Authors: Tom Grimes
Mentor: A Memoir (34 page)
His literary friends asked him why he didn’t write another memoir. “A lot of people expected me to continue the story of my life,” he later wrote, “but I was determined not to write that kind of book again.
Stop-Time
stands alone, and I’m glad of that. I did not think of the book as the start of a career, I thought of it as a thing unto itself, and was astonished that I’d been able to make it.”
Stop-Time
stands alone, and I’m glad of that. I did not think of the book as the start of a career, I thought of it as a thing unto itself, and was astonished that I’d been able to make it.”
Yet, one year after publishing his essay collection, he unexpectedly began another memoir, then hoped he’d live long enough to finish it.
A malignant tumor in his colon had metastasized. By the time his physician detected it, Frank’s cancer had reached stage four. There is no stage five. In four to six months, he’d be dead.
I hadn’t seen Frank since we’d had dinner, three and a half years earlier. We spoke often, of course. But my identity had been shaped so deeply by him that his physical absence no longer mattered. In my life, he was ever present.
When I called one evening, Maggie answered. Frank now spoke to few people. He wanted to say only what was necessary, I imagine.
After Maggie handed Frank the phone, he and I were momentarily silent. I remember lying on the couch in the room where I wrote, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves behind and before me, his books beside mine. We’d each written four and edited one connected to Iowa. 2,200 pages, 600,000 words, our lives converging like the letter
V,
moving through time from the moment we each said, “I want to be a writer.” Six words then, and six different words now. Midway through our conversation, Frank’s voice began to quake, and he said, “You know I love you, right?”
V,
moving through time from the moment we each said, “I want to be a writer.” Six words then, and six different words now. Midway through our conversation, Frank’s voice began to quake, and he said, “You know I love you, right?”
He wanted to be certain I understood, and he was asking me to release him. “Right?” he said.
Softly, but unequivocally, I said, “Yes, I know.”
Then, beginning to cry, he said, “I have to go,” and the receiver rattled as his trembling hand dropped it into its cradle.
He didn’t even hear me say, “Okay.” But then, he didn’t need to.
While writing this memoir, I believed I knew Frank completely. The illusion was necessary. But the truth is: like all of us, Frank was a mosaic. We know a person not only by what we observe and what he or she says or tells us but also by what we infer, imagine, and are told by others. Toward the end of his life, the latter is how I knew Frank.
A few weeks ago, I e-mailed Frank’s son Will to ask if I had certain dates right—the date Frank learned he had cancer, and the date Frank flew to Washington DC. The reason for his trip was simple. The news headline read, “Iowa Writers’ Workshop Wins National Humanities Medal”:
The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop has been selected to receive the National Humanities Medal, presented by the U.S. government to honor America’s leaders in the humanities. Only one organization has been honored in the past—all the other honorees have been individuals—and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the first university-based organization to be honored.President George W. Bush will present the medal to Frank Conroy, director of the Writers’ Workshop, in a White House ceremony today (Thursday, Feb. 27) in Washington, D.C.“The Iowa Workshop was the first in the country, and I am accepting this award for all the people who have built it over its 67-year history,” Conroy said. “We are deeply grateful for this national recognition.”
Will answered:
Dad was diagnosed shortly (like a week or two) before he took that trip to Washington. The trip happened between the diagnosis and the surgery, actually. A weird, dark time. When I asked Dad about that DC event I remember him saying it was surreal and that the various characters—Bushes, Lynne Cheney, Clarence Thomas, et al,. looked somehow like cardboard cutouts.My favorite story about that—which Maggie told me and which, to me, is pure Dad—had to do with the after party held in some White House room near the Oval Office—people mingling and sipping white wine, etc. There was a small military brass band on a little stage beside a roped-off piano that had been a gift from some king or sultan or someone—a piano not meant to be played, just displayed. But of course it was a nice instrument and Dad removed the velvet rope and walked to it and started to sit down. One of the band, a black guy, a bit startled, leaned over and informed Dad that he was not allowed to play the piano. Dad just nodded and said, “It’s cool, babe,” and got himself set and started to play. Probably “Autumn Leaves” or one of the standards he could swing through so well, or maybe a twelve-bar blues—I don’t know. But the surprised band checked each other and quickly realized they’d have way more fun with Dad than with whatever (undoubtedly stiff) playlist they’d prepared, and so they joined in. I guess it was a great jam—a real foot stomp in the White House—and it changed the feel of the whole room and prompted high fives on stage and smiles all around.I love that story. Not only could Dad always seem to understand the absurdity of the velvet rope/display piano kind of bullshit, he also had a quietly disarming way of making everyone else see the absurdity of it too. And as a result those guys just dug in and swung hard. How cool is that? But I’m only repeating this secondhand—Maggie was there. I wish I had been.
