Pages from a Cold Island (24 page)

“
I think this is all of us. We
’
ll not wait for anyone else.
”

When Rosalind said this Mary Pcolar was struck by how much the phrasing
and even the tone resembled Wil
son
’
s. In the long room Wilson was laid out in his white iron bed—
”
as though he were sleeping
”
—dressed in his blue pajamas and maroon bathrobe. On the nightstand next to the bed Rosalind had placed Wilson
’
s watch and his final reading, Housman
’
s
Last Poems
. The mourners had sent or brought flowers and to these Rosalind added a bouquet of lemon lilies and a bridal wreath she had picked the night before. Save for one man who broke down, and some touch
-
and-go moments for Rosalind, the ceremony was very brief and very controlled.

As Wilson had requested, his friend Glyn Morris read from the first lines* of Ecclesiastes (
“
I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem; yea, my heart ha
d great ex
perience of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in mu
ch wisdom is much grief: and he

* Rosalind Baker Wilson says that in his will her father had asked for the last lines of Ecclesiastes, but it was the first lines that were read.

that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow
”
) and the 90th Psalm (
“
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength, labor and sorrow, for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
…
So teach us to number our days, that we may appl
y our hearts unto wis
dom
”
). Mrs. Wilson blessed herself in the old Russian way. Wilson
’
s body was taken to a crematorium at Little Falls, and Mrs. Wilson then returned his ashes to Wellfleet.

The ceremony on Cape Cod was attended by about thirty mourners and
was made only somewhat more im
pressive by the half-dozen lite
rary figures in attendance, Lil
lian Hellman, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Harry Levin, Jason Epstein, Roger Straus, Jr., Morley Callaghan. Wilson
’
s friend of fifty years and Wellfleet neighbor of thirty years, Charles
“
Charlie
”
Mumford Walker, a classical scholar, de livered the briefest of eulogies. On finishing, Mr. Walker bowed his head, stretched out his arms, and said,
“
Shalom
,
dear Edmund.
”
Wilson
’
s daughters, Rosalind and Helen, his son Reuel by Mary McCarthy, and his wife
’
s son Henry then consecrated the ceremony by taking turns committing a scoop of the Cape Cod sand to the grave. At Talcottville Rosalind had unearthed four of Wilson
’
s much cherished Lady Showyslipper orchids and she now planted these at the gravesite. Edmund Wilson was no more. In many of the eulogies and obituaries it would be noted that American Letters would never again see his like. American Letters had of course never seen his like before.

10

My picnic proved a disaster. After we
’
d transferred the food to the back seat of Mary
’
s Impala we drove first to The Savoy in Rome,
going down through The Gorge be
tween Boonville and Rome through hamlets with wonderful names like Ava, a drive Wilson had much loved, especially in the autumn when the green pines embracing the road had so vividly contrasted with the reds, oranges and yellows of the hard maples. Mary had asked me if I minded the car radio, which Wilson had deplored—
“
Turn that damn thing off!
”
She also told me that Wilson had forbidden her to drive over thirty-five miles an hour but that as soon as he became engrossed in the countryside, or in his long thoughts, which was very soon, she could drive as rapidly as she cared to and he wouldn
’
t notice.

Here Mary laughed. If Wilson had ever accepted that her new Impala had air
-conditioning, he never gave in
dication of it; and though Mary had reprimanded him for
“
cooling the countryside
”
he continued to leave his window on the passenger
’
s side open. At The Savoy we parked the Impala behind the restaurant on a shaded elm and willow bluff overlooking the Mohawk River, high and surging and mustard-brown now from the awesome June rains. As we entered the back door I noticed a sign over it that read

PLEEZA NO PARKA DA BIG CAR IN FRONTA DA DOOR
. Or something equally absurd and corny, and I smiled to myself imagining what Wilson had made of that request.

Inside Mary went so unwaveringly toward a table at the front of the dining room that I was sure it must be her and Wilson
’
s table and I began to see that some stand-in role I couldn
’
t possibly fulfill was going to be expected of me. Coming down through The Gorge, Mary had told me how mischievous Wilson could be while ordering drinks. Like an upcountry yokel he
’
d begin by asking Mary if she
’
d care for a
DIKE
-her-
rheeee
. Later, if a waiter or wine steward asked Wilson to sample the wine, which wasn
’
t always the case in these rural eateries, he often took the most absurdly delicate sip, made the most exasperatedly sour face, feigned gagging the wine back into the glass. While Mary repressed joyous giggles, he went through an entire spectrum of hyperbolic disgust and dismay before allowing, with a curt affirmative nod of the head, that the wine was after all okay.

