Extra Innings (11 page)

‘Youth changes its tastes by force of passion; age retains its tastes by force of habit.'

We debate the truth of this aphorism. I am of the opinion that it is certainly clever but, to my mind, like much else that is clever, in error. I have retained my passionate, youthful tastes throughout my life,
regrettably
. But my physical capacity to enjoy them diminishes and then leaves me, with age. Rich food and hard drink are no longer easily digestible, music and theater are less available because of the failure of my ears, of becoming ‘hard of hearing,' as we used to say. Reading is more difficult as my eyesight weakens. My old love of swimming is not enough to overcome my body's debility. And the joys of sex? They are gone when opportunities and hormones diminish; they join the dubious pleasures of nostalgia and memory that we all must settle for.

I read the rest of the book to myself while Sybil listens to a country-music station, and I try my best not to hear it. La Rochefoucauld's maxims are like acupuncture, small stings on the skin, producing a modicum of pain and some subcutaneous pleasure.

We are home. A light, powdery snow has fallen during our two-day absence, turning the roughness of the meadow into a smooth expanse. We watch the evening news, listening to reports of Anita Hill's testimony before a Senate committee. We want to find out if her accusation of sexual harassment against a Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas, will stand in the way of his appointment. Who has lied? Why? There are no answers, only a growing sense, for both of us, that Thomas is not a suitable or credible candidate for so high, so important, a position.

The news moves on to other Senate business. I grow bored and find myself meditating on a frivolous observation: Senator Paul Simon's earlobes. They seem uncommonly large buttons of flesh that descend from his ears, almost organs in themselves.

This trivial matter sends me into the bathroom to inspect my own ears, something I cannot remember having done since my girlhood. Ah, there I see: mine too are now changed. Instead of the small, smooth globes I remember, now there is flabby flesh scored by vertical lines, to accompany, I suppose, the vertical lines that have worked their way into the flesh at the sides of my mouth, marks of disillusion and pessimism now echoed in aging earlobes. I remember that my friend Kay Boyle has worn large circular white earrings ever since she was a girl. On the jacket of her latest book, written at eighty-five, she is still wearing them. If I had thought of doing this earlier, I would have been prepared to hide my newfound defect.

This morning's mail brought the Knopf catalogue for next season. In it I find that Deborah Digges, a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop when last I taught there, has written a 224-page memoir. How
old
can she be? Is it easier to write a memoir when one does not have to go back very far for one's memories?

My niece, Laurie Danziger, writes to ask if I will collaborate with her on a book about children of agoraphobic mothers. Her mother suffered from this illness, from the time she was eighteen until she died of cancer at forty-two. Laurie, now almost forty, has had serious psychological problems ever since her mother's early death, and she must see a causal connection to her mother's agoraphobia.

I wish I could help her, but the truth is, I cannot conceive of collaborating with anyone. I tell her I am the most hermitic of writers, finding it hard to write if anyone is in the next room to me, or even in the same house. After I mail the letter, I seem to remember that Evelyn Waugh said something about this, and go to my Waugh shelf to find his remark: ‘I could never understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.'

The gulls have disappeared from the Cove. Do they migrate? I realize how little I know about the lives of gulls, those beautiful shorebirds that are my neighbors all through the spring, summer, and fall. I walk over to the bookstore and borrow Frank Graham's book on the subject, published in 1978. It begins by describing an expedition that went out to Eastern Egg Rock Island, Maine, in order to poison a portion of the black-backed gulls there. It seems that a colony of puffins, who were killed or driven off the coast of Maine by 1907, is to be reestablished on that island. But now it is overpopulated by gulls, whose growth was encouraged by ‘a careless civilization's wastes.' When the book was written the gulls had reached ‘pest proportions.'

I'm uncertain what wastes he is talking about. I'm sure he does not mean the leftover fried clams that used to feed the gulls at McDonald's near Wells, Maine. How big is ‘pest proportions'? Who is being bothered?

