Extra Innings (27 page)

I remember how delighted I was with the first sentence of a satire on Henry James in her first book: ‘Author Winner sat serenely contemplating his novel.' Last week, going through my shelves of poetry to eliminate volumes I will never read again, I came upon three books of hers, and found a verse she wrote soon after Watergate, called ‘Sprung Lamb':

After a sudden religious conversion

The shrewd politician can get off the hook

By answering any who cast an aspersion

‘The Lord is my shepherd and I am his crook.'

Reading Felicia's ‘Southern Comfort' I recall Sybil's unspoken pleasure (or did I imagine it?) when she heard about Maine's terrible weather:

No meter can measure

The infinite pleasure

Of people in tropic resorts

Who squirm with delight

Through the sweltering night

At their home town weather reports.

Ogden Nash. Dorothy Parker. Phyllis McGinley. Felicia Lamport. Who in the eighties and nineties has been able to take a humorous poetic view of mankind and its corrupt and polluted world? It may be that no lyrical breasts contain light hearts, that it is not possible to laugh aloud at ourselves and at others, for fear we will be thought frivolous and uncaring, or unaware of the great tragedies of our times.

In a mood for more levity, I am pleased to receive from Bob Emerson a clipping from
Newsday
published in New York City. It contains some lovely Yogi Berra witticisms: ‘You come to a fork in the road,' Yogi once said, ‘take it!' And ‘You've got to be careful if you don't know where you're going. Because you might not get there.'

But no matter. This is no time for humor. I call the airline and make a reservation to fly to Washington in a few days, to help with the misery of yet another move, this one, we both swear, to be our last. A vain threat: For everyone alive, the final move is into Emily Dickinson's ‘House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground' with its ‘Cornice—in the Ground—.'

May

When a man tries himself, the verdict is in his favor
.

—
Thomas Williams
, The Hair of
Harold Roux

Washington: Packing. Every day I come upon something I know I can live without. I place it in the ‘Sell' or ‘Give Away' or ‘Throw Away' heap. Sybil returns in late afternoon from the Vassar Book Sale, inspects the piles while I am in the bathroom or at the computer, and removes two-thirds of my discards to the ‘Save' or ‘Pack' collections.

I remind her how much that object will cost to ship. She reminds me how much it will cost to replace. I think she errs in being too saving; she thinks I am wrong in being so profligate. So it goes. I suppose it is often true when two people live together: one is a hoarder, one a disposer, and each thinks the other is making terrible mistakes.

La Rochefoucauld: ‘If we had no faults we should not find so much enjoyment in seeing faults in others.'

To us, the Vassar Used Book Sale is a movable feast. Once a year, wherever we happen to be, sometime in the month of April or May, it is necessary for us to be in Washington for this fabled event. In the old days, that is, the seventies, I remember that it was held in some huge, vacant ground-floor store. Book dealers, collectors, readers, and buyers would begin to line up outside at midnight, settling down in sleeping bags or cushions on the street near the building to await the opening of the doors at ten in the morning.

The first year we went to the sale, the leaders in line were Larry McMurtry, the co-owner of Booked Up, an excellent used-book store in Georgetown, and his friend Calvin Trillin of
The New Yorker
. Sybil and I were late: we arrived at five in the morning, so we were quite far back in the line. Volunteers would leave for coffee, their places being saved for them while they performed breakfast errands of mercy. In later years an enterprising dealer thought up the gimmick of handing out numbers to early arrivals to enable them to go home for a few hours of sleep. This worked for a while, until the stalwarts who stayed in line objected to those who drove by, picked up a number, and returned to get in their numbered places at a quarter to ten.

So intense was the competition for early entrance into this behemoth of Washington book sales that all sorts of trickery came to be practiced. Close to the opening hour, late arrivals would inch their way to the front, talking to friends along the way, arranging to arrive at the head of line as the doors opened. Others would exert extreme pressure at ten, so that the orderly one-by-one progress would be swelled by persons from the back, until pandemonium resulted—all in order to be the first at the poetry table, or the cookbooks.