When Mary ordered a daiquiri I knew I was expected to do the same, but I ordered a bottle of Schaefer instead. I wanted to explain to Mary my
“
problem,
”
that I might not stop with a single daiquiri, but I didn
’
t feel I knew her well enough for that and said instead it was too early in the day for me to get into the hard stuff. Then I almost broke up at my own preciousness, imagining, as I was, the reaction to that of the gang on Singer Island, my cold island, where for weeks at a time I
’
d gone from literal sunup to sundown on double vodkas and grapefruit juice. I wanted to talk with the owner Pat Destito and study the man who
’
d got away with addressing Wilson as
“
Dr. Livingstone, I presume.
”
Mary had told me that Destito had returned from Florence not long before, and the last time he and Wilson had got together the two men exchanged some amusing notes on Italy. But Destito wasn
’
t there and as it was Sunday it was likely he might not be there at all.

It was one o
’
clock, but the dining room was already filling up. mostly with families. The beer was compounding my tiredness, the atmosphere and the heady aromas of sauces from the kitchen were diffusing me with nostalgia. In our neck of the woods Sunday is pasta day, families such as those around us would be coming and going all afternoon, and I was thinking of all the Sundays I
’
d spent in my extended exiles from Watertown in futile search of a decent dish of macaroni and sauce. In Palm Beach County I
’
d given up and had long ago decided the Florida Italian didn
’
t really know what pasta was (though he argued, perhaps rightfully, that the tourist didn
’
t know and wouldn
’
t in any event order anything but the blandest dish of spaghetti and meatballs—or pizza!). On my in frequent visits to Watertown over the years I
’
d spent half my time trying to convince the Canale brothers of the fortune their food would make them in Palm Beach County. Most of the Watertown Italians of my generation (I
’
d got to know them in high school playing football, the great equalizer) were, like the rest of us, living on tasteless packaged steaks and packaged processed cheeses, but Sunday was still their day to return to the Sand Flats to visit Mamma and
really
eat, a
nd those of us who were unfortu
nate enough to have no Italian Mamma went instead to the Sand Flats to Canale
’
s or Morgia
’
s. Nor was this custom or this longing unique to exiled Watertownians.

Whenever anyplace in America I ran into an Italian from the Northeast, we got round to food immediately and it was axiomatic to our exchange that Italian cuisine was un known outside our part of the country. (One theatrical little trumpet player in Denver swore convincingly to me that there were more authentic Italian restaurants in the twenty square blocks comprising the Newark
“
Guinea section
”
than there were in all of the South, the Midwest and the Far West put together.
“
Meenkyuh
”
he said.
“
You can do better in Providence. Rhode Island, than you can in all of Los Angeles County.
”
) On Singer Island we had taken to making our own, creating the one other occasion on which I could be persuaded to leave the island.

When we could stand our drought from
lasagna
no longer, we threw our odd singles into a martini shaker on the back bar until we had accumulated forty or fifty dollars. Then Diane the day barmaid and I crossed the causeway and went to the House of Meats, thence to one of the super markets on U.S. i. Shopping, Diane and I had a game we played, she the domineering forceful shrew and I the servile Milquetoast spouse. Dia
ne owned the kind of totally im
pressive looks and figure (once coming down at five to join the cocktail-hour regulars I noticed that of six guys sitting at the bar five of them were her boyfriends!) that made my dopey cringing toadyism utterly credulous—as though I were one of those unhappily damned souls hopelessly en slaved to whatever it was this stupendous creature was doing to me in bed. As she pranced up and down the grocery-lined, shockingly lighted aisles, the cheeks of her marvelous ass bouncing with mighty purposefulness, I sorrowfully and meekly wheeled my little wired grocery cart at her tight-stepping feet, saying Yes hon, yes dear, yes mam. Into the cart Diane piled the cans of plum tomatoes, puree and paste; the cheeses, ricotta, mozzarella and provolone; the boxes of pasta; the meats, pounds of hamburger and Italian sausage, sweet and hot, a shank of veal or pork to flavor the sauce; the bell peppers, the mushrooms, the garlic. And as she did so she issued abrupt commands.