Ornithologists went ashore at the island and destroyed the eggs in a hundred nests. Then a tragic scene was played out. ‘The first of the gulls began their descent on spread wings, eager to resume brooding on the eggs they had abandoned as we came ashore.' Graham does not describe what follows, but I can imagine: The returning parents find only desolation and destruction. Their unborn offspring have been reduced to an unsavory mixture of albumen, yolk, and embryonic feathers.… Terrible. Coming to the book to learn about life, I discover death and destruction.

Henry Beston, the naturalist, is quoted by Graham on wild creatures: ‘They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.'

Laws protect gulls, like other birds, I have always thought. But not always so. We devise ways to trick them. Graham says waterfowlers mount carved gulls on their boats as ‘confidence decoys.' Ducks and geese seem to know that gulls are not shot, so they cultivate their company ‘under the delusion that that they too will come under the protective umbrella.' Artificial bird facsimiles are sometimes intended to alarm and chase away other birds, like the metal owl Barbara and Sam Wheeler mounted on their New York windowsill to discourage the pigeons. The omnipresent New York birds are back, I think, having conquered their fears and discovered that the owl was a sham menace.

Man can kill protected creatures, it would appear, or their unborn progeny, in order to give the opportunity for life to another variety of bird. Perhaps unfairly, it reminds me of euthanasia as urged upon us by those who believe the chronically ill and very aged ought to ‘give way,' the euphemism for ‘allow themselves to be put away,' in the interests of the young.

Should it not also remind me of abortion, a practice that, in theory, I support?

In Graham I learn that e.e. cummings said of penguins: ‘Their wings are to swim with.'

All these details are very interesting in themselves, but I come to the end of Graham's book on gulls without finding out if they migrate. I
have
acquired some very fine phrases like ‘prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth' and ‘confidence decoys,' as well as a nice image of swimming with wings, but no answers.

Washington: Under silent protest, even though it is only for four days, I have had to leave Sargentville to go to Washington for a Phi Beta Kappa meeting. Alone in the elaborate hotel the night before the gathering, I turn on all the lights in the Madison Hotel's two-room suite because of the unfamiliar corners and doors and pull the drapes against the sights and sounds of Connecticut Avenue.

Before the meetings begin, I decide to have a solitary dinner with the
Washington Post
, at a K Street Chinese restaurant. I walk through the broad, almost empty downtown streets, deserted by their hordes of daytime workers, and now occupied by a few homeless men who have settled down for the night in doorways.

An elegantly dressed man with a furled umbrella he is using as a walking stick passes me. He looks exhausted and wary, determined not to look to the right or the left and carrying his newspaper rolled under his arm. He seems vaguely familiar to me. An employee of Dean, Witter where I once invested some money? The headwaiter of a restaurant I once frequented? When he comes close he lowers his head as if to avoid any possible contact, and pushes on.

An old black man huddled in an Army blanket in a doorway laughs, in a mad sort of way, as I pass him and says, ‘Hy-yuh.' I say ‘Hi' and manage a weak smile.

The distraught, the frightened, the senile, and the mad are all around us on the streets of this city, making me think of all the possible paths to being sick and old I have thus far been spared. On the plane this morning I sat across from an elderly couple who, as the plane took off, and again when it landed, held hands. Her hands were disfigured by hugely swollen knuckles; when the attendant came by with ‘a snack,' she was not able to lift the tray from the arm of her seat. Throughout the trip her husband was mute and stared ahead unblinkingly. Something was clearly wrong with him.

She was a pleasant, cheerful lady. She wore a gold cross on a chain around her neck and little white pearl earrings and a white-beaded Indian bracelet. ‘He has sinking spells,' she explained to me. They are from New Orleans and are going home after visiting their daughter in Boston. Their daughter is a registered nurse with two children and a husband who works ‘for the city.' She chattered on to me. I realized she was glad to have, for the moment, someone to talk to who could listen and respond.

We landed in Washington, where they had to change for a plane going south. I asked if she needed any help in making the transfer. She said no and then added proudly, ‘My son is coming to meet us. We'll go to a restaurant with him in the airport. He works for the government.'

