successful sales manager on the West Coast for Harper & Row (in its religion department) and finally, until his death of AIDS three years ago, for the University of California Press. He had been a good priest at a time when there was no acceptable place for him in the Church.

I hear that the college now flourishes, with new buildings, new computer equipment and courses, a whole new secular face as the number of available teaching nuns and priests fell off. The outside world, I am sure, with its accepted revelations about the varieties of human sexuality, now has affected those once-protected acres. Mary's chaste spirit may well be somewhat in retreat and Richard's unconventional soul may walk the protected lawns and scrubbed corridors of the college.

The world of pre—Vatican II is firmly rooted in my memory. As Yogi Berra, my resident sage, is alleged to have said: ‘It is a case of
déjà vu
all over again.'

Jeannie Wiggins, our over-eighty, sharp-witted, humorous, and active neighbor, comes by our place on occasion walking with her dogs, looks around at our gardens, the new porch, the deck, and always says to us: ‘You kids have done a great job here.'

Last evening we kids had dinner at her house, together with some other elderly folk. Sybil, aged sixty-two, said she enjoyed being the youngest guest there. Someone told us the story of a friend, now ninety-five years old. She has rolled up all the rugs in her house to make sure she will not trip, like so many of her friends. Recently, she told her granddaughter, whom she was visiting:

‘Can't stay long. I've got a ticket for a revival of
Jesus Christ Superstar
.'

Another story garnered from the dinner party, I think from Connie Darrah. She is a descendant of the founding family, the Sargents, of our village, and gave us a fine old photograph of Ella Byard and her friends. (It was Ella who built our house.) She told us about a woman in central Maine who was driving her Subaru when she collided with a moose. She was injured and is suing the manufacturer of the automobile, claiming the company did not provide her with sufficient protection.

Later: I enter these stories, and realize that keeping a journal thins my skin. I feel open to everything, aware, charged by the acquisition of interesting (to me) entries, hypersensitive to whatever I hear, see, guess, read, am told. Matters that once might have gone unnoticed are no longer lost on me. I may sue my publisher for not providing me with sufficient protection against assault by whatever sensations are out there.

La Rochefoucauld: ‘Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily.'

Yes. At seventy that was what I did. I looked at death too steadily and too long. I held it aloft and reviewed it from every angle, like a potter with his pitcher mounted on a rotary stand, like Hamlet with Yorick's skull. I inspected its terrors, and saw its threatening effects in my body, in my diminished hearing and unstable gait.

Now, having passed that melancholy landmark and looked more steadily at my fears, I take heart from this small victory and no longer stare at death's imminence with so cold an eye. Having been reproached by people who read of my anguish and scolded me for it, I find I have taken note of their rebukes (sample: ‘I am eighty-one and damn glad I've made it thus far,' and ‘What are you whining about? Have you considered how lucky you are?') and vow to try to sin no more in that direction. I've been trying to turn what seemed tragic into what it would be nice to think of as comic:

Woody Allen, twenty-seven years younger than I: ‘I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.'

But still, death is the great mystery, life's great puzzle. To be present at the solution requires that we not exist as we have come to know existence. It must be what James Joyce meant when he asked on his deathbed, ‘Does nobody understand?' It was not the enigmas of
Finnegans Wake
he was referring to, I suspect, but the meaning he saw at the moment of his death. No one but he, at that moment, understood.

Word from Jane in New York that the first neurosurgeon she consulted thinks she might not need an operation for what is a slow-growing tumor, at least not yet. She is relieved. But she says she has an appointment with a neurologist to make sure of the diagnosis. Then she will decide what to do, and how soon.

The body of a finch on the roof outside our bedroom window has been there since the late spring. Now it is gone. Blown away or resurrected? I cannot tell. The little corpse had lost its color in death, so I have no way of knowing whether it was a gold or purple finch that had crashed so recklessly (I assume) against the glass of the window, broken its neck, and fallen a few feet to the roof of the screened porch.

