The Other (15 page)

I
BORROWED
my sister’s car and went to Portland. I found out there, while browsing with Jamie at a used-book store, that Simon Magus was “the father of Christian gnosticism.” In the religion-and-philosophy section, between high shelves, Jamie told me that without my beard I no longer reminded her of Al Pacino in
Serpico,
and that I now looked more like Pete Maravich, the NBA basketball player well known then for his behind-the-back passes and floppy socks. We walked around Portland for a long time with no destination, and then bought, at a corner store, two apples, some rolls, a block of cheese, and a bottle of wine, and took this meal up to Jamie’s apartment, where she lived with another PSU student named Gail Thornton.

In the kitchen this morning, I asked Jamie if she remembered this small dinner in Portland. She’d forgotten it. She said that, for her, “things blur together.” Then we searched through photo albums until we found what we were looking for—a photo of Jamie’s apartment building in Portland, the Casablanca, which was faced with what looked like white fish-tank gravel. Most of its tenants were students, so there were a lot of bicycles locked to the railings, and, by the trash bin in the alley, damp pieces of jettisoned furniture. In the photo, Gail and Jamie are moving in, muscling a sofa up outdoor stairs. There’s another of Jamie wearing a red bandanna and, with a nylon brush, scrubbing her toilet. There’s a third of her standing inside the open door of her refrigerator, guzzling from a wine bottle and, it’s clear from her expression, trying not to laugh. None of this helped—Jamie, this morning, still couldn’t remember the rolls, cheese, apples, and wine, or sitting on the sofa during dinner listening to an Aretha Franklin album, or going to see
Lacombe, Lucien
later that night in a run-down theater, or that there were panhandlers on the street as we walked back to the Casablanca. I remember all these things, as arbitrary as they sound, as well as sleeping on the sofa after four or five glasses of Chianti poured from a gallon jug and, because it was kept in a broom closet, warm. Jamie is blank on these details, but she does recall that, at some point before dinner, we walked along streets in the Kings Heights neighborhood, noting trees and bushes we liked in yards, and noting, too, houses we admired and—this is what Jamie sees as important—we both responded to simple, clean lines and to façades pleasing in their symmetries. I have no doubt this happened, if she says it did, but I don’t remember the streets or the conversation. I do remember that, as I lay there on the sofa, with my Chianti glass—a jam jar—on the floor beside me, I thought about getting up and going into Jamie’s bedroom, fully dressed as I was, and curling against her back without saying anything about it, but I didn’t do that. I just lay there thinking of it apprehensively. There was a lot of noise from an adjacent apartment, male and female voices and a stereo with the bass turned up, and around two, Jamie went past me barefoot, wrapped in a blanket, and took care of the problem, and then we sat in the living room—me on the sofa and Jamie in a chair—and talked in soft voices, in the dark, about the tenants next door and their propensity to throw parties, and about
Lacombe, Lucien,
how we felt about it these hours later and whether its emotional weather remained with us. Finally, I said, “What should we do tomorrow?”

Jamie, still wrapped in her blanket, said, “What should we do right now?”

Our bungalow is empty, on a lot of days, except for me, and I admit to liking this as long as it’s fruitful, a category that is, in my view, expansive, and includes, among other things that might appear idle, the exertion of memory. I have a tendency, in fact, to place events in memory while they’re happening, which might be construed as detachment from experience, although in the end this simultaneity is, instead of something else, the experience I’m having. I remember telling myself, that first time with Jamie on my first night in Portland, not to forget what was happening as it happened, and now having told myself not to forget is bound up with the rest of that memory.

The next day, in a shop housing clutter, Jamie bought a cheap pair of Ph.D. spectacles, granny glasses with no magnification. I’ve failed to mention that she’s three years older than me, which in the beginning was something we both liked. Those glasses, so owlishly large, were a sham, because her eyesight was perfect; they’d been discarded, and she’d retrieved them as a potentially useful prop. Gail Thornton had something of this self-parodic air, too—she used a pencil to lock her hair bun together before going out at night—and it was a joke between them. But mostly Gail wasn’t in the picture. Mostly, in her apartment at the Casablanca, Jamie and I drank warm Chianti and listened to used LPs. In ’74, we were retro, largely because music was cheaper that way. I can call up Coltrane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Seeds, and
Cheap Thrills.
Jamie had a record player in her room that could deliver five album sides successively, each new one dropping while the stylus rotated out of the way, so that you didn’t have to think about anything.

We walked up Nob Hill on the day after Jamie got her glasses. I bought a copy of the
Kalevala
—the national epic of the Finns—since a used illustrated copy of it was on sale for next to nothing and both Jamie and I were enamored of the pictures. Later, we lay on Jamie’s bed admiring these, and eventually my eyes closed. When I woke up, Jamie was sitting against two pillows with her glasses on, reading the
Kalevala
studiously. “Hey,” she said, “I have a question for you. ‘Shall I open up the casket, / Treasure box of magic sayings, / Strip the end off from the yarnball, / And undo the knot entirely?’” I said, “Those are beautiful lines,” and she answered, “It must be cold in Finland,” and put the book on the side table.

Blissful day the fourth in the City of Roses. We bought the Sunday
Seattle Times
and
The Sunday Oregonian
at the Magazine Emporium on Broadway. We went to bed in the late afternoon, and when I woke I heard rain, heavily, in the courtyard of the Casablanca. As before, Jamie was sitting up against pillows with an exaggerated straight face, peering over the top of her glasses, but this time with a pencil pressed against her lower lip while she worked on a crossword. “You’re good,” I said, and she immediately replied, “I could use a clipboard and a lab coat.”

Into this Eden some gloom was interjected when I read on the page of
Seattle Times
obituaries about the death of John William’s grandmother. “Dorothy Worthington, 77, Granddaughter of City Founder.” Among the stories about the dead that day, hers led, and it began with “Heiress to a considerable fortune, Dorothy Best Worthington was well known in Seattle for her collection of antiquities and for her lifelong devotion to the Cornish School.”

Mrs. Worthington was the daughter of Lydia Strong Post—whose father, Hiram Post, was a member of the Denny Party—and of Henry Carter Best, founder of Seattle’s Best Trust and Savings Bank.

Traveling to the Near East on numerous occasions, Mrs. Worthington gradually amassed what is widely considered the city’s most significant private collection of antiquities. A patron not only of the Cornish School but of Northwest painters, Mrs. Worthington was a leading light in Seattle’s art community for many years.

“She liked to travel in the grand style,” said her assistant, Lucy Hatch. “She was a dedicated amateur Hellenist who was generous in sharing her collection with the public.”

Mrs. Worthington, a woman of many talents, died at her Madison Park home August 29 of kidney failure. She was 77.

Besides her interest in antiquities and Northwest art, Mrs. Worthington was a devoted and knowledgeable gardener. During World War II she funded the removal of Himalayan rhododendrons to the Pacific Northwest for cultivation and research.

She also made numerous gifts to the Cornish School and was instrumental in inspiring other benefactors. “Our music program in particular is indebted to Dorothy Worthington,” said Phyllis Wood, a fund-raiser for Cornish. “In recent years she came to every recital and was a gracious and welcome presence.”

Born Dorothy Post Best in Seattle in 1897, Mrs. Worthington attended Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. In 1922, she married Cyrus Worthington, president of Worthington Timber from 1932 to 1967. With her husband and daughter she lived for many years in Madison Park and in a second home in the Highlands, where her antiquities were often on display.

Family and friends remember Mrs. Worthington as erudite and serious, but also capable of humor. “Dorothy had written instructions for the annual installation of the family Christmas tree,” recalls Lucy Hatch. “Yet she was able to laugh one year when it tipped over during a Yule party.”

In her later years, Mrs. Worthington took up the piano. According to Ms. Hatch, she read avidly during prolonged sessions of kidney dialysis over the final nine months of her life.

Mrs. Worthington is survived by her only child, Virginia Barry, of Taos and Seattle, and by one grandchild, John William Barry. She was preceded in death by her husband, Cyrus, in 1971.

