Fifty Days of Solitude (5 page)

Letters that contained obituaries from newspapers were kindly meant, I knew. The writers assumed (rightly in both cases) that “up there” I would not have heard or read the news. But always, the day bad news arrived became a useless one. I felt like an epiphyte, that tropical plant that takes its nourishment not from the soil or sand but from the air. Every breath of air I took seemed full of doom.

I needed to take a walk to the road and back after I learned of the death of Dr. Perkins. I had to get out of the stale, dire house air. Anna Perkins was doctor to Sybil's family and to most people in the rural hill towns of East Berne, Westerlo, and Clarksville in upstate New York. For sixty-five years, after her graduation from Radcliffe College and Columbia University Physicians and Surgeons Medical School, she made the rounds of her largely poor patients, farmers and working men and women, treating and dosing them for her fee of $5 a visit. Sometimes she forgot to collect the fee and had to be reminded or accepted a chicken or eggs in its place. Sybil told me that once, having treated her son Chris at home for a high fever, Dr. Perkins flatly refused to accept any money. “I was passing your house anyway,” she said.

One day I went on her rounds with her. She was then in her mid-seventies, I believe. She would pull up to a farmhouse and begin to gather her equipment as the farmer's wife (or husband or daughter) came down the path, helped her out of her Land Rover, and carried her bag to the house. I waited in the car, studying the list of places she intended to visit, the names of the chronically ill or the sick who had called, their complaint, and what medicine she intended to administer. The back of her car was crowded with free samples from drug companies, her own vials of medicines she dispensed to families who could not afford them, and her well-worn missal; her day always started at the Catholic church with early mass.

Visits to her office, from the day she began to practice medicine in 1928 until she died in 1993, cost $4. She was not the prototypical country doctor who sticks stubbornly to what she once learned. Every Thursday she drove to the medical center in Albany to attend the weekly seminars on recent advances in medical knowledge and practice. She read the current literature (I know this from the journals I saw in her van) together with the customary Catholic fare:
America, Catholic Mind
, the papal encyclicals.

She had not always been alone. Her companion of forty years was the daughter of a local industrial family, whom she always referred to as Miss Hannay. Miss Hannay died in 1973. Ten years later, when Sybil and I visited Dr. Perkins, she was still grieving for her. “It does not get any easier,” she told us, and then said nothing more.

She did not go to Harvard Medical School, she told us, because in her time it would not accept women.… She treated five generations of the Hannay family.… During storms she used to put on snowshoes to reach stranded families with sick children and once was air-lifted by helicopter to care for a patient with a bad heart who lived in the hills.… Out on her rounds if she saw a child playing in the yard who was supposed to be in bed, she would stop her car, order him indoors, and chastise the child's parent.… Sybil once complained to her that her hands and feet were always cold. She wondered if she might be anemic. “Try turning up the thermostat,” was her advice.… She was an avid lover of animals and, spotting a deer in a field during hunting season, would blow her horn loudly to scare it back into the wood.… Once she took her chair and sat in front of a tree she wished to save from the axes of road builders.

I did not know her well. Few people did: She was a very private woman who did not air her aches or griefs and disappointments. Sybil knew her better, and loved her, and thought of her every time she paid her Washington internist three hundred dollars for a physical examination.

O
NE
of the elderly nuns at the College of Saint Rose, where I taught for almost ten years in the 1960s, wrote to me of the death of my longtime friend Sister Noel Marie Cronin, at eighty-three, in retirement at her order's motherhouse, as it is called, and having served her vows faithfully for more than sixty years. She suffered from osteoporosis. She too was a woman of unusual reticence, who never to my knowledge talked about herself—I cannot recall her ever using the first person pronoun. She taught mathematics at the college. In her free time, deeply concerned for the future of young blacks in the South End ghetto of Albany, she organized a summer tutorial program at the college called
GAP
(Growth and Progress). She taught high school students math, persuaded other college personnel to teach English, dramatics, history, and science, and saw to it that the college provided lunch, snacks, and classroom space for “her kids.” She was unforgiving of carelessness, thoughtless behavior, and bad manners; but the kids respected her, some even loved her, and certainly they obeyed her.