We said goodbye. She added politely: ‘If you're ever in New Orleans …' although I do not know their names. It was a
pro forma
airplane farewell. In the airport, waiting for my luggage, I saw their son moving them toward the terminal, holding each one carefully by the arm. The old man was still staring ahead, his wife was talking happily to her son.… Now I know why the business-suited man with the umbrella on K Street seems familiar. He looks exactly like the dutiful son meeting his parents in the airport. Or so I imagine.

Almost alone in the Chinese restaurant (it is six o'clock, and Washingtonians, I remember, dine late, usually after eight, while many Mainers, intimidated by the early dark and tired after their early rising, eat ‘suppa' as early as four-thirty or five), I am seated by the maître d' in an inconspicuous corner to which single customers are usually consigned. It is as if there was something almost shameful about having to appear alone in public without a proper escort.

I order a Boodles gin on the rocks with a twist of lime. No, make it a double, I say, and spread out the morning's
Washington Post
, which covers almost all of the tiny table. Oh yes, I see. I am back in civilization. I read that two women, threatened by eviction from a Connecticut Avenue high-rise apartment house, jumped, hand-in-hand, from the twelfth floor. One died ‘on impact,' the other before the ambulance reached the hospital.… Of every thousand infants born in the District of Columbia, 20. I die within their first year of life.… Five young black males died last night in the southeast section of the city from gunshot wounds; three were engaged in the drug trade, the other two were innocent bystanders.

Further afield, yesterday, in central Texas, a young man smashed his pickup truck into a restaurant window at one in the afternoon, killed twenty-two people, wounded two hundred; then he shot himself in the head.… In Old Bridge, New Jersey, a twenty-year-old college student gave birth to a seven-pound baby in the bathroom of her parents' house, stabbed it many times with a nail scissors, and then threw it out the window. Her parents did not know she was pregnant. Her father found the dead baby in the bushes and thought it was a discarded doll.

After I read about the former mayor of this city, Marion Barry, who has now been sent to a more secure prison as punishment for allegedly performing a sex act in the visitors' room of the jail he formerly inhabited, I close the
Post
. The chicken in plum sauce has not yet arrived. I order another Boodles and think about what it might be like to live in Ushuaia on the coast of Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost city in the world.

In the early morning I call for breakfast. A pot of strong coffee and the newspaper are to arrive before seven. While I wait for it, I explore the fifty or so channels on the television provided by cable. I note, as I have many times before, that even with all these channels available, there is very little to watch. In Maine, we are not provided with such vast choices, the cable people having decided that too few people live in Sargentville to make it profitable for them to bring it to us. With the four channels we have, there is
still
very little worth watching, only a little less than with the fifty-five available here.

Outside the window of the hotel suite I hear the constant roar of traffic, the clatter of garbage trucks, the sirens of fire engines. Altogether, it is like being subjected to the high whine of a dental drill.

Scheduled for tonight is a large gathering of delegates and senators to the Phi Beta Kappa triennial meeting, a buffet supper and speeches, to be held at the National Archives building. I've been to so many of these affairs in federal buildings that I anticipate interminable standing on marble floors in dress-up shoes (my Nike running shoes are not suitable, I realize, for the occasion) and small, ‘finger-style' sustenance. So instead I ask the hotel's concierge to get me a ticket for the Kirov Ballet at the Kennedy Center. He does.

In the Great Hall of the center, the area before the entrance to the Opera House, I buy a sandwich and a cup of espresso, and sit on the red-carpeted steps to the theater to eat and drink, because no seats are provided. I think about the past, when the center first opened and one could purchase only wine by the plastic glass at the little stands.

During an intermission of a Wagner opera, Sybil and I, struggling to stay awake, asked the center's then director, Roger Stevens, whether coffee would be sold in the near future. ‘Never will be,' he said with some show of irritation. ‘It would be spilled on the new carpet and ruin it.'