A Season in Hell (20 page)

Candace flew up to Boston with me, the luggage and I in her charge. We stayed at a Cambridge hotel, and Candace accompanied me to the cocktail party and dinner the night preceding the meeting. I barely got through these events, cruelly aware of my fragility and fatigue. I cannot say I enjoyed them, as I had in the past; I was testing myself, and just barely passing. But the next day, at the ceremony and luncheon, I found that some of my best old Harvard pals had been gathered and brought to Cambridge. LeAnne Schreiber, Michael Malone, Maureen Quilligan, Janet and Tim Murray, were all seated at my table, and their familiar boisterous good humor (not normal at these events) got me through the praising speeches and past my own sense of frailty. I had a marvelous time and found myself unexpectedly moved by the event.

After arriving at Logan for the return trip, Candace and I discovered that all flights had been canceled. I did not trust trains in bad weather; I had a terrible memory of a snowy day when flights were canceled and my New York–Boston train took twelve hours. So we rented a big Lincoln Continental, which Candace drove to New York that night, the two of us light-hearted and giggly as we whizzed along the empty dark highways.

Candace drove us to the country again that weekend. I could not yet stay there permanently, because I had too many doctors’ appointments. The following weekend, Rob drove me up. I had invited my father, my sister, and Fred for Father’s Day; except for the fact that the children did all the cooking and cleaning up, it felt almost as if I were well.

At the end of June, I began to work again. I noted this fact on my calendar in large scrawled writing. The Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Canada, had earlier that year asked me to speak there in August. That festival has mounted fascinating productions of Shakespeare over the years and is one of the few places where the directors credit my Shakespeare interpretations in the program notes. I was thrilled to be able to make up for my cancellation the year before—I felt I was resuming my life.

On June 25, Candace drove us to the country, where I planned to spend the summer. I started to write an essay on
King John
, one of the Stratford productions for that year. I had not worked since the October before, when, on my laptop in the hospital, I finished the final draft of
Our Father
and wrote the first two chapters of a satirical novel about an aging woman’s ludicrous love affair. Now, using the laptop, I sat on my chaise on the screened porch and wrote for several hours a day. I was happy. I was not my old self—I was still weak and unable to do many things—but I could work, and I took huge pleasure in that, as I always have. Snags and problems may frustrate, but they also increase the pleasure of an intense effort. After I finished writing the Shakespeare talk, early in July, I began working on the copyedited version of
Our Father
; when that was finished, near the end of the month, I revised the Shakespeare speech and immediately began revising a long history of women I had worked on for twelve years, trying once more to cut it. It had been a five-thousand-page manuscript; it was now down to three thousand pages. I had to cut it further.

I also went swimming every warm day, and by July I was able to drive the car locally, to my physical therapist. Candace and I did errands together, and I supervised while she cooked—very well. The children came up most weekends, Candace’s time off. It was a treat to see them so often.

Late in July, the coven came for a weekend. I had a catered dinner and a picnic lunch (salade niçoise) prepared for the next day, when we went to Tanglewood. The following weekend, the kids and I saw a play about Brecht at a local art gallery and took a picnic lunch to Tanglewood on Sunday. Some Saturday afternoons, we went to hear early music played by Aston Magna, a magnificent group that plays in a church in Great Barrington. A lovely summer, filled with pleasure, it was far better than I could have hoped if I had let myself hope. I was not recovered, but I was well enough to feel grateful I had survived. I was getting stronger week by week.

When the time came to go to Canada, I decided to see if I could do it on my own. Though Candace was supposed to have the weekends off, she was willing to accompany me. But I felt so good that I wanted to test myself. I would not have to do much walking, and if I could get someone to carry my bag, I should be able to do it. So I did. Candace drove me to New York (I still could not manage that journey), and a hired car took me to the airport. I arrived in Stratford on Friday, August 6; that night, I had dinner with Jean Davison, a Canadian librarian. I had met her in 1980, on a British-sponsored tour to China (the only way an American could visit China in those days). We took a train from Victoria Station to the English Channel, sailed across, then took trains to Paris, Berlin west and east, Warsaw (where Polish friends unexpectedly met me with overflowing bouquets), Moscow, Ulan Bator (where we were stuck for ten days, owing to a flood in the Gobi Desert), then on to Beijing, Nanking, Shanghai, Nan-ch’ang, Ch’ang-sha, Canton, and Hong Kong. It was a tumultuous journey, partly because of a jejune tour guide and partly because the directors had no backup plan for disasters. But I became friendly with a few of the tourists and had since corresponded with Jean.

I was to speak on Sunday. On Saturday, Pat Quigley, my festival liaison, took me sightseeing in Stratford, which had barely changed since my last visit, over two decades earlier. The next day, I was blessed with a wonderful audience for my speech; it was made up mostly of women (as are all my audiences), but these were feminist Shakespeare scholars, and their questions were brilliant; they were a great pleasure. Afterward, I had lunch with Michele Landsberg, the
Toronto Star
columnist, and her friend Ellen De Noon. We had so much fun together that I invited them to the Berkshires for a visit.

Some things were hard for me on this trip (for example, my bedroom was a flight of stairs up from the sitting room in my hotel, the bathroom on the floor below). I was a little slow; it was not easy for me to walk around the town. But my only serious problem arose from my vanity—I felt humiliated by the shakiness visible in my gait when I walked to the podium. In the end, I shrugged it off, telling myself it would disappear as I got stronger, that my difficulty was a result of muscle weakness from the coma.

Later in August, Gloria Beckerman and Perry Birnbaum, my old Hofstra friends, came to the Berkshire house for a couple of days. Candace made wonderful meals and was such a warm hostess that they both fell in love with her. The day they left, the kids appeared, and the next morning we took off for Maine.

This was Barbara and Rob’s idea. They love the beauty of the state and often camp out among the pine trees and hike along the coast. This year, they invited Jamie and me along. They knew I could not camp out, and consulting us all along, they planned our ten days, making reservations at bed-and-breakfasts. We went first to Freeport, where Jamie and Barbara indulged their love of shopping while Rob sighed and I expostulated about the boring sameness of the merchandise. We stopped to see Esther and Bob Broner at Deer Isle, where they go every August; they were having a big party that day, which we briefly joined. I was thrilled to see the coastline from their house: Bob had given me a sketch of it when I was ill, and I sometimes used it to visualize the ideal spot. Indeed, it was that.

Then we drove to Bar Harbor and did the usual tourist things—the whale watch, the boat trip around the coast, visits to the fishing villages, Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, a drive over Mount Cadillac, and dinner at the Jordan Pond Restaurant, where three of us ate lobster. Rob has never gotten over the time I cooked lobster at home, when he was eight or so. I put the lobsters in salt water in the sink, to keep them alive until dinner, and one crawled out. Rob saw it moving across the kitchen floor and understood that it was to be cooked alive. He has never eaten lobster since, and every time
we
did, he would cry out in a tiny falsetto, “I want to live! I want to live!”

From Bar Harbor we went to Moosehead Lake, which Jamie found barbaric. It was cold there, and our cabin was a bit primitive but faced the gorgeous lake. Jamie and Barbara had fun in a pedal boat, we took a trip on a small motorboat to study wildlife and on a large one to survey the extent of the lake. We ate one night at the Road Kill Café, whose menu inspired us for the next few days to compete in inventing disgusting names for roadkill dishes. Our competition, totally juvenile, amused us greatly.

During our return, we stayed overnight at a bed-and-breakfast in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a town that enchanted us. It had an old section, dating back only to the turn of the century but charming nevertheless; Strawberry Banke was a wonderful museum of houses from the original settlement saved from demolition, restored or made into architectural displays. Some of them are old dwellings and shops, some are almost mansions. In one two-family house, the house on the right was restored to its condition in the eighteenth century, as a shop and dwelling; the house on the left, equally old, had last been inhabited in the 1930s and was left with furniture and household items of that time. The general store also dated to the 1930s. These two buildings seized me, carried me almost into tears. I am rooted in the 1930s, and its artifacts carried me back to a childhood that, unhappy as it was, tugged at me.

Our idyll ended, alas: I had been transported—literally and figuratively—by the trip and hated to come home. But within a few days, I had guests: Michele and Ellen from Toronto. It was September now, no swimming, but the days were still soft and golden. When my guests left, I got to work reading page proofs for
Our Father
; then I returned to the history book. Over the weekend, my sweet nephew Ricky Smith and his wife, Julia, came up to take me out to dinner at a local restaurant, and we had a bubbly evening.

It was time to go back to New York. Candace drove me down, and we parted: she went back to her old life, and I was going to try to take care of myself. Of course, I still had Isabelle to do marketing and errands, but the rest I would have to undertake. Over the summer, I had progressed to the point where I could nervously take a shower alone (but not a bath), could lift items that were not heavy (not, for instance, a pot of cooked pasta), and could drive for half an hour—not more. I could work at my computer if I piled pillows behind me and leaned back as I worked.

I cannot say I ever felt triumphant—I was too damaged for that—but there was a satisfaction in being able to get in a cab by myself and attend a PEN board meeting, the first in almost a year; and to get to Gloria’s house the next night, for a coven meeting, and be able to swallow, to
eat
.

Wanting to make amends for my teary blame of them at our previous formal meeting, I wrote a poem for the event. To compliment them, I drew on Rimbaud’s
Une Saison en Enfer
, a title that I felt described my experience as well. Rimbaud, in an experiment, had set out to “derange” all his senses, wishing to become a
voyant
, a seer, to transcend ordinary life, to arrive at the “Unknown.” He believes that the Poet /
voyant
can realize an ideal “harmonious Life” such as existed in ancient times. The poet will then liberate men, animals, language, and even women, whose “endless servitude will be overthrown.” (Rimbaud dedicated
Une Saison en Enfer
to his mother: “my first teacher of poetry / in literature and in life.”) Using alcohol, hashish, and other intoxicants, he writes as a “soul condemned to hell,” in delirium, in torment, hallucinating. In the poem, the poet is also condemned to aloneness, sometimes perceiving himself as a great artist in process of transcending life, and at other times seeing himself as a mere peasant. Throughout the poem, love is banished as inadequate to the poet’s need.

I wanted to compare my experience with his, and incidentally, a female with a male approach. My ingestion of poisons was not by choice but by necessity, and I sought, not revelation, but recovery. I, too, discovered hell, but along the way
I
discovered a harmonious life—my own. The difference was that I was so surrounded with love that, resistant to love as I am, I
felt
loved for the first time in my life. My friends and my children had renewed my life by transforming hell into a kind of heaven.

In my poem, I spoke of this and of my gratitude to be alive despite everything; I told my friends that they and my children had made me feel more loved than I had ever felt as a child.

During that week of September—the first week in which I could move on my own since the Christmas before, the first time since the previous October that I was strong enough to walk around the city by myself, and sit through a movie and eat popcorn, and go home and write an article—my spirits flew. I
was
going to get better, I was already much better, I was going to get my old life back and be my old self again. I
would
.

I was elated the day after the coven meeting, when Jamie drove us up to the Berkshire house for the weekend. Eager to see Innisfree, a “cup garden” in Millbrook, New York, we went on Sunday. It is composed of only natural features of the landscape, somewhat manipulated, and surrounds a lake; a path leads from one almost contained environment to another—thus, a cup garden, based on Japanese models. I made an error and forgot to take drinking water; nor did I realize at the outset that once on the path, one could only turn back or finish the walk. There were no shortcuts, and the walk was way over a mile long, perhaps two miles—a bit of a strain for me. This was not a problem until we were about two-thirds along. I was tired, but there was no respite. I had to finish. I did. And a kind woman at the end shared her bottled water with me. I was tired, but no harm done, I thought.

The next day, my back ached. Luckily, I had an appointment for a laying on of hands by my physical therapist that day. Myofascial therapy eased the pain slightly, but by the time Jamie and I got back to New York, I was in severe pain. I called a masseuse who had been recommended to me, explained how much pain I was in, and she came over and gave me a treatment that eased it somewhat. Then, at the very end, she said, “I’m going to give you a little shiatsu.” Before I could protest, she banged down on my back. I screamed.