Collectors believed that the worst-behaved and most pushy persons at the sale were dealers. Dealers thought that collectors of military books were unbelievably aggressive, and old-timers knew enough to stay away from Jacques Morgan, a local dealer who had the strength of ten in his hands and arms. He could insert himself into any small space near the book tables in order to sweep large numbers of books into his boxes.

All in all, the first twenty minutes of the sale were life-threatening. To the fleet-fingered, the rapid readers of book spines, and the effective elbowers belonged the spoils: valuable first editions, underpriced rare books, difficult-to-find volumes.

Two years ago (by this time I had stopped going to the opening day of the Vassar Sale for fear of losing life or limb in the initial melee) Sybil succumbed to torn carpeting and the pressure of the mob and was trampled, but not before a television camera had caught her fall and rise.

So her personal charge into the vast room containing thousands of used books is recorded for all time. Stories about her subsequent conduct are narrated, I am told, at the start of each year's sale. In falling, she sprained her right wrist very badly. Not a whit deterred, she went onto the sale floor carrying her canvas bags and collected hundreds of dollars' worth of ‘stock,' as she calls it, to be shipped to the Sargentville store. She packed up cartons of the books she had bought, carried them to her van, then up to the apartment. Only then did she give in to the extreme pain and allow me to drive her to the emergency room of the Capitol Hill Hospital to have her severely sprained wrist treated.

It is of such stoic and ferocious stuff that used-book dealers are made.

The apartment has begun to look like a warehouse. It is piled and lined with packing cases marked for their destinations: ‘bookstore' and ‘house upstairs' and ‘kitchen.' But we cannot figure out what will happen to them when they arrive. The Maine house is already overstocked with objects and furniture, the kitchen cabinets hardly close because plates, glasses, and cups obtrude from the shelves. I try to practice the ‘Good Riddance' school of packing, but Sybil is faithful to her mode of saving, collection, and preservation. I say, ‘Let's throw it out.' She says, as she wraps, ‘You never know when we may need it.'

The rooms of the apartment grow smaller each day. We find ourselves living in the middle spaces, surrounded by brown carton walls. Still, there is a lot left, so we advertise in the
Washington Post
that we are moving and selling. We nail hand-printed signs to streetlight and telephone poles in the Seventh Street—Eastern Market area. From noon to five on market day, Saturday, people pour in. By the end of the day what we haven't sold we give away, except for the larger pieces of furniture. Word spreads about them; by Monday they too are gone.

The phenomenon of ‘moving sales,' ‘yard sales,' ‘garage sales,' and ‘tag sales' did not exist, I believe, until the eighties. Before that time I remember sedate ‘estate sales,' handled by professionals, and auctions. These were formal affairs, with no haggling or ‘offers' permitted. The buyer felt somewhat intimidated by the process.

Flea markets date back to the early twenties and are probably the forerunners of yard sales
et al
. I never went to flea markets when I passed them ‘in the country' (they were not city phenomena), thinking that only junk would be offered there: the name suggested small, cheap, insignificant objects to me. But now! It is impossible to drive out on state and country roads on weekends without encountering hand-lettered signs with arrows, directing us to the nearest yard sale. And it is nearly impossible for us to pass one in Maine without stopping.

In the past, in towns outside of Washington, Sybil would lure me to one that advertised books among other things for sale by saying: ‘Who knows, there may be a first edition of
Huck
there.' Years ago, in a good bookstore in Santa Barbara, I bought a copy of Jean Toomer's
Cane
that had belonged to Paul Robeson and had all the worn signs of having been carried everywhere for years by the great singer. We sold that unusual copy. But the promise of a first edition of that scarce-as-hen's-teeth novel would drag me into garage sales for many years. Of course, we never found another
Cane
or a
Huck
, but we did come upon interesting books selling for very little that we could add to the bookstore stock.

I have heard that these sales, large and small, are now an important part of contemporary American economy. People buy what they need, it is true, but as often they are persuaded by the price to buy what they think they need or do not need but take a fancy to at the moment. Comes the time when there is no more room for what they have acquired at sales, they solve the difficulty by holding a yard sale of their own.