Noel (I would not have dared to address her in this way anywhere but in print, and after her death, but I thought of her as Noel) never asked me for money to support
GAP
once I had left the college. Instead she would write to me regularly in Washington, D.C., reporting on the progress and growth of one or another of her prize pupils and telling me some news of the faculty.

She was the daughter of deeply religious parents. Three of her brothers became priests and another sister and brother never married. I often speculated on whether strong puritanical teachings about sex had discouraged these children. All I knew for certain about Noel's sentiments was that when she heard an alumna had married she would wrinkle up her nose in distaste and say nothing.

I never heard her utter a critical word about a priest. Her devotion to the clergy was absolute. She was fond of Father Sam Wheeler who later left the priesthood to marry my daughter. She wrinkled her nose when she heard the news, but she said nothing disparaging to me about him and certainly never seemed to hold his disaffection against me.

When I heard of her death I pictured her as I first saw her, a small, bent woman in her old floor-length black habit, looking up into the face of a six-foot black lad, he with his hands on his hips looking down at her and protesting something. I saw her shake her head and point, and then the boy sat down at an outdoor picnic bench on the campus and took up a pencil and paper. She stood looking over his shoulder watching him work out some algebraic equations.

I walked away after that, but the tableau has remained with me. Wherever she is now she is doubtless laying down the laws of trigonometrical functions to a boy about to take the entrance exam to some celestial sphere or other.

T
HE
news that disturbed me most, that unsettled me to the point of a wasted morning's work, because all semblance of peace had departed from my study, concerned one of Sister Noel's favorite priests, Father Bertrand Fay. Tall, handsome, and very charming, he was my friend too. We spent many happy hours together listening to his superb recordings of opera in his quarters at the college, the same house in which Sam Wheeler lived before he defected into marriage with my daughter.

Years ago, when Bert was the object of unproven accusations of sexual “deviation” against him and Father Richard Lucas, both of them teachers in the department of theology, Noel was one of Bert's firmest defenders. (I have always thought that to her innocent mind a priest could not possibly be guilty of any sort of wrongdoing.) The unpleasant brouhaha ended in the resignation of the college president, who had issued the terminal contracts to him and to Richard, and the departure of Richard from the college, the church, and the city because (this is my guess) he could no longer bear to be dishonest, to play the closeted role he had been forced into.

For many years after that Bert and I exchanged Christmas presents. He would send me a magnificent poinsettia plant; I would, on occasion, give him whatever new book on opera I could find. Poinsettia was a flower Sybil disliked, but we could not figure out a way to cut off the thoughtful and (to my way of thinking) very handsome gift.

Bert was well-to-do, having a good salary and being the only child of wealthy parents. One after the other they died, leaving money to their beloved son. He moved out of the college into an apartment. With a close friend he set up an antiques business, after that a good restaurant. Both seem to have failed. For many years, a much-admired priest who was considered a fine preacher, he went on teaching at the college and serving a nearby parish on Sunday.

He must have run out of money. He must have needed it to go on living the good life he found important (“He dressed very well,” one parishioner told a reporter, a bad thing, I suppose he thought, for a priest to do). Someone else told me Bert felt he deserved the good life.

Apparently Bert still went to New York during the opera season. Did he keep the same subscription tickets he had had for so many years? I have no way of knowing. It was said he had two apartments in New York, but I don't know if this was true.

All I knew for certain was what I read in the long clippings sent to me from the
Albany Times-Union
and the
Troy Record
. It would appear that recently he had begun to borrow money from priest-friends, former nuns, senior citizens, and friends, on the pretext that it was an investment (to be repaid at 18 percent interest) in important work being done at the college by a student who was expecting large grants for his research in entomology. When very little of the more than a quarter million dollars in loans was repaid, Bert said the student had died of
AIDS
and his family was withholding the money.

