Final Fridays (34 page)

By high school, of course, our hormones had kicked in and we'd begun to go our ever-more-separate ways: separate bedrooms, friends, and high-school curricula. But we remained in close harmony both literal and figurative. We organized a successful little jazz group, for example, called the Swingtette—Ms. Primo on piano, Mr. Secondo on drums, and a couple of our friends on sax and trombone—and played regular Saturday-night dances at the Cambridge Country Club through our junior and senior years. After graduation, however, our
paths diverged indeed: Jack crossed the Bay to university, and for the next forty years returned to Cambridge and the Eastern Shore only to visit; Jill went to business school in Wilmington, returned to work in a bank in Cambridge, met and married one of her customers (Bob Corkran of nearby Hurlock), and happily went into the accounting business with him there.

Over the ensuing decades, Jack's life had the wider radius, but Jill's had much deeper roots: The Corkrans seldom left the Eastern Shore even on vacation, but they maintained warm connections with old friends, enjoyed golf games, crab feasts, weekend evenings at the American Legion hall, and raising their daughter Jo. Jill went from being named the Delmarva Poultry Festival's “Chicken of Tomorrow” back in her teens to becoming Hurlock's First Lady when her husband was elected mayor of that small town. And when Bob was sadly and prematurely taken from her by cancer while only in his fifties, Jill soldiered on: She taught my non-Maryland wife Shelly how to cook a softcrab and roast a goose; she presided over her daughter's wedding and spoke fondly of her son-in-law; she oversaw end-of-life care and funeral arrangements for our parents and other elderly relatives (with a little help from her far-flung brothers and their wives, but Jill carried most of the load, and carried it ably indeed); she enjoyed her granddaughter's talents and triumphs—and then bravely and cheerfully, when the time came, she made her own move from her house in Preston (not far from Hurlock and Cambridge) to a “continuing care” establishment in also-nearby Easton, where she lived out her final life-chapters, her accountant daughter presiding over her as Jill had done for
her
parents.

My closing, warmest memory of my twin is from not long after she made that move. In the summer of 2002, the Cambridge High
School Class of 1947 celebrated its 55th reunion with a sunset cruise aboard a paddlewheel tour-boat from Suicide Bridge (yup, that's its name), up near Preston, down the Choptank River to Cambridge and back, with dinner and dancing to live music. Much as my wife and my sister enjoyed each other's company, Shelly had other commitments that day, and so I picked up Jill at her assisted-living place and we two enjoyed a lovely evening together with old school chums, reminiscing about (among other things) our long-ago Swingtette jazz combo. The high point of that evening, for me, was when one of those good buddies, whom I'd reminded that our group's theme-song had been the smooth old 1930s ballad called
Moonglow
, passed that info along to the band without telling us. Next thing we knew, they were playing it for us—first time I'd heard it in maybe half a century! My old womb-mate and I set down our wineglasses and danced—not for the first time, certainly, but for the first time in too long a time, and for the last time, alas.

I can hear it now:

Moonglow it was, Jill, on that moonlit river, our tidal birth-water—and moonglow it remains. Your old ex-wombmate and ex-roommate is in no hurry to become your
tomb
mate; but it's poetically appropriate, I suppose, for Ms. Primo to lead the way in our tale's last chapter, as she did in its first.

Rest in peace, dear Sis.

1
New York: Putnam, 1984.

2
Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.

3
See “Keats's Fears, Etc.”, the lead-off piece in this collection.

4
The Development: 9 Stories
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).

5
Literally (which is to say, figuratively) “being breathed into again”: the CPR of artists in any medium.

1
As of 1997; another thousand-plus over the decade since. Scribble scribble scribble!

2
As of the date of this essay: Miller died in 2005.

1
xx:2, Spring 1996

2
Now defunct, alas.

3
See the essay “The Inkstained Thumb,” to follow.

4
Indeed, novelists such as Richard Powers and my former Hopkins coachee Vickram Chandra use everything from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and Project logistics programs to voice-recognition software for organizing and composing their novels: See Rachel Donadio's essay “Get With the Program,”
New York Times Book Review
, June 10, 2007.

5
See “The Accidental Mentor,” my 80th-birthday tribute to him, in the latter section of this volume.

6
For more on “Serial,” see the essay “‘In the Beginning, Once Upon a Time, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night'” farther on in this collection.

7
Coover himself, though a professor of e-lit, inclines to the p-variety for his own abundant and lively productions.

1
The five novels were
The Floating Opera
and
The End of the Road
(first published in 1956 and 1958, respectively, but reprinted in a single volume),
The Sot-Weed Factor
(1960),
Giles Goat-Boy
(1965), and
Lost in the Funhouse
(1968).

3
In his knowledgeable and perceptive
Reader's Guide to Barthbooks
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993).

4
The War of 1812, which to us children of the Chesapeake ranks as high as the Revolutionary War because so much of it was fought in our home waters, was even at the time often called the Second American Revolution. It is this second, more than the first, that figures in the historical portions of
LETTERS.
And those who lived through the American High Sixties will remember the apocalyptic air of “Revolution now!” that hung like tear gas over our university campuses especially.

1
New York: Anchor, 1996.

2
Subsequently published as
Genesis: A Living Conversation
(New York: Doubleday, 1996).

3
More precisely, I'm told, it means “In the beginning
of
.” Its deployment sans object in Genesis 1:1 is linguistically odd enough so that disagreement among Biblical commentators begins, appropriately, with this initial word of scripture. See, e.g., Robert D. Sacks,
A Commentary on the Book of Genesis
(Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Mellen Press, 1990), pp. 2–3.

