Coming into the End Zone (11 page)

October

This morning I visited my dentist, a wonderful fellow named Ted Fields who works on teeth during the day and spends all his free time in the evenings and on weekends in his studio doing witty and original ceramic sculpture. To get to his office on Nineteenth Street I pass a beautiful old building, three brick stories that wrap around the corner. It is now occupied by the World Wildlife Federation.

Every time I go by the place I am struck by painful nostalgia. Except for dental visits three times a year I find I avoid 1244 Nineteenth Street. In the front window, just left of the door, I sat for two and one-half years, editing ‘the back,' as it was called, of
The New Republic
. If every life contains one blessed time, no matter how short, a Camelot of the mind or spirit, these years were mine. I was fifty-four years old and alone, separated, by my decision, from everything I had known for thirty years—husband, job, city, apartment—and exhilarated by the sudden offer of the literary editorship of
The New Republic
in Washington, D.C.

To this day I wonder at Gilbert Harrison's choice of me. I had no experience as an editor. After college and graduate school I went to work as a title writer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (a job I obtained by simple nepotism, my great-uncle being Marcus Loew, who owned the company). After that, in quick succession, I worked for
Mademoiselle
, from which I was fired for irreverence toward fashion copy,
The Architectural Forum
, where I was a news writer, and
Time
in San Francisco during the founding of the United Nations. That was my ‘experience.'

After two years in the Navy during World War II, I ‘retired' to have children and write as a free-lance reviewer for such Catholic publications as
America
and
Commonweal
. It was in
Commonweal
that Reed Whittemore, then literary editor of
The New Republic
, saw a piece of mine on Mary McCarthy, and asked me to be a contributing editor.

I was amazed, and delighted. But I took the assignment seriously, and went to Washington for a few editorial meetings. Gil must have been surprised; in an off moment he had invited me but, I suspect, never thought I would appear. Washington was hundreds of miles from Albany. After a year, to my greater amazement, I had that unexpected letter from him: ‘My literary editor, Reed Whittemore, has resigned to work on a book about William Carlos Williams. Would you think about taking the job?'

Good God! Would I! No offer had ever come at a better time. Yet, very aware of my lack of qualifications, why did I accept? I will never understand this. I was unwell during that time, and the long trips (even driven by Sybil, my friend with whom I planned to live) had been a strain. But Washington had seemed to us, during our visits the year before, a striking city. I remember Reed took us to the newly opened Kennedy Center one night to see an Arthur Miller play. It was a balmy December evening. During an intermission, Sybil and I stood on the balcony looking over the dark Potomac with its sprinkling of river and shore lights. One of us, I don't remember now which, said: ‘I could live in this city.'

So, despite the logistic problems of combining two households (she brought the furnishings of her house in Clarksville, I the remains of my apartment in Albany), we came to the capital, rented a house near a school for her two adolescent children, and began our lives together. After a few idyllic years at
The New Republic
, the literary editorship came apart. Her children left the city to live with their father; we bought a house together in a suburban part of the city called Barnaby Woods (there were noticeably few woods still standing). I went to teach at American University for ten years, while she went to work at the Library of Congress and, at almost the same time, opened the first of our bookstores in the basement of our house. We named it Wayward Books.

I said my editorship came apart. I meant to say: It was ripped to pieces by a long-bearded fellow named Martin Peretz who bought the magazine, making the usual promises to owner and editor Harrison that all would remain as it was. But of course, nothing in life ever remains as it was. (Sybil's useful aphorism for this phenomenon is ‘Everything is different since it changed.') Peretz is a Rumpelstiltskin of a man with a volatile temper and inflexible convictions. Jewish affairs and the State of Israel were his passions. Gil was maneuvered out of the magazine he had turned over with such innocent faith and goodwill to Peretz. One day Gil departed, silently, telling no one. Soon after, either by Peretz's knife or resignation, others left in rapid succession: Stanley Karnow, Walter Pincus, Robert Myers, David Sanford, I.

That brief but lovely time was over. The weekly column I had written at the back of the book, called ‘Fine Print,' ended. It reappeared for a time in the
Saturday Review
. When that ill-fated publication slowly fell onto bad times, the column disappeared entirely. Gil, a helpless gentleman before the furious little man who had ousted him, retired to care for his ailing wife, Anne, and, after her death, to write the biography of Thornton Wilder. The rest of us went on to other things, Pincus to a career as an investigative reporter at the
Washington Post
, Karnow to fame with his books on Vietnam and the Philippines, Sanford to a good job at the
Wall Street Journal
, I to teaching and writing fiction.

Later, the title ‘Fine Print' had a curious resurrection. In San Francisco, at about the time the
Saturday Review
was bought yet once again, there appeared a magazine devoted to the arts of letterpress printing, called, most fittingly,
Fine Print
. At first I felt litigious. Then I realized that only in the most personal way did I own the title, and that this phoenix rise of the name was in some sense fortuitous.

In Washington, in the next year, I met the editor of the new
Fine Print
, Sandra Kirschenbaum. I told her of my interest in printing and typography, binding and papermaking. Now I contribute occasional reviews to
FP
, feeling at home under its aegis. Once in a while I double-dip, as they say of writers who use the same material in two different places, and review a fine handmade book on the air. Yolla Bolly Press in California printed a beautiful, expensive volume of John Muir's
Travels in the Sierra
. I explained, in
Fine Print
and then on National Public Radio, the pleasures of owning such a book. The response was surprising. I mentioned the high price. Twenty-five people called the publisher to inquire about purchasing it. Clearly, there is a small but avid market for books that appeal to the touch, the eye, the mind, especially in the presence of the fifty thousand ugly, mass-produced, carelessly or tastelessly designed books that pour out of offset presses and ‘perfect' (not an accurately descriptive term) binding machines every year.

I read the obituaries in the
New York Times
this morning, looking for the the tragic, telltale signs of an AIDS death: young age, twenty-one to forty-five, the announcement of death by a longtime companion, and the list of survivors, parents, sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews. I sit still as I find two such announcements today, the black pall of despair coming over me for the others I loved.… Then I go on reading on the same page. A writer, in her fifties, has died. I note the judgmental power of the order of words, as well as the choice of articles, the difference between ‘Mary Fitz, a novelist' and ‘the novelist Mary Fitz.'

For my birthday this summer, Sybil gave me a computerized catalogue of my ballet books. It is a useful, handy present, because once the collection exceeded two hundred volumes, I found I sometimes bought the same book twice. I keep the books together in the guest room, and find myself going there often to browse. Today I read a rather poorly written but still informative biography of Anna Pavlova, whose greatest role was the dying swan. The pictures of her in action make it hard for me to believe she was as perfect as she is described. But I learn that as she was dying, she called her attendant and said, ‘Prepare my swan costume.' The author does not say, but I assume it was brought to her and Pavlova was buried in it.

It is cold today. The leaves are yellow and blow about underfoot and cover the flower beds. Trees begin to have their barren, almost nude winter look. I wear my wool jacket to walk to the bookstore to bring Sybil some late-afternoon coffee. I decide to go into the long, red-brick Eastern Market to avoid the wind. It is a pleasant walk-through. I know many of the merchants. The chicken salesman named Melvin is an ardent Redskins fan and wears the team's colors under his white apron. Mr. Miller, of the deli, is in his eighties. He wears a fedora while he works and brags that he roasts the beef himself. It is beautifully rare. I don't have the heart to tell him his hand is too heavy with the garlic for my taste. But Sybil likes it this way.

The cheese man offers me samples I would love to try, except that delicacy is no longer permitted to enter my cholesterol-laden arteries. The older lady with dyed-black hair at the bakery has brought in her paintings-by-the-number to display. She only reads paperback books by Jewish authors or about Jewish life. The bakery counter is near the side door of the market. I buy two blueberry muffins from her, admire her art work, and leave the building reluctantly: It has grown darker and colder. I walk quickly to Wayward Books, and deposit the coffee on Sybil's desk.

