The Spectator Bird (16 page)

“No, I guess not.”

“Why not, Joe? It's been over twenty years. I loved him, too, I thought I couldn't bear it when he died. But I have. It's the only way. It's not healthy to go on grieving forever.”

“You're forgetting I wrote this journal only six months or so after.”

“I heard how you read it.”

“Yes? Well ... sure it bothers me. It was the worst thing that ever happened to us. If you can finally bear it, all that proves is that you're a born survivor and I'm not.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don't know. Nothing. Maybe just that women are more durable, they're made for surviving and holding things together. Anyway it's not his death, or not only his death.”

“What then? Do you still feel guilty about all the clashes you had?”

“That, sure. I don't suppose I'll ever get over blaming myself. I should have been wiser, somehow. But that's not all of it, either.”

“Then what?”

She is ever one to talk it out. What? Good God, what not? But it was I who had provoked this dialogue.

“The way the world wags,” I said. “The difference between what we'd like to be and what we're able to be. How to respect myself when I know I'm confused and cowardly. How to respect a world where nothing I believe in is valued. How to live and grow old inside a head I'm contemptuous of, in a culture I despise.”

“You mustn't,” Ruth said, ready to cry. “Even if it was as bad as you say, you have to go on living, and you can't blame either yourself or him just for the way things are. He agreed with you, don't you know that? He despised it, and himself too, as much as ... You taught him to.”

“So don't tell me I'm not to blame for anything. The hell of it is, I despised his way of despising it more than I despised it. If he'd really fought against the things he hated, some way or other, do you think I wouldn't have been with him? But he just quit. He turned belly up. And he was on the side of the future, his way won. In twenty years everything he stood for has taken over. He was prophetic. The counterculture. The pleasure principle. Now. Wow. Junk everything good along with the bad. History is an exploded science, civility is a dirty word, self-restraint is not only unhealthy, it's a laugh. Manners are hypocrisy, responsibility means you've sold out, adolescence lasts into the seventies, or will. And it's okay to lush on the money civilization so long as you hate it. So then the money civilization gets the word and adjusts itself to the new market and sells itself in a new package to its despisers and lushes.”

“He'd have come around.”

“I wish I thought so.”

“Anyway, what is it you're complaining about? You used to say the world is at least fifty-one per cent in our favor or we couldn't live in it.”

“Sometimes fifty-one per cent doesn't seem quite enough. Also, sometimes it's all you should take. My problem with Curt was that he wanted to take eighty-five per cent while keeping his right to gripe. It doesn't do any good to pretend that he didn't lush. He never learned the responsibility of giving something in exchange for what he took. If I come down out of the hills with foxtails in my beard, crying, ‘Woe, woe unto this people!' I have to include him among the enemy. I can't see any other possibility.”

“You could forgive him.”

“I forgave him long ago.”

“Did you? He might have had something to forgive us for, too.”

“Ah, Ruthie.” We looked at each other across fifteen feet of our last mutual sanctuary, she in the bed one or both of us will probably die in, I in the chair where the survivor will sit and wait to wear out. “What do you think?” I said. “If he'd lived, would he finally have joined us? If he'd been alive these last twenty years would we have made it up, and been friends?”

“I think so,” Ruth said. “I have to think so.”

“Maybe you're right,” I said—I just dropped it, I didn't want any more of it. I stood up, and found that I was so stiff I almost couldn't stand. My toes, ankles, knees, hips, ground bone against bone. My finger joints were sore and hot to the touch as I casually washed them in air. Ruth watched me until I went to the bathroom, where out of her sight I took an allopurinal and an indocin. She watched me in silence as I went through the bedroom on my way to the kitchen to get a glass of milk to counteract the corrosiveness of the painkiller. I came back, and she watched me in silence as I undressed. I went to bed gloomy.

Today, among other junk mail, there was a questionnaire from some research outfit, addressed apparently to a sampling of senior citizens and wishing to know intimate things about my self-esteem. It is their hypothesis that a decline in self-esteem is responsible for many of the overt symptoms of aging. God knows where they got my name. Ben Alexander, maybe; his finger is in all those pies, and always stirring.

I looked at some of the questions and threw the thing in the fireplace. Another of those socio-psycho-physiological studies suitable for computerizing conclusions already known to anyone over fifty. Who was ever in any doubt that the self-esteem of the elderly declines in this society which indicates in every possible way that it does not value the old in the slightest, finds them an expense and an embarrassment, laughs at their experience, evades their problems, isolates them in hospitals and Sunshine Cities, and generally ignores them except when soliciting their votes or ripping off their handbags and their Social Security checks? And which has a chilling capacity to look straight at them and never see them. The poor old senior citizen has two choices, assuming he is well enough off to have any choices at all. He can retire from that hostile culture to the shore of some shuffleboard court in a balmy climate, or he can shrink in his self-esteem and gradually become the cipher he is constantly reminded he is.

What bothered me about Césare Rulli's visit if not the lacerations it left on my self-esteem?

The responses that I feel more and more when we step out into the unsafe surrounding world are doubled and tripled every time we go down to the Stanford campus, as we did yesterday afternoon to hear the Guarneri Quartet. Inside. the hall, all's well. Music is a great democratizer. There are as many white and gray heads in the audience as dark or blond ones. Attitudes are suspended in favor of appreciation, you see a few people you know, you are smiled and waved at, you feel the solidarity of common tastes and interests you have spent your life acquiring, and you participate, even though an outsider, in the community of the university.