Had I paraphrased Will’s e-mail, you would have experienced the episode thirdhand, and Frank would not have become “Dad.” After all, Frank had three biological sons. He wasn’t simply my surrogate father.
Also, I got certain facts wrong; or not facts, exactly, but interpretations and perceptions. I’d mailed a published excerpt of this memoir to Maggie, Will, Tim, and Frank’s oldest son, Dan, offering them my version of “Frank.” But what if it didn’t conform to their version, or versions? Would Maggie hate her husband’s portrayal? Would his sons loathe their father’s depiction? Would they despise what I’d written, and me as well? I realized that Frank didn’t belong solely to me, and I worried about what they’d think. But Will’s e-mail relieved me:
Hey Tom!This is an excellent piece—really first rate, and I happily learned a few things I didn’t know about Dad.And his e-mail surprised me:Also—and because I can’t be any kind of fair critic of my father’s work I’ve appropriately kept my mouth shut about it—I really love Body & Soul and I was glad to read your thoughts about it. My dirty little family secret is that I love B&S even more than Stop-Time. . . . Body & Soul seemed to me to be as honest a book as Stop-Time, but it came mostly from love rather than anger. Needless to say I’m very glad Dad got to a point where he could write from such a place.
And my perception about Frank’s hands, as described in the essay, was wrong. I’d written, “His hands were large, his fingers long, ideal for a piano player.” But, by e-mail, Maggie corrected me:
I had to smile because actually, Frank had small hands. He was secretly proud that he couldn’t reach an octave but came up with a way to do it if required.
In a sense, I was also wrong about the amount of time Frank spent with his sons after his divorce. It “would be limited to three months each summer,” I’d written. “Otherwise, he was absent, mimicking his own fatherless childhood.”
Which was not entirely true. Will wrote:
One thing I need to say—although you’re absolutely right that Dad’s time with Dan and me was essentially limited to three months a year after the divorce, and technically it’s true that he was ‘absent from our lives,’ as you write, I promise you it didn’t really feel that way. We spoke on the phone all the time and wrote letters and he was always very carefully attentive and respectful and helpful with regard to any of our little worries or problems. He was great about that—made it feel like he was there, still, in Brooklyn. It always seemed like he was coming to NY for a visit within the next few weeks or we were visiting him somewhere or meeting for Thanksgiving or something like that. I missed him sometimes, of course, but it always felt, every day, as if he was very present and accessible. In fact a joke I had with Dad was that, in contrast to his own situation in which that wall of books became (replaced) his father, I had such a great father that I never had to read a single book (!).
Our feelings, perceptions, and imaginations create the constantly changing mosaic of those we know, but know incompletely.
Once cancer reaches stage four, nothing, not chemo, not an operation, will halt its metastasizing. Yet, after reconsidering the test results, Frank’s oncologist changed his opinion. “Now he says I’m a three,” Frank told me, “or more like a three and a half.”
The operation, on a late-winter afternoon, lasted four hours, maybe five. Frank’s entire colon and all malignant tissue surrounding it were removed. Before Frank had fully recovered, he began chemo treatments. “And let me tell you,” he said, “they’re no fun.”