4
In fact, some such English adverb as
Beginningly
or
Originally
would be the formal-metaphoric equivalent of
Bereshith.
But
beginningly
, alas, is an over-selfconscious coinage, and
originally
is both forceless and inexact, implying some subsequent re-creation, as in “Originally the story began here, but later . . .” et cetera. An analogous problem faces English translators of Marcel Proust's
À la recherche du temps perdu
: That monumental novel about time opens with the word
Longtemps
, famously rendered and vitiated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff as “For a long time,” which moves the key word to fourth place. The poet Richard Howard's version makes an ingenious restoration: “Time was . . .” (in the sense “There was a time when . . .”). See
the essay “‘In the Beginning, Once Upon a Time, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night,'” farther on in this volume.

5
E.g., separation of the four elemental forces, prodigious inflation, reciprocal but not quite equal annihilation of subatomic particles and antiparticles, “quark confinement,” and the commencement of nucleosynthesis, all within the initial second of Planck Time.

6
Some commentators judiciously prefer “the
sky
and the earth,” inasmuch as the theological connotations of
heaven
play no part in this part of the creation-story. See Sacks, p. 4.

7
A history which itself rebegins in Chapter Five—“This is the book of the generations of Man,” et cetera—with its recapitulation of Man's creation on Day Six of Chapter One and again in Verse Seven of Chapter Three.

8
Act Three—when, as Chekhov reminds us, all the pistols hung on the wall in Act One must be duly fired—will not be addressed in this essay: Armageddon, Judgment Day, the end of the created world in the Big Crunch of Apocalypse.

9
Notably the Weak, the Strong, and the Participatory, more or less advocated by such distinguished physicists as, respectively, Brandon Carter, Stephen Hawking, and John A. Wheeler.

10
Joseph Heller declares that he begins his novels by writing their last chapter first, after which he invents a sequence of events that necessitates that ending. (See the essay “‘All Trees Are Oak Trees . . . ,'” farther on in this collection.)

11
Concerning biological evolution, for example, as well as human history, Stephen Jay Gould remarks, “History can be explained, with satisfying rigor if evidence be adequate, after a sequence of events unfolds, but it cannot be predicted with any precision beforehand” (“The Evolution of Life on Earth,”
Scientific American
, October 1994).

12
E.g. Dante's out-Virgiling of Virgil in Canto IV of the
Inferno
, where he writes of himself being saluted in Limbo by the shades of
both
Homer and Virgil (not to mention Horace, Ovid, and Lucan), who welcome him as their peer.

13
Aeneas sometimes strays from destiny's path, as in his Carthaginian interlude with Queen Dido (Virgil's dutiful remake of Odysseus's long tryst with Calypso), but Mother Venus soon enough corrects his course.

14
A passage that never fails to remind me, profanely but respectfully, of Yeats's awed question in
Leda and the Swan
: “A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon
dead.... / Did she put on his knowledge with his power . . . ?” On Matthew's evidence, the son, if not the mother, did.

15
As instanced by Virgil and Dante, the vocation of artisthood bears some analogy to those of mythic-herohood and messiahship—conspicuously so for the Romantics and the great early Modernists, with their characteristic conception of the artist as hero (one recalls James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, originally named Stephen Hero, vowing to “forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race”), more modestly so even for Postmoderns. In at least some cases, the present author's included, one's apprentice sense of calling may be far from clear even to oneself, and the “Jesus Paradox” may take on difficult additional dimensions, though seldom with such high stakes as attend the callings of mythic heroes and messiahs. One may be uncertain of both one's vocation and one's talent for it, or confident of one of those but not the other, or confident of both but mistaken, or
doubtful
of both but mistaken, or correct on one or both counts. In the happiest case, one comes to have reasonable faith in both calling and gift and at least some “objective” confirmation that that faith is not altogether misplaced. But “real, non-scripted life” is slippery terrain, in which templates and prophecies are ill-defined, elastic, arguable, and verdicts are forever subject to reversal. One crosses one's fingers, invokes one's muse, and does one's best.

1
It's the genre's notorious tendency to substitute period color, historical information, and melodrama for other novelistic values.

2
A totally fabricated account of the doughty Captain's defloration of that thitherto impregnable maiden. But many scholars question Smith's own account of his rescue by Pocahontas.

3
In fact, Powhatan's people stream-bathed almost daily, and found the English to be foul-smelling.

4
Indeed, in a second edition of the satire, published in Annapolis in 1731, Cooke quite de-fangs the sot-weed factor's closing curse:

1
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

2
See the memoir “The Judge's Jokes,” farther on in this volume.

3
A decade later, it exceeds 500.

4
Both figures proportionately higher a decade later, like the number of degree-granting creative writing programs in American colleges.

5
See my essay “It's a Long Story,” in
The Friday Book.

6
For more on these tools, see “The Inkstained Thumb,” farther on in this collection.

7
Enrique García Diez, late of the University of Valencia.

8
“Night-Sea Journey,” in
Lost in the Funhouse.

9
Itself now a dated question in the age of DVDs, themselves perhaps outdated in turn by technologies that more with-it folk than my wife and I are acquainted with.