The thought of resurrection and an afterlife is central to my faith. I have always been able to grant those supernatural certainties to the Christ whose entire life, from his virgin birth on, was so extraordinary. But I've had some trouble assuming they would be part of the end of a life as ordinary and sin-ridden as mine.

Still, some wise unbelievers have granted the possibility of these occurrences to themselves. On his deathbed, the brilliant cynic and atheist Voltaire saw a lamp flare up. ‘What, the flames already?' he asked. When agnostic Disraeli lay dying, the mourning widow Queen Victoria proposed to visit his bedside. ‘Why should I see her?' he told his attendant. ‘She will only want to give me a message for Albert.'

And another: One of my recent correspondents, one of those who scolded me for my pessimism, sent me a sentence, said to be Goronwy Rees's last words, in 1979, to his son Daniel: ‘What shall I do next?'

She did not tell me who Goronwy Rees was.

Telephone report from Ron King about the Down East AIDS Network walk last month. Six thousand dollars was raised, many people participated in Ellsworth, the food that Sybil solicited from area merchants and two groups of friends gathered was sufficient for the walkers and volunteers, and very good. This success marks a significant change in awareness of the need for concern and care on the part of a hitherto indifferent community.

I have finished
Hard Times
and moved on to
Bleak House
. My cherished set of Dickens, in many volumes because each novel is separated into three or four small books, bound in blue cloth with bright gold stamping, once belonged to a woman named Mary S. White. Her name is neatly stamped on the flyleaf of every one of the thirty-six or so books. I think she read them all, for there are minor blemishes on some pages, here a light thumb mark, there a trace of tiny bits of food that have dropped into the gutter.

There is a pleasure in reading books that belonged to someone else. Clearly, Mary S. White enjoyed these books before me. I fantasize about her life: She was an elderly spinster, a New Englander (I found the books in the Owl Pen, a bookstore outside of Greenwich, New York) who lived alone after the death of her parents, whom she cared for during their long lives. Delicately built, she favored small books that fit comfortably into her tiny hands. I see her seated alone at five in the evening, in an upright chair at her small, round dining-room table, drinking tea and eating a buttered scone, a few crumbs of which have dropped into the margin of, say,
Pickwick Papers
. When I get to it, I will surely find them.

Out of volume three of
Bleak House
falls Mary S. White's posthumous gift to me, a yellowed clipping. It is undated but seems to be from a New York daily newspaper at the turn of the century:

A lady lately visited New York city, and saw one day on the sidewalk a ragged, cold, and hungry little girl, gazing wistfully at some cake in a shop window. She stopped, and taking the little one by the hand led her into the store. Though she was aware that bread might be better for the child than cake, yet desiring to gratify the shivering and forlorn one, she bought and gave her the cake she wanted. She then took her to another place, where she presented her a shawl and other articles of comfort. The grateful little creature looked the benevolent lady up full in the face and with artless simplicity said, ‘Are you God's wife?'

BEAUTIFUL INCIDENT
is the story's headline; it is a sentimental little tale that might be written today, made linguistically contemporary, if the little girl were to ask the kind lady: ‘Are you God?'

The plea for the use of plain words when writing English prose is common, not limited to William Strunk's popular
The Elements of Style
. Among Sybil's purchases yesterday for the bookstore was a 1988 paperback of a book,
Plain Words
, on the subject by Sir Ernest Gowers, first published in 1954. Gowers advised writers to prefer ‘get' or ‘buy' or ‘win' to ‘acquire,' to use ‘rich' in place of ‘affluent.' ‘Near' he finds preferable to ‘adjacent.'

About ‘adjust' and ‘alter' he says, ‘If you mean “change,” say so.' He derides ‘analogous'; it is a starchy word for ‘like.' He instructs us to substitute ‘clear,' ‘plain,' ‘obvious' for ‘apparent,' and ‘find out' for ‘ascertain.'

This list is chosen from the list for the letter A in Gowers's dictionary of short verbal preferences. Fifty more pages follow, for the rest of the alphabet. But I fear that if we forcibly removed fancy words from the speech and writings of most people (including me), we would leave them almost speechless, and certainly unable to compose a letter, a term paper, or a review. For ‘compose' here I should have used ‘write.'

I must take this good advice more often. For ‘linguistically contemporary' in my journal entry before this one I should have said ‘up-to-date.'

Last night we had a small dinner party for friends. There was much good, witty talk, in which I tried to participate but found it hard. When I am alone I find I can go days without needing to say a word to anyone. Talking is clearly social mucilage, silence a threat to sociability. Recently, I looked through Aleister Crowley's
Diary of a Drug Fiend
in the bookstore and copied out: ‘People think that talking is a sign of thinking. It isn't, for the most part; on the contrary, it's a mechanical dodge of the body to relieve oneself of the strain of thinking.'

Coming back from a brief visit to May Sarton in York: We found her weak, thin, in pain, but gallantly working on a new journal to be published on her eightieth birthday and determined to
live
and write despite her dismaying infirmities. We stop off Route I at Moody Beach where my family and I spent many summers when the children were young. We pull into the Hazeltines' driveway. Their house is closed up and shuttered—they have gone to Florida for the winter, we are told. We walk out onto the great, flat expanse of a most beautiful beach and a boundless ocean.

Sybil observes that it looks huge after the relative limitation, almost confinement, of our Cove. Our water is bounded by the rough meadow in front and green banks on either side. It is usually calm; the coming and going of tides are hardly audible.… But here at Moody there is almost no end to the vast carpet of sand and blanket of water, except at the horizon that joins the sky at a great distance. It is the difference between mortality of the Cove and the immortality of the ocean, between backyard and continent.

For me, Moody, which lies between Ogunquit and Wells at the southern end of Maine, is the Ur-beach. It was where I renewed my love of the sea, which had been lost or buried in my memory from the time I was six and went with my family for the summer to the ocean at Atlantic City. Then, without warning, in the next summer I was sent to a girls' camp in the mountains, beside a lake, and learned, I remember keenly, the disappointment of limitation. After a few years at camp, I was able to swim about one mile to the far bank of the lake, a feat common to most of the ‘intermediate' swimmers, as we were called, but one that, to my mind, fatally diminished the glory of Crystal Lake. If I could swim it, it was too small.

Reluctantly, I came away from Moody Beach. It was like leaving the immeasurable cosmos for a two-foot yardstick at home. Thinking about May on the journey north, I realized how fortunate she is, in a way, to have a lovely pond at the right side of her property, where herons and egrets come regularly, and the wild ocean at the foot of her meadow. Her place is endowed both with the pleasure of the closed circle and with the infinite immensity of the sea.

I have always loved Moody and, as well, its name. There is a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The Minister's Black Veil,' about Parson Hooper, whose sad history, Hawthorne tells us in a note to the story, is based on ‘another clergyman in New England, Mr. Joseph Moody of York, Maine.' Without too much substantiating evidence, I like to think that Moody Beach is named for the clergyman who wore a black veil over his face to cover his guilt ever since his early life when, by accident, he was responsible for the death of a beloved woman. Or so the story suggests.

Outside of Wells, we go to a yard sale, one of hundreds held all over Maine on weekends. We stop at every one we pass, looking for books and, at the same time, inspecting all the artifacts of Mainers' lives spread out on rickety card tables and boards and trestles: odd pieces of chipped porcelain, old burned pots and pans, plastic wall decorations and knickknacks of every description, as well as rusty, interesting old tools, kerosene lamps, ships' parts, and always, used clothes of every size, clean but very worn.

I find a small, battered Peter Pauper ‘gift' book copy of La Rochefoucauld's
Maxims
. I buy it for fifty cents to read during the four hours we have yet to drive, ignoring Sybil's reminder that I already own two copies, one in Maine, the other in the apartment in Washington.

Sybil is driving (as she usually does, because of her profound, but justifiable, distrust of my poor reflexes and absentmindedness), so I read aloud to her from the book: