Coming into the End Zone (29 page)

Now I shall sail by the ash breeze, standing still on the deck.

Living in this beautiful place, I look forward to the solitude it affords me, and to friends to break it with. At the end of the day I shall welcome them to share my board and my luck. Who knows, I may be entertaining angels.

Unlike Anna Pavlova, I have no immediate use for a swan costume. I am ready to begin the end.

Afterwords

This memoir will make a belated appearance, in the fall of my seventy-third year. There are a few changes and developments that have occurred since I gathered together the memories and events of my seventieth year. True, I will disturb the symmetry of the book, or what Aristotle called one of the essential unities of a literary work. But then …

• The lovely campgrounds at Kailuum in the Yucatán no longer figure large in my winter plans. I have stored away my mask, snorkel, and fins in an inaccessible place. Friends Tori Hill (of the Library of Congress Reading Room) and Elizabeth Carl, now the Reverend Elizabeth Carl, ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, visited there last winter. They, and ten other campers, came down with what is referred to, euphemistically, as Montezuma's Revenge. Then Tori contracted hepatitis, and was sick for a long time, although it is not at all certain her illness was linked to that idyllic Mexican coast. Nonetheless, my enthusiasm to return is, perhaps foolishly, diminished.…

Still, someday I want to stand at the foot of the Temple of the Dwarf and watch my new grandchild, born early in 1989, scamper up its forbidding steps. It is only fitting that her parents, lovers as I am of the great sites, have named her Maya.

• Last fall, I read of the death of Mary McCarthy, of cancer, at the age of seventy-seven. I half expected it. She had left Castine at the end of the summer and gone to teach her usual semester at Bard College (the institution she had forgiven after her satire upon it in
The Groves of Academe
, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it had forgiven her). There she died, quite suddenly. When we met at the Blue Hill farmer's market in the summer of 1989, and she left me with that harsh adverb ‘unpleasantly,', I regretted that I had not thought of some conciliatory response. Her grey, much-altered face, so beautiful in her youth and maturity, suggested illness to me. She seemed frail as she turned away from me to inspect the vegetables. I am diminished by her death, having once spent almost a year on her life. We all are.

• The Episcopal congregation in Blue Hill has finally found a churchly home for itself. Last winter it purchased, for a very modest price, a handsome old abandoned Methodist church about ten miles out of the town in North Penobscot, and worked through the winter and spring to make it habitable.

Easter was celebrated there. Land has been donated for a new home in Blue Hill, and money raised to move the building, not an inconsiderable enterprise. The steeple and windows, pews and lighting fixtures must be removed, and then the building
cut in half
, mounted on dollies, and drawn through the narrow streets, the overhead wires suspended as it makes its dichotomistic progress. Everyone hopes the aged structure will survive this arduous journey, that it will not rebel against the violence done to its Methodist walls by the new denomination, and that,
mirabile dictu
, we will celebrate next Easter in the resurrected building.

• An irony: By moving to Maine, I believed I had escaped the violence and threat of the city: murderers, muggers, robbers, drug users and their suppliers, the night noises of sirens and helicopters in pursuit of culprits. I had, but now I discover, to my dismay, that fear and anger, violence and threat, belong to every landscape, inhabit even the flower beds and gardens, country lawns and decks.

Omnipresent hungry cats prevented me from having bird feeders in the city. This spring in Maine I acquired three feeders and set them strategically, under trees, on poles on the lawn, on metal arms from the house. An efficient squad of small red squirrels has managed to climb every rope and chain and pole, from the bottom up and the top down. They approach the feeders by leaping, sliding, and climbing the house shingles. They will not be frightened off by my angry, indeed even hysterical, shouts. True, they respond by dropping from incredible heights to the ground. They take up a stand on a nearby piece of granite and chatter harshly at me, the same ka-ka-ka I heard when, as a little girl in Central Park, I was attacked by a grey relative of the same family, large, stringy, and mad. Squirrels, of whatever size, color, or state of mental health, are my new criminals.

Streams of water directed at them affect them not at all. I have been able to devise no defense; I am at their mercy. At first, I took the feeders indoors, empty of seed, symbols of lost battles and ignominious defeat in the war between nature and me.

Later, I found an unattractive but efficacious way to defeat the little fellows. I greased a pole and placed the feeder, awkwardly, at the top. They never managed to ascend, and there were no nearby trees to drop from. Victory, at last? Not at all. For part of the summer they ate seed dropped by birds at the foot of the feeder, seemed to be satisfied, and then disappeared. But in the fall we discovered they had been happily engaged in removing much of the cellar insulation in order to provide themselves with a cozy pink nest in an old wood bin.

• Wayward Books now resides in a utilitarian-looking building down a path from our house. Inside it is cozier, housing nine or ten thousand books (we're never sure quite how many), a woodstove with comfortable chairs around it, and copies of book-review sections from around the country and England for browsers to read when they tire of buying. It has done moderately well in its first year. Its greatest virtue, for us, is its proximity to the cove, which, despite my worries, is a place of constantly changing interest.

•
Fine Print
, the handsome quarterly magazine about handmade books, invited me to join its board of contributors and then, two years later, announced suspension of publication, after fifteen years of distinguished production by letterpress printing of its fine issues. I begin to wonder if the name carries its own inevitable albatross.

• Aunt Bet is now 103, bright, cheerful, and quite well, living in her nursing home. Her spirits are good. She is still charming, and lovely to look at. Her eyes are somewhat improved; every evening she reads the newspaper. She still enjoys her nip of brandy.

About the Author

Doris Grumbach, author of many novels and memoirs including
Fifty Days of Solitude, Life in a Day, The Ladies
, and
Chamber Music
, has been literary editor of the
New Republic
, a nonfiction columnist for the
New York Times Book Review
, a book reviewer for National Public Radio, and a bookseller in Washington, DC, and Maine. She lives in Philadelphia.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Excerpt from “Women” from
The Blue Estuaries
by Louise Bogan. Copyright © 1986 by Louise Bogan. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Excerpt from “Here Lies” from
Collected Poems of Stevie Smith
. Copyright © 1972 by Stevie Smith. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Excerpt from “The Critic” from
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
. Copyright © 1981 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O'Hara. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Excerpt from “Ash Wednesday” in
Collected Poems
, 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright © 1964, 1963 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Excerpt from “Little Gidding” in
Four Quartets
, copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Copyright © 1991 by Doris Grumbach

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

ISBN: 978-1-4976-7664-0

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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EBOOKS BY DORIS GRUMBACH

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