Extra Innings (20 page)

Did she print the two copies (was it truly only two copies?) because she could not bear the delay between the first and the second draft? Who knows? Perhaps even she doesn't. Goethe once said: ‘Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.'

With the arrival of one tardy review of
End Zone
, sent to me by a friend, the critical views of the book have ceased. Its long birthing is over. If it survives for any length of time out there in the world in its maturity, it will be on its own. In some notebook, ah, here it is, I have written down a sentence by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: ‘I regard reviews as a kind of infant's disease to which newborn books are subjected.'

Why is it that I feel very old when I am living on the Hill in Washington? People here walk briskly. I lag. They chatter to each other in high-pitched, self-assured voices in Provisions, the coffee shop, their shining brown hair and perfect white teeth lighting up the underground cave where the little tables and chairs are set. Their high heels, their starched white shirts, their lustrous shoes, their leather briefcases stowed away under their chairs: they are all Congressional aides, or Library of Congress trainees or Folger scholars or professors or White House assistants or real estate agents or lobbyists. They shop at the Eastern Market, across from our apartment house. They are oblivious to the high price of asparagus or artichokes or raspberries. They buy large bunches of flowers from the vendors outside. They hold the leash of their well-groomed dogs with one hand, a French bread, newly ground coffee, and roses in the other. They greet each other on the street with happy little cries of recognition and pleasure.

They all seem acquainted, affectionate, part of a coterie alien to me in age and occupation. They live on a heady plain or better, on an upward slope of advancement and success, surrounded by public admiration of their status. Their self-esteem never seems to flag; their ambitions appear to be boundless.

The sight of all these happy settlers makes me homesick for Maine, where others of my generation have come to live, as have I, after the gritty, brash years of striving and pushing ahead and achievement are over. Down East on our peninsula, which I miss so badly, many of us have settled, in the real sense, for being old. Out of the race. Dimmer of wit. Shaky of foot. Over-age in grade.… I remember that in the Middle Ages extreme nostalgia and homesickness were treated as diseases. Clearly I am in need of a doctor.

While I was in New York a few weeks ago I went to a publication party for Joe Caldwell's new novel,
The Uncle from Rome
, held at the beautiful East Side building that the American Academy in Rome owns. It was crowded with his friends, noisy with all the polite voices of his admirers. New York, like Washington, has its exclusive groups, literary clans, publishing cadres, arrivistes and clingers-on. Nothing makes me realize how passé, how far out and away I am in my present existence as much as attendance at one of these roundups, where the crowd (herd? no) all know each other and rejoice in their familiarity.

Of course, my ego is not beyond resurrection. Susan, a librarian at the University of Delaware and caretaker of Yaddo's books every August, shows me a rare-book catalogue in which my first novel is listed for $175, the second for $275. I have a short rush of pride before it is washed away by the usual river of anonymity. I face it: Those books, like me, are old hat; they disappeared almost thirty years ago after a single printing each. Their publisher, Doubleday, in its economic wisdom, trashed the remainders of tiny printings in its Garden City warehouse, thus accounting for their present scarcity.

Bill Henderson calls to say he has received
Autobiography of an Elderly Woman
, admires it, and wants to republish it. I am delighted. I agree to write an afterword for it. I come away from the telephone feeling the elation of the owner of a stray mutt who will be groomed in order to be shown at the Westminster Dog Show.

Last night we had dinner with our friend and neighbor Luree Miller, a writer on travel, travelers, and women explorers. We talked at length about community matters, and about the Bench.

At the other end of the Eastern Market is a small stone-and-grass area called Turtle Park. It houses a stone turtle on which two- and three-year-olds love to climb, and seats for adults who watch over their endeavors. At the side is a lovely wooden bench given to the park by Luree. Mounted on the bench is a small gold plaque, a testimonial to her husband, Bill Miller, who was born in Alaska, was a dedicated world traveler, served in the State Department, and died in his early sixties of cancer. Theirs was one of those marriages of which it is said, curiously, that they were made in heaven, which I suppose means that it was that rarity, a happy alliance formed on earth. Knowing the Millers made me renege a little on my cynical belief that a happy marriage is one about which one knows very little.

