Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (10 page)

Both sides of the book-lending equation, the giver and the taker, experience fear. How brave we are to overcome that fear to share love, truth, beauty, wisdom, and consolation against death! The threads of friendships entwine over the shared enjoyment of a book. If later a book is shared that is not so mutually enjoyed, the friendship survives. Another day will bring another book, and perhaps another joint experience of connection and satisfaction. I wish I had returned Mary's
Bridges of Madison County
not with a sneer but with a smile, and with another book in hand. Mary had lent me the book around the time I was reading a lot of Laurie Colwin. I could have given her my favorite,
Goodbye Without Leaving
, and said, “Read this. You just might love it.”

Friendship saved and book shared.

Chapter 10
Hearing Words I'd Missed Before

Have you ever been heartbroken to finish a book? Has a writer kept whispering in your ear long after the last page is turned?

ELIZABETH MAGUIRE,

The Open Door

IN THE SPRING OF ANNE-MARIE'S ILLNESS, I SPENT A SATURDAY
afternoon with her in her study, at her apartment on East Ninety-sixth Street. She and Marvin had renovated the room years before, turning a small extra bedroom into an enclosure of warmth, a cozy office where Anne-Marie could work. A wide board, the size of a door and painted deep beige, rested on two short file cabinets in one corner, by a window overlooking Ninety-sixth and Madison. This was Anne-Marie's desk, adorned that Saturday with stacks of papers, piles of books, and her laptop, closed now. She hadn't been working in those last weeks; the pain medication kept her off-kilter, and she was too tired, all the time. Photos of Marvin were in frames along the edges of the desk, beside photos of my boys at various ages. Pictures they had drawn for her were lined up on the wall, resting alongside postcards and Polaroids of places Anne-Marie had been. Paris. Los Angeles. Fiesole. Pienza. Udaipur. Fire Island.

The wall opposite the desk housed floor-to-ceiling bookcases, enclosed at the bottom and open on top. The shelves were jammed with books—art history and philosophy, novels and poetry, and her collection of Tintin books. The wall between shelves and desk was lined with three windows, northern exposure with muted sunlight. A William Morris print in green and gray papered over the remaining wall space, its vines and flowers overlapping and spreading toward the ceiling.

In the center of the room was a brown couch, fronted by a low coffee table, covered now in books, magazines, and Netflix envelopes. A new addition to the apartment, a television and DVD player, a gift from my parents, faced the couch. Anne-Marie and Marvin had been watching movies at night, waiting for the medication to finally knock my sister out and allow her some hours of sleep before pain and discomfort woke her up again.

Anne-Marie had another visitor that Saturday, a friend from graduate school who taught at Williams College. Liz had come down for a quick visit and left soon after I arrived. She smelled good, a soft perfume of fresh, damp leaves. After she left, her sweet smell lingered, along with the palatable flavor of kindness and concern that now seasoned all visits to my sister. I moved to sit next to Anne-Marie when we were alone, ready to make my usual—and hopefully amusing—report on my “life among the savages.” Anne-Marie and I had both loved Shirley Jackson's book of the same name, her hysterically funny account of life in the suburbs with young kids.

But Anne-Marie didn't want to hear about the boys. She turned to me and grabbed hold of me, her skinny arms drawing tight across my back. I buried my face in her hair and listened while she spoke.

“It's not fair,” she said.

“I love you,” was all I could respond. I burrowed my nose into Anne-Marie's gray sweater and inhaled deeply. It wasn't Liz who had smelled so good. It was Anne-Marie. Of course. I knew that scent. Mitsouko. Anne-Marie's favorite perfume. I breathed in deep, again and again. I hugged Anne-Marie closer to my rising and lowering chest. I wanted to restore health to her. I wanted to bring back a long life to her future. I could no longer hear what she said to me; I was too close, buried in her hair and sweater.

I have kept the gray sweater. I'm wearing it often these days, feeling the February cold through the windows of my music room, as I sit reading in my purple chair. Upstairs in my closet I keep a half-filled bottle of Mitsouko on a shelf, and when I can bear to, I open it up and breathe in. Sometimes I wonder what words I missed that afternoon, cowering against her shoulder. What wisdom did I fail to hear, or reach for?

In early February, I found words of wisdom in the story of another woman who had died too young.
The Open Door
by Elizabeth Maguire is a fictionalized biography of the nineteenth-century author Constance Fenimore Woolson. The novel begins with a young Woolson rowing out on her own along Mackinac Island in northern Michigan. Woolson is breathing hard as she rows, but she knows it and she likes it, for it is “the gasp of health.” She is determined to never get married and suffer the illnesses brought on by childbearing: “It wasn't fair to blame marriage for the deaths of her two sisters, but she wasn't going to risk it. Give up her life for a man? Not her. She had too much to do.”

And as Maguire tells the story, Woolson does a lot. She becomes a writer to support herself and her mother, writing short stories, travel pieces, and longer works. She journeys up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and moves her mother south to Florida for her health. She is a voracious reader of all the newest books, and when her mother dies, Woolson heads off to Europe, defying the conventions of mourning, because she is determined to meet one of her literary heroes, Henry James. She and James end up forming a deep and lasting friendship. Woolson never does marry, as she prophesied. She remains independent, relying on romantic interludes with a longtime lover and on friendships such as the one she has with James for companionship.

As I read through
The Open Door
, I found myself liking Woolson more and more. She is enthusiastic about life, strong-willed when it comes to getting what she wants, and she loves books. I underlined again and again the words Maguire puts into Woolson's mouth about the wonder of reading: “Have you ever been heartbroken to finish a book? Has a writer kept whispering in your ear long after the last page is turned?” Yes, yes!

When I was in high school, I began keeping a journal of favorite quotations from books. The purpose of the journal was to act as a vault. I wanted to save the words whispered in my ears by beloved authors, and store them up for the day when I would need to hear them again. As much as they had inspired me when I first read them, I could turn to them when needed and rekindle the inspiration. I hoped back then that by following the words, I would become stronger, wiser, braver, and kinder. The quotes I saved in my journal were the proof of, as well as guidance for, how I would meet any challenge and overcome all difficulties.

Not that I didn't find direction from my parents. But my parents didn't teach us through oft-repeated words of advice or family sayings or long lectures. My father occasionally called us “parasites,” like when we asked for a larger allowance or whined about all the weeding and lawn work we had to do, but neither he nor my mother made a big deal about the basic tenets by which they lived. We watched how they behaved, and we learned from their actions.

My parents liked their jobs, and we never heard them complain about having to go to work or putting in long hours (my mother when she was chair of her department at Northwestern, or my father all those nights he was on emergency call). They loved to listen to music, beautiful music like Schubert and Brahms, and the singing of Jacques Brel, Georges Moustaki, and Nana Mouskouri. On Sundays, music was always playing in our house, accompanying us in our long lunches and throughout the lazy afternoon. My parents cared about other people, especially others who, like them, were outsiders in the community. We had frequent dinner guests and overnight visitors, whether newly arrived immigrants, recently hired faculty members, or homesick university students. Our house was open to anyone who needed a little extra support or comfort or just a home-cooked meal.

My father was a surgeon at three hospitals in Chicago, but he also had a family practice in the large Polish neighborhood of Chicago's west side. When patients couldn't pay, my father took promises in lieu of payment and accepted gifts of embroidered pillows, crocheted blankets, and bottles of liquor in thanks for his generosity. He brought the pillows and blankets home, and left the vodka in the office. One afternoon while at work, my father heard an explosion from the storage room. Four bottles of home-brewed vodka had exploded, leaving headache-inducing fumes in the air and shards of glass everywhere.

One of my very first memories from childhood is of being taken on an Open Housing march by my mother. It was the fall of 1966, and I had just turned four years old. That summer, Martin Luther King Jr. had started his Freedom Movement in Chicago to open up white neighborhoods to black families. Organizers from Evanston began their own campaign to integrate our town's neighborhoods, staging long walks that began in the predominantly black part of town and then passed through the almost exclusively white areas.

My parents had had firsthand experience with segregated housing. In 1964 they bought a house in a small development on the border of Evanston and Skokie. Soon after moving in, they discovered a covenant in the deed of the house that had never been pointed out to them by their lawyer or by the lawyer of the couple who sold them the house. The deed prohibited the selling of any house in our cul-de-sac to a “non-Caucasian.” My parents were outraged, and they, along with a few other families on the street, drew up a petition to remove the clause from the deed.

My mother walked through the neighborhood, asking for signatures to the petition. Doors were slammed in her face, and nasty notes were left in our mailbox. Anne-Marie and Natasha were told by local kids, “We can't play with you anymore,” while their parents sued my parents for harassment (the suit was later dropped). My family finally moved out of the cul-de-sac and into a house with no restrictive covenants.

My mother began attending the Open Housing meetings held at Evanston's Ebenezer AME Church. When the marches were organized, she went along, taking us with her. The marches always began with a sermon in the brick church, people packed tightly into its small interior. After the sermon, we spilled out of the church in waves. I remember feeling suddenly cold after the heat of the church and looking up to see hundreds of stars in the sky. Everyone was excited. There was a lot of laughing and singing. For me, it felt like a holiday, and I clapped along. The campaign leaders set us up in a long snaking line and led us in singing “We Shall Overcome.” My mother placed me in a stroller for the long walk ahead, and with my sisters at her side, we moved forward with the crowd.

As strong as my parents' examples were, I remember as a kid wanting to hear some words of advice from them. I clung to the words my father spoke once, when my sisters and I were complaining about something—“Do not look for happiness in life. Life itself is happiness.”—and I wanted more. I remembered the sermons we listened to in the Ebenezer Church before heading out on our marches, especially when the pastor quoted verbatim from Martin Luther King, urging us all to “open the doors of opportunity to everyone, all of God's Children. . . . We have to let justice roll down like water and let righteousness flow like a mighty stream.” At four years old, how could I know what those words meant? Somehow, I did.

In the books I read as a kid, parents gave out advice, or if not parents, some kind of authority figure did. Ole Golly in
Harriet the Spy
was always quoting Dostoyevsky, Cowper, Emerson, and Shakespeare while advising Harriet on how to live her life. But my parents were not that way. They lived according to their own principles, and expected us to follow along, or not. How or if we followed along, and all the big and little decisions, were left to us to decide.

Not all my decisions were good ones. I smoked in high school and drank, pilfering bottles of Chivas from the basement, gifts to my father that he didn't keep track of. I wasn't drunk the night I hit a police car and ran from the scene of the accident. I was completely sober that evening, and just trying to help out a friend whose car was blocked by another car at a party. He had to get home, and having noticed that the keys of the blocking car were in its ignition, I offered to move it out of the way. No matter that I was fifteen and had been in driver's ed for only two weeks. I jumped in, turned the key, and backed down the driveway, never looking behind me. I will never forget the sound of the crash or the sudden jolt of impact. I got out of the car, saw the smashed-up front of a black-and-white police cruiser, and took off running. I ran through yards, and then went up and over a high fence. I fell down hard onto the other side, twisting my ankle. Hobbling all the way, I made it home to find the police already there, waiting. I had to sit in the back of the police car all by myself, while my parents followed behind in their car.

Other than spending a terrifying night in the police station, I got off easy. When my court date came, no police officers showed up to testify against me, and all charges were dropped. The punishment I received from my parents was fair: I was grounded for six weeks. The punishment I got at school was worse. I was teased, and kids I didn't know pointed at me and sniggered. Friends dropped me when they realized I could no longer go out after school or on the weekends, or because their parents advised them against hanging out with me. A few loyal friends stuck close, and my sister Natasha stayed in nights to keep me company. Anne-Marie was already off at college, and she thought the whole incident was hilarious. Looking back now, I realize how lucky I was that I didn't hurt anybody, and I can see that the weekends spent at home cured my too-early habits of smoking and drinking. At the time, I remember turning to my book of quotations. I used the words I found there to shore myself up and get through the mess I'd made.

I still have that high school journal of favorite quotes. The mix of obvious and obscure lines reflects my adolescent mind's struggle for answers. There are two lines from
A Separate Peace
by John Knowles: “An arrogant determination to live had not yet given out,” and “Only Phineas never was afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone.” I walked through the school hallways after my traffic accident, head held high, repeating under my breath, “never afraid, never hated anyone. . . .” From Margaret Mitchell's
Gone with the Wind
I'd copied “After all, tomorrow is another day,” and this one also I recited in my head, walking along. At night before going to sleep, I reread more quotes I'd penned in, like Dickens's great line from
A Tale of Two Cities
: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done” (Backing a car into a cop car and running away? Hardly!); and the quote I'd copied out in great, sweeping letters, “People do not complete us, we complete ourselves,” taken from
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir.