Extra Innings (15 page)

Elizabeth Cale, my sports-loving daughter, is going over her huge collection of clippings, in an apartment where she has finally been able to have a room just for her collection. Twelve years ago she clipped an article from the
New York Times
about the Mormon Nation (a faith in which she was, for a time, deeply interested). She sends it to me. For a moment I am puzzled, not understanding its pertinence to my interests. But on the back she has drawn an arrow pointing to a headline: ‘Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.' The date of the clipping is July 3, 1981. The article begins:

Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. Eight of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made.

The article, the first, I think, in newsprint on AIDS, appears far back in the paper, on page 20, and goes on to say that diagnosing doctors have alerted other physicians ‘to the problem' in an effort to reduce the delay in offering chemotherapy treatment. The cancer is given a name, Kaposi's sarcoma.

Just that long ago? Beginning so simply, so inauspiciously, seeming so containable. A little thing, a problem, another variety of the Big C. Would that it had been, and that thousands more had not followed those first forty-one men into that good night.

The Christmas season: All our tree decorations are on a shelf in our apartment in Washington, so we decorate this house with a plain wreath on the door. A Spartan holiday for me, but Sybil, who never cares much for transforming the house with Christian symbolism, is content. On Thanksgiving she told me this was her favorite holiday because it had no religious connotations. I too have my partialities about holidays. I don't like the patriotic ones, the often-bogus display of flag and bunting, uniforms and marching-band music, war-praising speeches and gun-and-cannon firing.

I also have an aversion to sentimental displays, Mother's and Father's Day, and other such plastic celebrations. Subtract religious, patriotic, and sentimental holidays from the calendar and what do we have left? I yield to Sybil: Thanksgiving.

Two days before Christmas, St. Brendan's, the little church in Stonington, finds itself without a priest. Cynthia, who has served the Episcopal congregation well for two years, has decided she must be at a retreat house in the West, her whole sacerdotal profession now being inner-directed. She regrets her need to be absent, she tells us, but she wishes to continue her ‘spiritual journey' under the leadership of Father Keating, a Catholic priest, whose films she has been showing us for some time.

Cynthia is a deeply spiritual woman, with strong mystical (and Catholic?) leanings. We all express our understanding, to an extent, of her choice between our needs and her own. But we are angry, resenting the prospect of a bleak Christmas Eve Mass. We can go to the church in Blue Hill, of course, not go anywhere, or hold our own Mass without the Eucharist.

We decide to stay together, to use the whole liturgy of Rite One, except for the words only the priest may say, and to ask Cynthia to consecrate and reserve the sacrament so that we can receive it and celebrate with the wholeness that Christmas requires. That evening (Maine churches hold their midnight services at nine because of the cold and the icy-road threat), a saving remnant of us met in the Catholic church, which always allows us to use its sacred space when it is not otherwise occupied, and celebrated Christ's Mass. There was an eerie suggestion of the very early church rites about it. Without a priest, the royal priesthood of the people, as Martin Luther termed it, had assumed the celebratory role.

Less than two weeks until Jane will undergo her ordeal in New York. Last evening at the Christmas Mass, during the prayers of the people, I spoke her name, without saying why I was asking for prayers for her. It is perhaps naive of me, but I have faith in these communal requests for the Lord's help.

Almost daily, on Route 172, we pass a huge barn, built very close to the road, that is in the process of collapse. It once belonged to our neighbor Abby Sargent's great-grandfather, whose children operated the farm for many years. Now almost eighty years old, the barn served for a time as a ‘hen factory,' and began to fail in 1979. Everyone, most of all Abby, worried about it. We watched it age, grow more feeble, threaten to fall into the road, much as we would watch a beloved old person go into a decline, as we used to say. It was Abby, I believe, who spoke to the road and town authorities to see if something could be done to hasten its safe demise.