There was, of course, no department of entomology at the college, nor any student registered there who was doing research in the field. Bert gave up his college post, which he had held for twenty-five years, and left the priesthood. He now faced foreclosure on a house he allegedly collateralized with the money he borrowed, as well as numerous counts of grand larceny. He was out on bail.

I felt great pity for Bert even while I recognized the wrongs he may have done to trusting persons and the selfishness of satisfying his own needs at great cost to others. If he is convicted, his will be a tragic fall, from the heights of respect and admiration granted a priest and professor, especially if he is handsome, graceful, and charming, from prosperity and every kind of pleasure, to the lower depths of a probable jail sentence and the life-long distrust, even scorn, of his acquaintances and friends. How will he live with this descent during the years he has before him?

American society leads to many more precipitous falls than ascents that move steadily upward through a lifetime. It is one of the tragedies of a very promising youth that too often achievement and recognition come early and too fast, leaving a long life of disappointment and decline. At the same time, those who start slowly are more fortunate. With few expressed hopes for their futures and only their own convictions, they quietly and in obscurity make their way up whatever ladder they wish to ascend. Success in middle and old age is gratifying, especially since it makes more bearable all the physical failures of those years.

I
N WHAT
odd places we must go to find solitude! A physician I know told me that he did not mind one whit having an examination known as Magnetic Resonance Imaging
(MRI)
, a diagnostic procedure most people hate because the patient is encased for so long, lying still in a machine that is almost tomblike. He said it was the only quiet time he had had in a long time, and he was able to think very well in the stillness and silence the examination provided.

O
NE
day last week the newspaper contained a review of a new book,
The First year: A Retirement Journal
by John Mosedale. It startled me because so much of Mosedale's initial concern about retirement ran counter to mine. Without the presence of the storm and strife of the work-a-day world, he said he feared that untroubled retirement would not be a continuous pleasure. He told a story of a man who lived on a South Pacific island: “Life was effortless. Each day the sun rose in splendor. One morning the man emerged from his hut, looked at the rising sun and said, ‘Another perfect goddamned day' and shot himself.”

Mosedale worried about “the sudden silence after the roar of work.” I remember that when I moved to Maine (retirement in the strict sense is not required of writers) I could not wait for the moment when quiet would descend upon me, only to discover that silence was not a state often granted to anyone, however one might desire it. In the fifty days in which I worked to achieve it, I learned how elusive it was. The far-off sound of a passing car, the whine of a chain saw in the distance—at my neighbor's house a quarter of a mile away, was it?—the rough quack of crows searching for sustenance in the snow under the bird feeder, the crack and snap of a log falling into the woodstove ashes, these were the breaks in my silence. They roughed up the smooth nothingness I hoped for.

Mosedale said he thinks much less about death now that he is approaching it than he did as a young man. “I don't avoid the thought. I am just not interested.” Curious. When I was alone in my relative silence I thought about it a great deal. I realized that at my age it had become part of the very texture of my thinking. Everything was related to its imminence: my reading, the music I heard, my sense of time and place, my plans, my prayers, my very appetite for thought, for work, for sleep. Perhaps in this sense I not so much
thought
about death as lived with it, like a mortal illness or the loss of a leg. It was not indifference, quite the contrary. It was interest so profound I could not for a moment escape its occupation of my life.

I
SPOTTED
an eagle very high in the sky over the cove, making its easy way through a blank sky. It made me think of a Franciscan nun I read about in the local newspaper who died of cancer after a lifetime of devotion to the poor, the homeless, the hungry in Hancock County where I live. Shortly before her death, her caretaker told her an eagle was flying over her house. “Tell it to wait,” Sister Barbara said. “That's my ride.”