Four years ago, the bench was stolen by some unneighborly yuppies, who wanted it to furnish their living room in a unique way, I suspect. Led by Gary Hortch, the young man who owns Hayden's, the nearby liquor store (and who voluntarily keeps up the little park), people in the community searched for the bench and finally shamed the anonymous couple into returning it to an alley where it was found. It was promptly restored to its place in the park, this time chained to the ground.

Some late mornings I take my scone from the bakery and my cup of coffee from Bread and Chocolate and sit on the bench, thinking of the good marriage and the good life that this fine, useful seat signifies, and watching the children, oblivious to everything but the mountainous hump on the turtle's back, make their Everest climbs.

We are packing our books in the apartment, slowly, getting ready to ship them to Sargentville should we be fortunate enough to sublet the apartment for most of the coming year. Out of one book I decide to keep falls a New Year's card sent to me a long time ago from New Directions and Anne and James Laughlin. It contains some lines by William Carlos Williams in a poem called ‘January Morning,' and reminds me of the view from Jane's hospital room, looking down the Hudson from close to the George Washington Bridge, and across to the Palisades: ‘Who knows the Palisades as I do / knows the river breaks east from them / above the city—but they continue south / —under the sky—to bear a crest of / little peering houses that brighten / with dawn behind the moody / water-loving giants of Manhattan.'

The peering little houses have long since given way to towering condominium buildings and other unsightly developments. Williams would not recognize the Palisades of his time and my childhood.

A letter today from a friend on the West Coast who inquires if (unexpectedly) enough good time has passed so that I no longer am ridden by despair at having grown old. Someone else has sent me a taping of John Leonard's review in which he says he would like to shake me when he hears (reads) my complaints about entering the end zone. Three elderly ladies in the last month write to tell me I am wrong: their seventies (one is eighty-four) are the best time of their life; one quotes the old Robert Browning saw: ‘Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be.'

Today, seated at the counter at Bread and Chocolate for late-afternoon coffee (theirs is the best on the Hill, in my view), I try to dig deep into the aging shell of myself to find an answer. Have I come to terms with old age? Does the fact that I have survived for five years since first I began to record my anger at aging reassure me that it is all not as bad as then I thought? Did I exaggerate my melancholy? Was I unduly pessimistic?

No. Oddly, there are no changes in me, except perhaps for one: In place of my fury of rebellion I have grown more patient with what is. Privately, I still war against my elderly condition of weakness, frailty, powerlessness, but now I accept its inevitability. Publicly, I am quieter about everything. I've abandoned the barricades for the veranda, the foxhole for the hammock.

It is all a matter of disposition, perhaps even of character. I am not happier with what I have than I was but more grateful for what I have left. I continue to mourn my lost youth and my active mature years with all their excitement, energy, and ability to anticipate the future. I miss the pleasures I once felt at waking to an unlimited day and the old contentment of going gentle into a good, long, secure night.

Dinner tonight with Rod MacLeish, who has left his commentary job at National Public Radio and gone on to a better berth at the Christian Science Monitor cable channel. Rod is a writer of fiction, the only one I know who enjoys telling, in detail, the plot of the new novel he is in the process of writing. I am always surprised at his daring, I who am afraid to breathe a word about anything I am doing for fear it will all be jinxed, or that I will lose it in talk and have nothing left for the pen.

Rod is in good spirits tonight. His plot summation is interspersed with assurances that the new book is hilarious. ‘I am really a humorist,' he tells us, although, to be honest, I have not been able to spot any humor in his abstract.

His daughter Cynthia now lives in Alaska, where she has married an Aleut, and is pregnant with their child. She loves her life there and expects to settle permanently. She listens patiently to my hymn of praise to life in Sargentville and then tells a story about a Texan who brags to a Maine farmer: ‘My spread down there, well, it takes me a day to drive from one end of it to the other.'