“
Put the cart right here, Frederick.
”
Or,
“
You stay here, Frederick. I
’
ll be right back and I don
’
t intend to be looking all over hell
’
s half-acre for you!
”

We had husbands, more sure of their places in the marital universe, shaking their heads in heartfelt rue and sympathy with my plight. One day a pimply, aproned, whiteshirted, black-bowtied stock clerk, totally unnerved by Diane
’
s stunning looks that so clashed with her brutal stridence, toppled over a huge triangular tier of quart cans of prune juice (a big item among the retirees in Florida). I didn
’
t think Diane and I were going to make it to the car. When at last we did so and had the bags of groceries in the trunk, we fell into each other
’
s arms in the front seat and clung to one another in riotous exhausting hilarity. The real fun had only just begun. If one fancies himself a chef, one hasn
’
t lived until he
’
s been turned loose on a completely equipped hotel kitchen, with its pots and pans and kettles, its sharpened knives and racks of seasonings glimmering all in place; and because Big Daddy liked
lasagna
as well as the next guy, and was besides a prince of a man, he
’
d turn Diane and me loose. All day long we simmered our sauce in a four-gallon vat (it has to go
tapocketa
tapocketa
like a volcanic crater). And while I sipped at my vodkas and grapefruit juice, and with a great wooden spoon occasionally stirred the sauce, the regulars, drawn as to a magnet, came round and round through the swinging waitresses
’
doors. They would sample a spoonful of the sauce, go
Ahhh
, blow a French
c
hef
’
s kiss, and make their suggestions as to what little touch would lift it to the airy regions of perfection. McBride
’
s little touch was invariably
“
Don
’
t forget the motherfucking bay leaf!
”
The
lasagna
was reserved for the second night. In a great steel dish five inches deep we
’
d make up and bake about forty pounds of it, then put it in the walk-in cooler to
“
firm
”
before rebaking it the following evening. On the first night, as a kind of mouth-watering foretaste of the heavens to follow, we
’
d cook some rigatoni or linguini and use the remainder of the fresh sauce on that.

And now, sitting with Mary, between the beer and the ambrosial aroma of those sauces from this other kitchen I was dying of some sort of Sunday afternoon blues, longing terribly for a bowl of pasta, wondering if I were ever going to escape that accursed island, and thinking that in my search for something of Wilson I seemed destined to be interrupted by things of the flesh, sex or pasta, always something, and feeling downright shameful about my loony banana bread and cream cheese sandwiches. Mary, too, had been rendered nostalgic by her Wilson-less return to The Savoy and her daiquiris. Remembering the good times with Wilson, she had begun a discreetly quiet but steady weeping, petite tears coming steadily out of those small in candescent eyes and making their way over those lovely Hungarian cheekbones where she daintily stayed and absorbed them into her hanky.

The funny part, she was saying, was that though Wilson loved going out he cared nothing whatever about food, and though he owned the epicurean lines of
le grand gourmet
she never accounted for his figure save by thinking it derived from the sedentariness of his monklike existence or understood the relish with which he talked or wrote about food. So that Wilson
’
s own order might not seem ludicrous or insulting to the chef by comparison, or that he and Mary might not appear a couple of
“
real losers,
”
he
’
d force Mary to order one of the grandest things on the menu—lobster, Delmonico steak, scallops—and then his eyes would sheepishly avoid the waitress
’
s as he asked if it might not be possible to get him a fried-egg sandwich. Wilson
’
s teeth had been bad for years, but even after his Lowville dentist Ned Miller had put them right, Wilson seemed not to care about the choicer dishes or because of his teeth to have fallen into the habit of softer foods. Moreover, Mary insisted, if Wilson had ever been as interested in food as those outings to restaurants in
Upstate
had conveyed she
’
d never been cogni
zant of it.
“
Sometimes he didn
’
t even finish his fried-egg sandwich!
”

Because of the past days
’
furious rains and the possi
bility of a washout, Mary chose not to attempt the old road that led up behind Flat Rock, and we went instead to a little stream, a tributary of the Sugar River, that coursed rapidly among hillocks in a miniature valley behind a weathered upainted barn. After first going through a barbed-wire fence, I was handed the styrofoam container by Mary, and then I in turn parted the barbed strands so Mary could get through. I decided to be
“
heroic
”
and stake out our passage down to the stream, finessing the cowpies as I went. On my feet I wore a pair of rubber-soled suede ankle shoes—what we used *o call
“
fruit boots
”
—and as I suavely took my first bold step the ground was so dismally wet that my foot kept going breathlessly down and didn
’
t come to rest until mud as oozy as baby feces came over the top of my shoe and into my sock. The night before I
’
d been reading Iris Murdoch
’
s
The Unicorn
and had just got to the part where the heroine is told of some pathetic creature who had sunk and
“
drowned
”
in the bog and how as he
was oozing ex
cruciatingly down his hideous screams could be heard all through the night but no one had been able to get to him. Now I started composing my obituary for the Watertown
Daily
Time
s
: