Extra Innings (14 page)

The study is the only upstairs room. I remember that Cather's first, minuscule bedroom was in the attic of the tiny Red Cloud house. Ever since that time she seems to have hated being ‘underneath,' at the mercy of sound and interruption by footsteps and noise over her head. I seem to remember that when she lived on Bank Street in New York, she rented the apartment directly above her to prevent hearing what Myra Henshawe, in
My Mortal Enemy
, was so plagued by: ‘We are unfortunate in the people who live over us,' Oswald, her husband, explains to Nellie, the narrator. And the dying Myra adds: ‘They tramp up there all day long like cattle … beating my brains into a jelly.' Cather loved her cabin for its ‘great quiet, in this great darkness.'

There was no telephone line in her time; now, of course, the wires are there. Once there were ‘four waterfalls, white as silver, pouring down the perpendicular cliff walls.' Now we see only one, thin and almost tentative. But the weir she wrote about still stands in the water, within sight of her window had the trees not grown up so much. Weirs, I learn, are fishing traps, made of huge, pointed tree trunks, driven into the water and holding what is here called twoine (from twine?), nets into which herring swim and then cannot escape. At high tide the sticks are barely visible through the fog, reminding me of Whistler's watercolor
Southend at Sunset
. Although I suspect the vague sticks in that work are a distant pier.

(I am always struck by how the memory of a work of art often shapes, indeed determines, what I come to see in the natural world. Would Cather's weir have looked the same that fog-filled day had I not known the Whistler?)

When we leave, Ted educates me about the trees on Cather's land, tamaracks, which are pines with red-brown bark and needles that turn lacelike and bright yellow in the fall when every other pine remains green, and the scrubby shrubs on the headlands that are pygmy, speckled alders. Then he walks to the rear of the cabin, where there is a crumbling stone wall. I fantasize, seeing Cather's heavy white hands (or Edith Lewis's more delicate ones) building that low wall from the stones everywhere on the beaches and headlands. When we go back to the car, I find that Ted has carried away a small cobble-shaped one for me. I demur but am secretly pleased, having thought about ‘liberating' one myself but being too cowardly to do so. Now it sits, solid and reassuring, on a corner of my desk, reminding me of a fine writer productively at work fifty years ago in a secluded, quiet, and beautiful place. Like mine.

Odd. I had the curious feeling Cather was still around there somewhere, resenting our intrusion on her privacy, waiting impatiently for us to leave.

On our way back to the inn, we stop at a small grocery store and buy some canapes to have with our evening drink. Herring, of course, is the major catch on the island and the main contents of its small canning industry. I buy a can of kippers, feeling smug about my newly acquired education.

I am reprimanded by an eighty-year-old correspondent. ‘Let me set the record straight,' she says. ‘You are badly mistaken about the nature of old age.' Her view differs from mine in many respects. She writes that she never thinks about the slow, inexorable decay of her body, as I seem ‘obsessively' to do. Unlike me, she does not despair at losses and decline, but instead rejoices in what remains to her, and daily celebrates the gift of time she has been granted.

What shall I reply? That I could not write of her fortunate experiences in growing old, only of my own. I needed to be honest about what I felt, not dishonestly cheerful. ‘I needed to set my own record straight, unpalatable as it might be to some readers,' I wrote to her. I have written this, in different words, to other protesters against, to them, my unjustified pessimism. Some of her words echo in my mind. I go to
The Writer's Quotation Book
, published by Bill Henderson's Pushcart Press in a neat, small, pocket-size book, and find what I thought I remembered. Gloria Swanson (married numerous times) said: ‘I'll be eighty this month. Age, if nothing else, entitles me to set the record straight before I dissolve. I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.'

Vocabulary I acquired on Grand Manan: Fishing boats of whatever size are called dories there, never dinghies, as in Maine. Dulse: purplish seaweed that is edible, gathered on the rocks of the west coast of the island in Dark Harbour, dried on the beach, and then packaged and served as a snack, like peanuts. Some people do not like eating it but chew it and then spit it out, like tobacco. I look at it but do not buy it, being, as I have become in old age, loath to try anything new, sure it cannot possibly taste good.

Information about Cather's summer cabin that I found in my file of letters at home: In 1963 the New Brunswick government wanted to make it an historical site so that visitors could view the place, ‘reverently.' Miss Lewis, Cather's long-time companion and executor, replied to the request that Miss Cather, as she always referred to her, ‘was so opposed to any publicity on Grand Manan—she so wished to keep the little cottage unadvertised and unknown—that I do not feel that I can give you permission for any sort of lease for viewing the site.'

I was right. Miss Lewis wanted the place kept private for her friend, sixteen years after her death. Cather is still there, hostile to our presence, forty-five years later.

The prospect of months ahead in Sargentville, cold, icy, and tempestuous as they might have been, has been dimmed and then wiped out. Jane's operation is the third of next month, so we will drive down about that time.

I had looked to January and perhaps February here to try out my theoretical love of solitude. Cato: ‘Never am I less alone than when I am by myself.' The test will have to wait until next year.

Sunrise in winter is far redder, far more brilliant, than at any other season. It starts early and by six has filled the sky over Deer Isle with a color not unlike fire.… I think of the news recently that the Berkeley hills were caught in a great sweep of fire, leveling a hundred homes. On television, standing in front of a sky still burning, I saw old acquaintances, the McClungs, and listened to them tell of the total destruction of everything they owned. They are book people, he an editor at the University of California Press and she, I think, active in the University Press bookstore in Berkeley that we visited years ago when we went book-hunting in California. I have a horrified vision of the hundreds of books that must have inhabited their house reduced to grey ash.

I cannot escape constant worry about my daughter. When I look out over the winter-roughened water of the Cove I see her face. What makes this operation especially harrowing for her, and for the rest of us, is that she had a benign brain tumor removed fifteen years ago. It was a long and terrible experience. She has a vivid memory of the pain she will have to endure again, of the difficulties and indignities that accompany having one's head opened and foreign matter removed from it, and the long, slow, pain-filled recovery.

Having been through all this, she is understandably in an acute state of nerves. The Wheelers and her husband, Bob, are trying hard to help her through these next weeks of waiting, but it is not easy for anyone, especially not for Jane.… Her younger sister, Kate, a physician who is very pregnant, has come up from Baltimore to assist her in conversations with the doctors who will do the seventeen-hour surgery. Another sister, Elizabeth, will take leave from her Lake Placid job to stay with her when she comes out of intensive care, thus putting to rest at least one of Jane's great worries, being alone in a hospital room, as she was last time when an emergency arose. And she is promised a private room, another of her concerns: she doesn't feel up to bearing the pain of anyone else, unreconciled as she is to the prospect of her own.

It is good to see how concerned these sisters are about each other in an emergency. I am filled with pity for Jane, and find it hard to concentrate on what I had planned to do. How selfish writers are. Full of concern for a child I love, still, a morsel of resentment sticks in my craw that anything should happen to distract me from putting words on the page.

Three years of occupation of what I once considered a most spacious study, and now there is hardly room to get into it. Books and folders are piled everywhere. It makes me think of the visitor who was shown through Mark Twain's study in Hartford. He asked the great man why it was necessary to have so many books spread and piled so untidily over the floor. ‘Well, you see,' Twain said, ‘it's so very difficult to borrow bookcases.'

My greatest difficulty is finding what I need. The old, original classification scheme, installed by my librarian-housemate Sybil, seems now to have been completely broken down, by me. Books are stuffed in everywhere, on their sides, flat on their backs. Next time I arrange them I will resort to the most absurd system I know of, like the one I read of recently in
Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books
, a small Christmas book published by the bookseller, Oak Knoll. It was a crazy scheme suggested in an etiquette book of the Victorian age: ‘The perfect hostess would see to it that works by male authors and female authors were properly segregated on her bookshelves. Unless (like Elizabeth and Robert Browning) they were married.'

The telephone rings. I tell this story to the caller. She laughs. ‘That system is still in use,' she tells me. Elaine Showalter, the feminist scholar at Princeton, admits only women writers to the shelves of her dining room.

I welcome a day away from the difficulties I am encountering with the novel to drive down the coast to visit May Sarton. On the way I stop to see what damage has been done by Hurricane Bob to Moody Beach. Seawalls have been broken and steps washed away; the Hazeltines have had water driven in under their porch. But on the whole the beach has survived well and is still as vast and as beautiful as ever.

Standing at the top of the seawall in front of the Hazeltines' cottage, which adjoined ours, I imagine I can see Sam Wheeler, then a Roman Catholic priest, visiting us. It is early morning, and Sam is a sight to behold. He is dressed in his long, black cassock and is playing long-distance Frisbee with my husband and Mike Keating. Five years later he will be my son-in-law. I wonder what has become of his cassock.

And I recall another scene. We are sitting around a campfire built very close to the Keatings' cottage up the beach. It is growing dark; we are all about halfway through the evening's drinking and feeling fine. The children are bedded down. The grown-ups decide to stay up as long as the fire lasts. We build sand barriers against the encroachment of the tide, and watch it with inebriated interest as it creeps closer and closer. Then a miracle: the water breaks through the sand wall, parts around the still-burning embers, and comes up to the steps, avoiding the fire. It is close to three o'clock in the morning. Still we sit, celebrating our victory over the force of nature.

At this point my memory fades. But Kathy Keating tells me the next morning that we stayed to see the tide turn and begin to retreat, as if discouraged by the noise of our intoxicated hilarity. At that moment, we put out the fire, I am told, and went down the beach to our cottage, walking in the black water. The Keatings went skinny-dipping, as we called it then. The sky was beginning to lighten, that I recall. It was one of the great moments at Moody Beach.

Another: On Labor Day, beginning at noon, we would build a great bonfire, composed of every broken object, every scrap of wood and driftwood we could find. One year it rained, so we mounted a broken umbrella over the built-up high point, and it protected the fire most of the day until it too succumbed to the flames. All day, neighbors emptied their refrigerators into the fire; the odors that resulted were terrible, especially when Kathy disposed of a huge pot of decaying turkey soup into it. In the evening, we held a sort of bacchanalia around it, with music, drunken dancing, and folk singing to Mike Keating's guitar. The drinks of the night consisted of the remains of every wine and liquor bottle of every description left over in the cottages.

The high point of the evening came when we gathered in the dying firelight to review our summer's collections of sea glass, deciding which pieces were not sufficiently ‘done' to be retained. Sea glass, as every walker of the edge of the sea must know, are bits of glass washed up by the sea, blue, green, brown, white, and colors in between, which are remnants of bottles caught in the sea wrack.

We had decreed, in our first year on Moody Beach, that the discards had to be thrown back into the sea by a virgin, in order to be further seasoned by the pious action of the waves. For some reason we saw the ceremony as religious in significance. The selection of the person to perform the rite became the night's pinnacle of hilarity: who was truly fit for the task? It was thought we might have to go as far as York Beach, or Wells Beach, to find a truly qualified candidate. At last, after much debate, Martha Keating was settled upon as the only sure celebrant along the mile-and-a-half stretch of beach: she was four years old.

Today, standing on the edge of Moody's empty expanse, I thought I was watching a shadowy volleyball game, played every afternoon between the Keatings, the Grumbachs, and their friends. Mike Keating and my husband were fierce competitors. Once, when the Keatings were a point or so behind, Mike reached for the ball in the air, hit small Martha, and knocked her out. Perhaps I remember it wrongly, perhaps it never happened, but what I see and hear is Mike shouting to Kathy to pull her out of the way without taking his eye off the ball on his side of the net. The game went on, goes on still in my memory, played hard by absent sportsmen and children, in a time half a century in the past.

Vita mutator, non tollitur
. My friend LaSalle, writing to me about a sentence I quoted in
End Zone
(‘There is no death. Only a change of worlds') sends me the version of it from the Tridentine Mass of Requiem: ‘Life is changed, it is not taken away.' In whatever version, I continue to find it very hard to think of death as anything but oblivion, the bottomless abyss, life's light obliterated, the unending dark. Perhaps that is the ‘change' the proverb and the liturgy describe.