Before his diagnosis, he had signed a contract to write
Time and Tide
for Crown, which published a line of “walk” books in which famous writers described the places where they lived, at least part of the time. When Frank’s agent, Neil, broached the idea, Frank immediately said, “Nantucket.” Like other “walk” books, Frank’s paperback-sized volume would be short—140 pages—and it would blend the island’s history with Frank’s history. It’s a somber book, at times, and its audio version, read by Frank, weakened by chemotherapy, is haunting. A sense of letting go—of his work, of his family, of his life—permeates the memoir. And, after thirty-five years, certain regrets remain vivid. “I don’t have much nostalgia for Nantucket in the seventies,” he writes. “Personally, it was a tough time both emotionally and economically. I was a writer, after all, and, to make it worse, a literary writer. I left Brooklyn with three hundred dollars, no job prospects, and an unheated, unfinished barn on a remote island as my only possession.” He scraped by, “living on the cheap,” as he put it. “I installed electric heaters in the bedroom and kitchen, but the barn hadn’t been built with winter in mind and I spent a lot of time in the crawl space underneath working on frozen pipes with a propane torch, or installing new ones with an instruction book lying open in the dirt in front of me. My mortgage was $600. I discovered anew how claustrophobic and narrowing it is to live with little money. (I’d known it in my childhood, too, although in a different way.)” But he noted the farcical, as well. During the nineteenth century, when most of Nantucket’s male population was out to sea, whaling, lonely women managed the island. Frank unearthed a newspaper ad that read: “Nervous? I will spend the night with thee. 25 cents.” He also discovered that “a type of ceramic dildo imported from Asia called ‘He’s at Home’ was a common domestic item.” Wanting the fullest sense of Frank’s mood while he worked on the book, I asked Neil for his impressions. By e-mail he replied:
The diagnosis threw him, and he talked about canceling the contract, or not taking the money until he was done. But in fact writing was a joy for him (not common to writers, as you know), and I think it gave him a pleasurable task to distract his mind.
Frank didn’t overlook other treasures, either. “The kids discover the joys of clamming,” he writes, “and of the fact that you can bring something back for dinner even if you’re seven years old, let’s say. We always went out to a tidal flat near the entrance to Polpis Harbor in our boat, with the dog. Maggie and I might swim while Tim, my youngest, went off with a bucket for an hour. We could see him in the distance, hunkered down, his small form bright in the stark sunlight, elbows akimbo, digging with purpose. Or on a foggy day, he would simply disappear as the sound of buoy bells rang muffled in the air. We call it Tim’s Point, and we go there often.”
Time and Tide
for Crown, which published a line of “walk” books in which famous writers described the places where they lived, at least part of the time. When Frank’s agent, Neil, broached the idea, Frank immediately said, “Nantucket.” Like other “walk” books, Frank’s paperback-sized volume would be short—140 pages—and it would blend the island’s history with Frank’s history. It’s a somber book, at times, and its audio version, read by Frank, weakened by chemotherapy, is haunting. A sense of letting go—of his work, of his family, of his life—permeates the memoir. And, after thirty-five years, certain regrets remain vivid. “I don’t have much nostalgia for Nantucket in the seventies,” he writes. “Personally, it was a tough time both emotionally and economically. I was a writer, after all, and, to make it worse, a literary writer. I left Brooklyn with three hundred dollars, no job prospects, and an unheated, unfinished barn on a remote island as my only possession.” He scraped by, “living on the cheap,” as he put it. “I installed electric heaters in the bedroom and kitchen, but the barn hadn’t been built with winter in mind and I spent a lot of time in the crawl space underneath working on frozen pipes with a propane torch, or installing new ones with an instruction book lying open in the dirt in front of me. My mortgage was $600. I discovered anew how claustrophobic and narrowing it is to live with little money. (I’d known it in my childhood, too, although in a different way.)” But he noted the farcical, as well. During the nineteenth century, when most of Nantucket’s male population was out to sea, whaling, lonely women managed the island. Frank unearthed a newspaper ad that read: “Nervous? I will spend the night with thee. 25 cents.” He also discovered that “a type of ceramic dildo imported from Asia called ‘He’s at Home’ was a common domestic item.” Wanting the fullest sense of Frank’s mood while he worked on the book, I asked Neil for his impressions. By e-mail he replied:
The diagnosis threw him, and he talked about canceling the contract, or not taking the money until he was done. But in fact writing was a joy for him (not common to writers, as you know), and I think it gave him a pleasurable task to distract his mind.
Frank didn’t overlook other treasures, either. “The kids discover the joys of clamming,” he writes, “and of the fact that you can bring something back for dinner even if you’re seven years old, let’s say. We always went out to a tidal flat near the entrance to Polpis Harbor in our boat, with the dog. Maggie and I might swim while Tim, my youngest, went off with a bucket for an hour. We could see him in the distance, hunkered down, his small form bright in the stark sunlight, elbows akimbo, digging with purpose. Or on a foggy day, he would simply disappear as the sound of buoy bells rang muffled in the air. We call it Tim’s Point, and we go there often.”
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