We drink, and eat our muffins. On the sign blackboard, now residing indoors near the door because of the foolish city ordinance, is a Henry James sentence: ‘It takes a good deal of history to produce a little literature.' I ponder it. Is this what I am doing here, dredging up masses of personal history in the hope of producing a modicum of literature?

Now it is quite dark outside. The schoolyard across the street is empty of its usual complement of basketball players. I decide to wait until closing time at seven so I can walk home with Sybil. I sit on the stool and pick up a volume of short stories by a young man I knew briefly in the seventies. But I get no farther than his picture on the back flyleaf. I see it was taken by Thomas Victor.

Thomas Victor. He was an acquaintance who died recently of AIDS, a fine photographer of writers. My friend Joe Caldwell, the novelist, told me that Tom would ask his subjects if they had any special likes or dislikes when being photographed. ‘Oh, no,' they would always say, ‘anything you want to do.' ‘And then,' Tom told Joe, ‘they would fight me all the way.'

I remember Tom darting around the New York Public Library to take pictures of notables at an American Book Award gathering, a small, dark man with a perpetual smile, now gone, his immortality a mere byline under other people's faces.

At seven-fifteen the cash is added up, the day sheet finished, the alarm system activated, the door locked, and we start the short, cold walk home. All the way home I think about Tom Victor, which leads me into remembering that Joe Caldwell, then a small boy, asked his grandfather if he could have his books when he died. His grandfather said: ‘Who's going to die?'

We eat late, whatever can be cooked in a rushed half hour, and ‘clean up.' Sybil is the perennial dishwasher, I the dryer and put-awayer. She likes to wash, although she is firm in the belief that the act of dishwashing ruins her hands. She wears rubber gloves, which inevitably stretch. Recently she acquired a new pair but adamantly refused to throw away the old ones.

‘What are you saving them for?' I ask. Hoarder that she is, she says: ‘You never know when you might need a small piece of rubber to stretch over something.' I challenge her to give me an example of such a need. She is silent and goes on doggedly scrubbing a pan.

Suddenly I recall my mother and me walking along the east bank of the Hudson River on Riverside Drive. She watches the boats moving in stately fashion up the river toward Ben Marsden's Amusement Park in the Palisades, a place I loved. My father used to offer to take us there on Sunday. (He was a man given to making lavish promises, few of which he ever fulfilled. I believe he thought the offer was an adequate substitute for carrying them out.) I, perhaps eight or nine years old, always watched the eddies close to the shore, absorbed in their varied and sometimes puzzling contents, so much more interesting than the featureless flow of the cleaner water beyond. I see a strange sight, an extended, light-colored length of rubber floating limply in the wrack.

‘What is that thing?' I ask my mother.

She looks to where I am pointing, flushes, and quickly looks away.

‘That … that is a bandage you wear … when you have … a sore thumb.'

I remember we walked on. I watched the water intently and saw more bandages. It occurred to me that there must be an inordinate number of persons in New York City with sore thumbs. But I say nothing—until this moment, when I break my silence and say to Sybil:

‘I've thought of a use. Condoms for considerate gentlemen.'

‘Also,'
she says, and finishes the dishes, clad in her tight new rubber gloves.

Saturday. This morning, so absolute is my addiction, I find myself turning to the crossword puzzle in the
Times
even before I read the headlines. One clue is
PALEY
. The answer turned out to be, of course,
GRACE
. I remember the day when the clue was
BOYLE
, the answer
KAY
. This is true fame, I thought, to have one's name immortalized in a game that two million persons puzzle over while they drink their morning coffee.

When she appeared in my puzzle that day, I sent Kay a postcard, congratulating her on this recognition. She wrote back that several other persons around the country had written to her about her inclusion, some even sending the whole puzzle so she could see for herself. Then she effectively humbled me:

‘I hope you are not one of those persons who does crossword puzzles.' As I remember I did not reply to this. Should I feel ashamed? Is this a lowbrow, unworthy occupation?