The Maine farmer replies: ‘Ayeer, I had a truck like that once.'

I haven't heard this before. I notice that as soon as you tell someone you live in Maine, you are told a story of this sort. I can laugh easily at her story, more easily than I could at her father's novel.

This week the fish stall in the Eastern Market across the street was robbed, at two o'clock in the afternoon. Two teenagers entered through the back door and coolly garnered five thousand dollars, we're told. Reporters are more horrified at the sum of money the little stall had in it than at the audacity of the well-informed youngsters who knew exactly when to ‘pull off the holdup and how much money there would be there at that time. The two boys were, of course, both armed. I have heard it said that few black youths over the age of twelve now appear on the streets of D.C., or in school, without a gun. I hope this is an exaggeration.

Three weeks ago, we are told by the owner of Clothes Encounters, a used-apparel shop two blocks from our apartment on Seventh Street, that a lady was robbed by a chap who got out of a car, took her handbag, got back on the passenger side of the car, and was driven away.… I am quite ready to leave this city, and it is only February.

Today I spent the morning at a local public radio station on the campus of American University, doing an interview with Diane Rehm. She is an intelligent woman who actually reads the books she talks about, and then asks incisive and original questions. It took an hour, she asked about my life, career, and
End Zone
. Then she told me she approved of my contrary opinions on photography (I dislike it because I believe most amateurs use it in place of committing persons and places to memory; the view goes from lens to film without passing through the brain of the picture-taker). On the day of her wedding, she said, the hired photographer failed to appear. She was distraught at the time, but now she celebrates his absence, for she is left with her choice memories rather than a set of posed and artificial pictures.

Late yesterday afternoon: Confused by the number of people walking, rushing, crossing, standing, all on our corner of Seventh Street, I froze where I stood, wondering, for the moment, which way to go. This happens to me often in crowds, as though every possible path were closed to me by too many people already occupying them.

Then Irving, the bake shop owner, came out of the Eastern Market carrying a large bag. I watched him as he crossed to the schoolyard, opened his sack, and threw out handfuls of crusts. Suddenly, and in great numbers, a flock of sea gulls arrived to claim the bread. I decided they must be accustomed to his being there every day, so they leave the Potomac River and come inland (like the Moody Beach gulls who used to eat their dinner at McDonald's on Route 1) to feast on the basketball court of Hine Junior High School.

Political affairs in Washington, D.C., seem more heated, more immediate, more urgent, than when we are in Maine, as if important things were happening down the street, across the park, in the buildings we see from our windows. Even if the candidates now vying for public office are politicking in New Hampshire or Texas, it appears to us nonrepresented residents in the capital that they are in our front yard.

I am stunned at the amount of ‘dirt' about the private lives, the sexual peccadilloes and twenty-years-ago drug parties, that is the conversational nourishment of every gathering and meal in D.C. Sybil suggests we think about writing an op-ed piece for the
Post
about the curious fact that the really good senators and governors, those who accomplish a great deal in their official positions, are often the ones whose private lives bear the least scrutiny: Edward Kennedy, Governor Bill Clinton, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

February 20: I am struck by a terrible blow of homesickness for the Cove, for the house, for Sargentville, for Maine. Sybil tries to counter it by challenging me to a game of gin rummy. I lose badly. We go out to a late dinner with old friends Tori Hill and Elizabeth Carl. We talk about the improvements to the Main Reading Room at the Library of Congress, which Tori heads, and life at the Episcopal church in which Elizabeth serves as curate. Even their good talk and company, and excellent Vietnamese food at the Queen Bee in Arlington, do not help.

I've been wondering about the origin of the clause ‘applauding with one hand.' The image is evocative—and mysterious. Does it mean halfhearted approval? Or soundless praise? I seem to recall that it is Quaker in origin. When I get home, I shall have to ask Grace Perkinson, one of the few Quakers I know.