So it comes about that objects of use, near-use, and no use circulate, from one yard to the other, from a garage in Stonington to a barn in East Blue Hill. I like to imagine that, eventually, the first seller of the little sailboat mounted on the face of a clock which stands on an abalone shell will change hands for the fifth or sixth time, and at the end, will be presented as a fiftieth anniversary present to the original seller.

In this manner, old purchases will move from house to barn to yard to other house. There is the pleasant sense of making a profit from what one no longer wants. But I suspect the profit is delusory, because persons caught in the yard-sale circuit will use their profits to acquire more ‘things' in the next season of sales. The pleasures of acquisition are fleeting, profits only temporary. But the yard-sale economy seems active and vital.

Sybil is already packing objects to send to Maine ‘for our yard sale up there.' She assures me: ‘People in Maine will appreciate these things.'

The saga of the bicycle named the
Queen Mary:

Stored for three years on the balcony of the apartment is Sybil's old bike, vintage about 1939. When her older brother Joel came back from a student tour of England in that year he brought as a present to his ten-year-old sister a lovely three-speed Raleigh bike. For fifty years it has accompanied Sybil everywhere. But in her last years of city life she had rarely ridden it. This week, after much agonizing self-examination, she was able to entertain the thought that perhaps she might bring herself to sell it now.

At the apartment sale on Saturday a few people examined it with interest, but no one was willing to part with seventy-five dollars to buy it. On Monday Sybil and I walked it (one tire was flat) to a bicycle shop on Pennsylvania Avenue. We made a somber progress; she was desolate about offering it ‘to the trade.' On the way we passed a panhandler who asked her if she was going to sell that fine bike. If so, he said, he would buy it ‘when I get paid at the end of the week.'

No, the fellow at the shop said, he had no use for it. But the former owner of the store, a man now in his eighties who is the world's largest collector of bicycle
drums
, might be interested. Drums, or hubs, I learn from Isaac Wheeler, my grandson who works summers in a bicycle shop, are the axle-and-gear housings on old three-speed bikes. He was not able to tell me why anyone would collect them.

The shopkeeper tells us that so notable is Henry Mathis's collection that he has left it to the Smithsonian Institution. Sybil dwells lovingly on her bike's history as we all stand looking at the relic, pointing out that only the kickstand and the basket are not original. She explains that it is named the
Queen Mary
because one rides it sitting aloft in lordly fashion, high above everyone else on the road or street. ‘None of this abject crouching that they do on bikes these days,' she says.

Next day she takes the
Queen Mary
to Maryland. The collector of drums (or hubs) admires the bike, and buys it. So upset is she by her callous abandonment of an old, trusted friend that she forgets to ask if he is going to polish up the original, now-dull black paint and sell it, permitting the new owner to mount the shiny black antique and ride away down Branch Avenue, aloft and regal, or dismantle it for its parts. She is somewhat consoled by the thought that if the old collector does disassemble it, the drum will serve to immortalize the whole bike when it is displayed in a national museum. She thinks it would be like an historic transplant—taking a healthy part from it and preserving it in another place.

Sybil comes home, saddened. But I notice she puts her helmet, the old bike bell, and two sets of cables and locks on the pile marked ‘Pack.'

For some reason (perhaps the sight of the helmet), I remember Queen Elizabeth I's threat to an unruly courtier: ‘I will make you shorter by a head.'

The time for John Kidner's moving men to arrive is approaching. Our living quarters have shrunk even further. We now have a couch, a chair, a demountable Ikea table, and about fifty cardboard cartons in the living room. The remains of a Mother's Day bouquet, three tulips and a few carnations, sit in a bottle on the table. We are stripped down to basic needs. After all the years of overdecoration, it feels rather good.

I break the rhythm of compulsive packing and go to noon Mass at St. James. Mother Barbara Henry, ‘curate,' as she is listed in the bulletin, is the celebrant, Iris Newsom, of the Library of Congress, is the server, I am the congregation. It is a quiet, decorous liturgy, during which the confusion and roil of the streets outside die away, and only the peace ‘that passeth all understanding' seems to inhabit the beautiful church.