But go outside after the concert and you step out of security into hazard, out of the culture into the counterculture. All around the terrace the young roam, or sprawl, or lounge. White Plaza has a sort of bazaar, a stretch of blankets and quilts and plastic groundcloths on which are displayed belts, handbags, macramé flowerpot hangers, and other kinds of the junk that Gertrude Stein called “ugly things all made by hand.” The wives, children, and dogs of the artists tend them and sleep among them. Students pour back and forth, or sit arguing at the union's tables, or read propped against trees. They are not hostile and contemptuous as they were a few years ago; they just don't see you. They will move their feet off a table if you sit down at it, or pull in their legs if you fall over them. They don't seem offended that you exist, only surprised. It is unsafe to approach a swinging door too close behind one of them. If you get there first, and pause to hold it open for them, they bolt on through with an alert, sidelong, surprised look, both puzzled and offended, as if your act of courtesy had been a trap they had just managed to evade.

In the plaza and along the walks, their ten-speed bicycles come up behind you silently and swiftly, and without bell or warning whiz by you within two feet at twenty miles an hour, leaving you with a cold shock of adrenalin in your guts and a weakness in your knees, and in your head a vision of your humiliated old carcass lying on the pavement, pants tom, knees bloody, arms broken, glasses smashed. You wonder if they'd notice you
then.

“What do you expect?” Ruth asks, getting quite exercised over my grumblings. “They've got their own concerns, why should they notice you or me? Do you expect them to whisper to each other, ‘Who's that distinguished-looking couple that just went by?' Do you think they should stand aside and pull their forelocks at you?”

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” I said.

“It's just your vanity.”

“Okay, it's just my vanity. The fact remains that every time I come into this plaza I feel self-conscious, and uneasy, and like a freak—an
ignored
freak. And I resent being made to feel like a freak by a bunch of real freaks, self-made.”

“I wish you weren't so prejudiced,” she said hopelessly. “It would do you good to have more contact with young people. You need it even more than they do.”

“Yes?” I said. “How do you make these contacts? It wasn't the old who declared that feud.”

“Feud! What feud? I'll bet if you'd just accept one of those invitations to talk to classes you'd find out there isn't any feud at all. That destructive phase is all past, everybody keeps telling us. It went out with Vietnam. These are just healthy normal kids going about their business in a place where they have every right to feel at home and you and I don't.”

“They obviously do and I obviously don't,” I said. “Come on, let's get out of here and take our walk.”

“It might be good for you,” Ruth said.

Maybe good for me, but not comfortable. That spell of mucking out my culvert in the rain just about fixed me. I limped and hobbled—maybe exaggerating just a little for Ruth's benefit, to emphasize my legitimacy as an oldster. Her response was not sympathetic, though I thought I detected doubt in her glances now and then, and caught her just about ready to ask if I felt well enough to go on.

Actually I was enjoying it, in spite of the rheumatiz. We walked all around the hill where the older faculty houses are, and all the way, in the big opulent yards, the mimosa made yellow globes among the other trees—pure forsythia-yellow, the true color of spring—and there were whiffs of daphne, and manure, and mushroom compost, and the pleasant sight of gardeners working. The briskness of the air got us to walking faster than I really wanted to. I wanted to saunter and savor, because this was clearly not the country of the young, this was civilization of a pleasant and reassuring kind, the kind I have been trying to earn citizenship in ever since I was old enough to know what I wanted.

We rounded the hill and came down along Frenchman's Creek, running a steady little stream after the rains, and pooling above old weirs. There we overtook Bruce and Rosie Bliven, bundled up in overcoats and armed with canes and walking with brittle briskness.

They have lived on the campus ever since he retired as editor of the
New Republic
many years ago. Since retiring, he has had about three heart attacks and written about five books, and it is a cinch that at eighty-five or whatever he is he still contemplates five books more, and may be halfway through the next one. His last Christmas letter contained a line that should be engraved above every geriatric door. He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man with something the matter with him. He has a sweet humorous face and an innocent resilience that make me ashamed of myself. As an apologist for old age he is better than Ben Alexander, even. And Rosie can make you feel good at a hundred yards, just by the sight of her. Bruce says she is always trying to help old ladies of sixty down steps.

We chatted awhile under the pepper trees and parted, and they went back up along the creek with their canes, talking as if they had just met after long separation and had a lot to catch up on.

“Aren't they a cute pair,” Ruth said.

I thought I detected a monitory tone. “Mellowed by age,” I said.

“Oh, come on!” she said impatiently. “You can admire them without getting off on the young again.”

“Brace yourself,” I said. “Here come a couple.”

They came toward us arm in arm, the girl sashaying out and swinging her long skirts as if in a square dance, and turning to look up into her companion's mat of whiskers with a teasing sort of adoration. As we came close they both looked at us directly, and smiled, and said softly, “Hello.”

Startled, we replied. They passed on. Ruth was ready to pop with self-righteousness. “What about the surly young?” she said. “How about that feud?”

But I defused her with a reasonable response. “That's all it takes,” I said. “That's all it would ever have taken. They noticed us, they were civil, they appeared to be closely related to the human species. God bless them, if they'll act human they can wear all the granny dresses and whiskers their little hearts desire.”