Wasting away
I predicted explicitly, long ago but exactly, what would become of us if worse came to worst. It has. In this new administration, we will lose everything. House, cars, freedom, togetherness. We — I — never believed we could gracefully fade away but hoped nonetheless. Just found out last month’s electric bill was $1,900. Good God Almighty. They (meaning Pat and daughter Marge, not aliens) keep things from me. I’m the genius, you see. He mustn’t know.
She’s mad for my lacerating her at not finding a literary agent when the prevalence of Smartphones means nobody answers the phone ever. I’m mad at her... because I think it means she doesn’t believe in me anymore. In sickening irony, contrary to decades of fact. She believes I wrote the best story and the best poem of the 20th Century and she also believes I will die right in front of her, soon, unattended by anyone but her. Which I corrected by telling her I want no funeral at all. I don’t want to be the “poor sonofabitch” at Gatsby’s last rites
So here we are, mad at each other. I say we need money, and she thinks I’m blaming her. Money. Never anybody’s fault. It gets away from all of us. I love her. But I cannot prove I do.
Just sitting here. The next morning. In case you’re wondering, we never come to blows. We spent the night together but she’s never gotten used to the idea that someone other than her can have a temper and not back down against hers. So we yell sometimes. She claims I hate her. I know she hates me. Average our ages together and we’re my other magic number, 78. But we belong together. Great gifts we’ve given each other. She gave me greyhounds and narrowboats. I gave her F1 racing, college football, and Russian movies in subtitles. This old and we’re still in love. We accuse each other of our deepest fears. I’m afraid of dying a failure and leaving her unprotected. She’s afraid I don’t love her enough to ignore the obvious fact I’ve exceeded my expiration date for great writing, meaning she’s afraid of me not being here to annoy and harangue her as no one else in her life has seriously dared do. You could say we belong together because we deserve each other, two born fighters who refuse to leave the ring ever as a loser.
How many of you have had a lifelong romance, a love that survived 20 years of loss and reawakened in a single glance. My wife is my Evangeline.
*****
Evangeline.
A Tale of Acadie.
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean,
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?
Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers,—
Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands,
Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven?
Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!
Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October.
Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o'er the ocean.
Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pré.
Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,
Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman's devotion,
List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest...
*****
Well, there’s a great big poem that follows. You know. Longfellow. Evangeline and her Gabriel. Separated by fate, and all that. For decades. It figures. Our own romance was a love at first sight kind of thing. Both of us queering the deal from the start. Is this a story after all? It begins to feel like one. She’s sleeping, a few yards away, and she is still, as she has been, the center of my life. But mad at me. So, there you have it. I’d be long dead without her, and she’s not happy with me right now, which is killing me.
Where was I? Typing boiler room at a nuclear engineering firm in Pennsauken, NJ. Rows of keyboarders at chunky IBM terminals. A handful of young proofreaders at the back. Three of us were good looking. Four of us were male. All of us were impressed. I know I was. Who would wear pants that tight to work? And who’s man enough in the dork world to tell her to stop? Our eyes met for a nanosecond as she was raking them across every face in the room. A flash happened and I found myself wondering...
She thought he’s too young. I thought, she’s married and thinks I’m just a kid. But there was lightning in that first meeting of the eyes, waaaaay across a crowded room. To me she looked like a lioness, diminutive but fierce, that red mane glowing away the banalities of corporationland. A lioness nose, bold and dominating, eyes penetrating and predatory. I tell you, this was a nuclear engineering firm, and everybody was afraid of her. One of her looks could pin you to the wall.
Most people don’t have a standard of comparison for someone like her. I did. Cliffies. The female Harvard wannabes at Radcliffe. They tried to affect that look, they wanted to make you feel small, and they were all merely tiresome. First question was always about your board scores. They generally fell silent when I told them mine. The look attempt switched off and they ate their salad. This was the first time I had actually seen the look they were striving for. The typists were quite visibly alarmed when they were notified that “Pat wants to see you. In her office.” Somehow you expected them not to return. But they always did and seemed to work a little harder after. For a few hours anyway.
It was a week or two later when I got the call. “Pat wants to see you. In her office.” Not that worried. I’d been to prep school. News that the disciplinarian Dean of Students wanted to see you was just as terrifying to us boys as the Pat summons was to typists. Nobody died from meeting Mr. Howard at his high throne dining hall table after breakfast. He ladled out some punishment and that was it. You’d pay for your sins on Saturday in the parking lot behind Tibbetts Hall. Then you were quits with Mr. Howard till next time. This Pat person was likely to be the same kind of brief ordeal.
She really did have that look. I could see she was actually trying to tone it down. Trying not to terrify me. Hmmm.
“I’ve had a complaint about you.”
“By whom?” I didn’t really care. All the engineers were illiterates. All the typists were halfwits. The other proofreaders were pussies.
She looked at her open file. “Yuri Levtushenko. Pipe support engineer. He says you ‘vandalized’ his document.”
I’m returning her gunfighter gaze. Thinking she’s not used to that. Something going on at the corner of her mouth. Is she amused? She’ll never tell.
“I know,” I said. “He complained at the time. I told him nuclear documentation in the U.S. is supposed to be written in English.”
Her mouth did its thing again. “Yes, he also said you were impertinent.”
I was surprised. Wouldn’t have thought that word was in Yuri’s vocabulary. She read my face. Quick she was.
“Derzkiy,” she said.
I cocked my head. She was close to grinning. “Russian for impertinent. Derzkiy. I studied Russian in college.”
Why was I here? I obviously wasn’t going to be keel-hauled over this.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “You don’t belong here. You’re not a proofreader. You’re an editor. That creates problems for word processing supervisors.”
I don’t belong here. Hardly news to me.
“I apologize,” I said. “Won’t happen again.”
That hair. Glowing red. Real Irish red.
“I told him nuclear documentation in the U.S. is supposed to be written in English.” Almost but not quite a smile. “I also told him if you were impertinent again I would punish you. Now you should go back to work.”
Yes, this is going to be a story, a long short story that ends in the 1980s with tears on both sides. Stay tuned for the next jump. (It was Fitzgerald who postulated that good stories are always written in one jump or three. More than three, you’re starting a novel. Don’t think I have the nerve for that. She’d kill me. She may anyway.)
CORRECTION. There isn’t going to be a second and third jump, at least not while we’re still alive. That would be a little too Philip Roth for me. To give you an ending of sorts, I can offer a late chapter that does contain tears, whether you detect them or not… Originally posted under the title Justifying My Life to My Wife.
Didn’t think I needed to do that. She just told me I don’t like people. Maybe she got it from her daughter who lives here rent free and recently told me I’m “a horrible human being.”
I made the mistake of telling my wife I don’t like people anymore, which I don’t. I meant that as a change of state. But she corrected me. “You don’t like people period. Never have. You just lecture them. You don’t like Jews, for example.” She could have added black people, which she thinks I also don’t like, because she believes I’m a WASP racist. Because she’s an Irish Catholic who has never had much contact with Jews, black people, etc, and the Irish are famously tolerant of everyone of every Irish Catholic vicissitude.
She backed off after a while, blaming her grumpiness on body pain.
The truth does out. It is what she thinks.
Not going to justify myself to her or anyone. I’m already on record. My views on people, my affections, likes, dislikes, are already abundantly available in print and on the Internet.
I have lost my liking for people in general. That’s a fairly recent development. Like every man, I have always been ambivalent about women. They are both better and lesser than men. Pretenses about equality are ridiculous. Doesn’t make me a misogynist. We’re different. Will always be. Why the whole transgender flap is so absurd. Men can never be women, and women can never be men. No surgery can change a mind or a soul.
Like every Christian I have differences with Jews. Our traditions, histories, and life experiences are at odds. Always had differences with Roman Catholics too. I am a WASP.
I was raised in a way of life that is now completely gone, despised, even reviled. Extinct. What was unique about us? We were Episcopalians, a vanished denomination that has become the opposite of my upbringing. Why I’m too old to survive in the new order. We had an interpretation of Christianity which despite its fidelity and faith in the Nicene Creed was entirely separate from the Roman Catholic interpretation.
We were not afraid of God. Our bad, I guess. We had our own kind of contract with the Lord and Creator of the Universe. For example, we took the Ten Commandments seriously. We were raised to believe in the efficacy of rectitude. Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t want what other people have, be polite to parents and everyone else, don’t swear, don’t despise your neighbor but help him if you can, and in the words of the King James Bible, “Do no murder.” If these simple rules were in your heart, you could stand in the pew and face God like a man (or woman), and you could trust in God to approve your decisions. We had no confession booth with screens and Rosaries and Hail Mary’s. We had a General Confession in the Book of Common Prayer, whose language repeated verbatim time after time reminded you that you were a miserable sinner, and don’t forget it. (My paternal grandfather and namesake — the finest man I ever knew — was fond of saying, “I may be a sinner, but I’m not miserable.” That was Episcopalian rectitude in a nutshell.
I grew up wanting to be like my grandfather. Did we look down on everyone else? No, I don’t think so. I went to a private elementary school my grandfather organized, and the student body was 40 percent Jews and 20 percent Catholic. The purpose of the school was education. We wore uniforms, so economic differences would not be obvious. Did I notice differences between my sister and me and the Jews and Catholics? Yes. Did our parents all socialize together? No. Were they excluded from our country clubs? Not that I ever knew. My first huge crush was on an Italian Catholic girl named Madelyn who had seven brothers and sisters, one of whom, Ira, became a kind a kind of school mascot because he was so cute. One time we had a school bus accident, and all the children on the bus were most distressed not by the accident but by a nasty cut on Ira’s eyelid. Madelyn never gave me the time of day, probably because I wasn’t Catholic. All but one of the bullies I encountered as the “brain” of the school were Jewish. Mostly they came from richer families than mine. I got picked last for sports. I was an obvious target for the ones who were ambitious in sports. Truthfully, I never made the connection to Jewish doctors and factory owners. My dad’s advice about bullies was always the same. “Punch them in the nose.” But Billy Sussman and Buddy Levitt were always kind to me.
We had some nasty WASPs of our own, usually girls. Their fathers were also doctors, etc. But you couldn’t punch them in the nose. You couldn’t ever hit a girl. And there was also the WASP who befriended me, the incredibly spoiled son of a factory owner who delighted in borderline cruel practical jokes involving electricity and other things he knew more about than anybody else. (Yeah, I had a Jewish friend in first grade whose parents had been in Auschwitz and whose mother died one weekend in first grade. I can still remember the sound of the wet fallen brown leaves we shuffled through when he told me. I had seen their tattoos. He wasn’t back the next year. I remember his name, Julian, and his gifted cantor brother, David.)
Except for the factory owner and doctor kids, we were all living in the country. We had all kinds of non-WASPS, non-Jews, and non-Catholics in our lives. Black, Native American (Indian then), Puerto Rican, and most importantly in my case, Moor. They were the support system that fixed things, looked after children, toted crop baskets, and were embedded in everyone’s everyday rural life. Emma raised the Hine kids while their parents were in the Bahamas and ‘half-breed’ (her Moor husband Nelson’s monicker for her) Ann did everyone’s laundry, folded and ironed and perfect every time. Our requirement? You addressed the men as Mister until they instructed otherwise, the women as Missus until they instructed otherwise, and you looked them in the eye. Except for the migrant workers, who refused to notice you in person but would wave from a truck-bed on a dirt road between fields, just never in the general store. They didn’t smell good, but your mother explained they had no running water in their barracks. Oh.
My grandmother had two black women who helped her take care of my ailing grandfather. I grew up with those ladies, Rosa and Elizabeth (Catholic!). I can tell you honestly they were better women than my grandmother was, no matter how many hats Grandma had to wear to church. My other grandfather had a best buddy from work named Gibby, who did all the painting for everyone’s houses in our extended family, and he always had a spotless black Mercury sedan less than two years old. Always a cool hat too. He would have done anything for my grandfather, whom he called “Cap,” even though Grampa sometimes slipped and used the N-Word when he was talking politics. He was a Methodist, not an Episcopalian. He was also from Ohio. So we made allowances.
Gramma’s wife had a hired man named Henry who came and did work at our house from time to time. I thought Henry was a Superman. We had this 19th century carriage shed, three bays and it included corn cribs, a big building it was, and the back of it had poison Ivy growing all the way to the roof, with branching trunks the size of men’s thighs. When my dad and I were building our tennis court out of a field, he thought the back of the carriage house was unsightly and asked if Henry could remove the poison ivy monster. Henry always looked the same. He wore bib overalls, needed a six egg lunch and a ride back to Penns Grove and he had too few dollars for even a WASP to admit. He was also immune to poison ivy. He cleared the entire carriage shed of the tree-sized vines in a single day. Never seen anyone in my life who could do so much work so quickly without ever moving fast. Like some inevitable force of nature. When your mom dropped him off outside that hedge in Penns Grove you wanted to say something to him more than thank you, but you were too young to think what that might be.
Have I talked about the Moorish divas of Cumberland County, Lillian, Rose, Priscilla… Oh never mind.
People who grow up in suburban Camden County know a lot more than I do about who can relate to people and who’s a racist and not than I ever could.
Justify? Who’s talkin’?
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