A graveside memorial will be held at…

This all struck a chord with me because in the winter of ’73 I’d helped John William move a piano for Dorothy Worthington. One afternoon, we went to her home in Madison Park, a mansion better suited, I thought, to a plantation in the South, because it had tall columns and a widow’s walk. Inside, the furniture looked monumental, with shells, eagles, and leaves for touches, and the foyer smelled like tarnish paste. It was dark in there, and drafty even with the radiators percolating. We were led by Mrs. Worthington’s assistant—a woman with a lustrous silver pageboy, in jeans—into a conservatory: white wicker, a small television, and a view of rhododendron bushes seized by frost. There was also a space heater on wheels, and a folded-back
TV Guide.
After ten or fifteen minutes, Mrs. Worthington shuffled in, announced, “The punctual piano-movers have arrived on
shed-ule,
” and kissed John William on both cheeks. There was lipstick on her teeth. She wore a cardigan cable-stitch sweater and brandished a glass-handled cane. She had a man’s jaw and looked a little pop-eyed, plain like Eleanor Roosevelt but with the rimless glasses of Harry Truman. “Tell me,” she said, sitting down in a wicker rocker. “How are you enjoying the Lakeside School?”

“It’s great,” said John William.

“Dexter Strong, you know, was a good friend of your grandfather’s.”

John William scratched his head.

“We knew Bob Adams, too.”

“I don’t know Bob Adams.”

“Bob Adams was headmaster,” said Mrs. Worthington. “You’re looking so virile these days, John William, with your wonderful, poetic head of hair.”

To me, she sounded like Katharine Hepburn—like somebody from the horsy set as it might have existed before color television. The tremulous tone of her patter was benign and scary at the same time. I noticed that her shoes were orthopedic, and that she kept her chin tilted, as she spoke, to good advantage. Her gaze was aggressive, and her cane could have been a prop. John William said, “This is Neil Countryman. He’s moved a lot of pianos in his time, and I thought he might be useful.”

Mrs. Worthington smiled. “Neil Countryman,” she said. “I like the sound of that. Are you interested in painting?”

“Yes.”

“Behind me here, in the next room, is an Ambrose Patterson worth a little of your time.”

I’d thought she meant house painting. I’d thought she might have had a job for me painting a room or a wall. “Okay,” I said.

“There are also some wonderful Tobey murals in the house, and a Clayton Price which you’ll see when, I suppose the phrase is, we tackle the piano. Are you Punctual Petes ready to tackle the piano?”

We made a long, slow trip behind her through dark rooms. Around a corner, the silver-haired assistant was waiting for us, standing with her hands clasped in the doorway of a study where a fire burned. “Lucy,” said Mrs. Worthington, “Lucy, this is Neil Countryman. Don’t you think ‘Countryman’ is a wonderful name?”

“I do think so.”

“And my grandson, John William.”

“Hail,” said Lucy.

We traveled on—Lucy, as it turned out, was just acknowledging our passing, and returned to her desk work and fire. Then we came to what I think you would call a drawing room. That’s of course an antiquated term, “drawing room,” but it wasn’t hard to imagine that here, in the past, the Worthingtons had entertained guests. Now this drawing room was a music studio smelling humidly of Turkish rugs. It was lined with books, and it housed a few of Mrs. Worthington’s antiquities—for example, a fragment of a black jar, a jug, and a bronze warrior on horseback. To me it felt cryptlike, with its drawn shades and ancient knickknacks. “Your adversary,” said Mrs. Worthington, meaning her piano. “And you thought this would be easy.”

It was a Bösendorfer grand with an ebony finish. For a moment we stood admiring its strings and hammers; then John William, unsolicited, swung a rod out of the way and closed the top. “Where to?” he said.

“Darling,” said Mrs. Worthington.

She called our attention to some rug scraps on the piano bench by prodding them with the rubber tip of her cane. “Look down,” she said. “Those are some very unfortunate fir floorboards Grandfather Cyrus coerced me into in 1957. So I asked Lucy to bring up four scraps. The idea is that one of you strong young men will
carefully
lift a corner of the piano, and the other will slip a scrap under the wheel. You will notice that my scraps have a top and a bottom. I want the soft side down, of course. We’ll coddle these floorboards.” She tapped an orthopedic shoe, as if in a test. “I have Palladian furnishings,” she said. “Strong, solid pieces. Underneath some of my carpets, there’s damage. Men who worry their hair about, to hide their bald spots—I’m like that with my Douglas-fir floors. Do you remember the Highlands?”