Finally, by what agency I do not know, the beautiful old building fell down entirely this week. Now it is a flattened pile of grey boards, done in, I would like to believe, by a kind of joint civic euthanasia. The old die late and well in Maine.

This morning, because I am feeling very good in the presence of the beauty and snowy elegance of the buried gardens, the meadow, the edge of the Cove, the silence and the solitude of the house as I work, the name Miss Schaff suddenly entered my mind. I searched my memory for the reason, could not find it. Then I spent an hour going through a notebook from five years ago.
Voilà
, here it is. I remembered it, I believe, because of the headline ‘The Long, Unhappy Life of Miss Schaff.' Stories appear regularly in the newspapers about obscure persons, seemingly of low degree, who die and leave a fortune. Katherine M. Schaff's life story is both odd and prototypical; it has remained in my mind.

The headline writer was correct in one respect: she did live long, ninety years. The assumption that her life was ‘unhappy' is what I question. She was born in Pequannock, New Jersey, and left school at thirteen to work in nearby Union as a jewelry polisher, leaving home before dawn, taking three buses, and coming home long after dark. Her father and two sisters died in her early childhood; she lived with her mother for forty-five years, supporting and caring for her, and then, for the next twenty-five years, with her brother, until he died. Except to go to work, she left her house only twice in her lifetime: once to take a pleasure trip for a day to Asbury Park, and at the end, after a stroke, to enter a nursing home, where she died in 1982.

She worked overtime at every opportunity, building her many savings accounts. In 1978 she began to collect social security, $270 a month, which she lived on. Her reclusiveness was abetted by her fears: of bugs (her house was always spotless, and in the nursing home she rose at four-thirty every morning to clean her room), of thunder, and of men (a terror she inherited from her mother). She hated having children enter her yard, yet she planned two weeks ahead for Halloween. She had had one suitor, whom she turned away because of what she said was her duty to her mother. After her retirement, a kindly neighbor did her shopping for her, and checked on her by telephone each morning. Miss Schaff would reply, ‘I made it through the night.'

Her only visitor was her neighbor, who came by on New Year's Day for pickled herring. She had a radio and a telephone, made her aprons from old dresses, her blouses from her dead brother's shirts. Only her neighbor, a minister, and the driver of the hearse attended her funeral. To Pequannock's Rescue Squad, which had once taken her to the hospital, to the Fire Brigade, and to the Youth Recreation Department she left the contents of her five bank accounts: over one hundred thousand dollars. Her neighbor eulogized that Miss Schaff had led ‘a hard, very unhappy life. I don't think I ever remember her laughing.'

Unhappy? I wonder. I think I understand her life. She loved routine and sameness. They made her feel safe against her fears of invasion by dirt, the elements, the opposite sex. Her hermitic life was further protection. She had shut herself away, pulled in the boundaries of her existence, so that the walls of her life sheltered her against everything she could not bear. She must have preferred her own company, solitude, to the company of others, which may be what loneliness is. The radio was her connection to the world, as much of it as she wanted to hear about. To her, ‘doing without' must have seemed both normal and satisfying, and her money lying secure in her banks was a safety net she was never to use. Buffered in this way, expecting nothing, never disappointed or rejected, with nothing to lose and nothing to be concerned about gaining, must we assume she was unhappy?

She rarely laughed, we are told. So somber an outlook on the human affairs of our time seems entirely appropriate to me. But I am puzzled by one small biographical detail: Why did she choose Asbury Park in which to spend her one outing? Had she once an affection for the seashore? Did she know it had an amusement park, that it was, even then, noisy, crowded, and full of the tinny sounds of the merry-go-round and the high, panicked shouts from the Ferris wheel? I do not know why she went, but I can guess why she never went back.

The
New York Times
reports this morning that George Rapee, ‘one of the world's great veteran bridge players,' is playing (at the age of seventy-six) in Indianapolis at a national competition. I learn that he held three world titles in the fifties. I remember him clearly, seated cross-legged on a table in the editorial office of the
Washington Square Review
, of which I was editor in my senior year (1939) in college. He had very black hair combed straight back; he never said very much. Someone told me he was the son of Ernie Rapee, the orchestral conductor, ‘one of those sons of famous people who never come to anything,' I remember someone saying.

A wonderful letter from a man in Texas who wishes to augment my stories in
End Zone
about absurd military discipline and behavior during the war. He served in the Medical Corps at a base hospital in the Pacific which cared for severely burned sailors. An order came through that a very important member of ‘the brass' was arriving to inspect the installation. All patients who were able were to stand at attention beside their beds as the general passed through. All others, too severely wounded to rise, were to lie at attention, and salute, during the inspection.

Jane calls daily, or I call her. The time of her ordeal is close. Yesterday, Christmas Day, was her forty-fifth birthday. She celebrated with her husband, her sister, and her brother-in-law in New York City, where they all live. It must have been a less than festive day, like the prospect of New Year's Eve when more of the family will be together. I cannot believe that the level of hilarity will be very high.

Sybil and I are packing to go to Washington, closing the house slowly, talking to Mr. Snow about turning off the water, checking to make sure that everything we hope to see turn green and bloom again is covered, the bushes secured under blankets of boughs or hemp, the whole living organism that is a house put into hibernation, cold storage, for the long winter.

I call Abigail McCarthy, an old friend from
New Republic
days, to ask her to introduce me at the Woman's National Democratic Club next February. She says she will try to change her Florida plans to visit her sister and move them a few days ahead. I think this is remarkably good of her. She says, when I tell her about the sad decline of my Catholic faith, ‘I don't know that I have much of the old faith left, but I still behave as though I did.'

The club asks for a title for my speech. I have no idea what I will say, so far from the day, so I use Red Smith's
mot:
‘There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.' I decide to call the speech ‘Opening a Vein,' and hope it fits whatever I think up to say two months from now.

Winter thought: You grow old, and the older you grow the less you are known as a person who has done this or that, and the more your name is prefixed with the fact of your advanced age. Or, if you have a small accomplishment, it is enlarged in the eyes of the reporter, it never stands alone, your age is always attached to it: ‘At the age of seventy-five she won a senior marathon,' or ‘At seventy-three, he taught himself Greek.' Josh Billings knew that living a long time was its own single virtue: ‘I've never known a person to live to 100 or more, and then die, to be remarkable for anything else.'

January

‘My children,' said an old man to his sons who were frightened by a figure in a dark entry. ‘You will never see anything worse than yourselves
.'

—
quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson in
Spiritual Laws

Last month, on the 11th of December, Berenice Abbott, the distinguished American photographer, died. She was in her mid-nineties, I believe. I knew Susan Blatchford, her companion, slightly (she had twice visited Wayward Books). We made indefinite plans for me to visit them in a town only about an hour from Sargentville, but nothing ever came of it. I kept thinking there was still time, put off calling again, next summer, I thought.… So I never got to tell her how much her photographs of New York City in the thirties shaped my memories of the city of my birth.

I remember one thing Susan told me about her friend. She said that Miss Abbott never complained about old age. Every day was an enjoyment to her; she woke each morning with a sense of delight that she was still alive. I found this amazing, in the light of my feelings each morning that nothing good can come of the day ahead. I told Susan I would like to acquire some of Berenice Abbott's
joie de vivre
, but I never traveled to Munson, to catch from her the enviable contentment with which she lived her life. Once more, as if I were not already aware of it, I learned that there is never ‘still time.'

In Washington, preparing to go to New York to see Jane, who is enduring the first hard days after her operation, and waiting to hear if her vision has survived it, I discover how bleak is my interior landscape, how much like the view from the apartment I have now, of an alley, of the windowed wall of a public school, of another, new building with all the charmless features of modern architecture. It is some consolation, or perhaps reassurance, when what you see matches so well the way you feel.