Late-Life Love Page 4

  There were countless stories about his international students. “Freddie Wahba,” I would say—to prompt a retelling of the Egyptian graduate student who had arrived at Don’s office, brandishing a fistful of ties: “There are sporty ties and you are a sporty man.” Don had asked how Freddie got his first name. Apparently his father had named his kids after his bosses working on the railroads.

  “Do you have brothers or sisters?” Don had asked.

  “Yes, I have a sister.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Schwartz,” Freddie said.

  In his retirement, Don often goes to Emeriti House, where he leads poetry discussions or works on projects to preserve the past. As the university necrologist, he tries to ensure that every faculty death issues in a memorial resolution. As a collector of oral histories, he oversees the videotaping of retiring faculty, who are interviewed as they consider the trajectories of their careers. These activities slowed down and then came to a halt during the aftermath of the aphasia incident. Or maybe they were nudged aside by the new critical edition of Pride and Prejudice that he was completing with our friend Mary. He had produced earlier editions on his own, but invited Mary to collaborate so that she could oversee its future republications.

  At the neurology appointment set up by the ER physician, Don told me, he concluded the session by reciting the three words—table, pencil, apple—that the doctor had asked him to remember at the start of their session. He had been able to subtract 7 from 90, then 7 from 83, then 7 from . . . but at any age I would have failed that test. (I am the sort of person who does not rise to the challenge of the eighth-grade Common Core math test.) He had tried to draw two shapes like home base, but failed to make them overlap. While I waited in the Inverness during the afternoon of Don’s consultation, which issued only in an order for more tests in the hospital, my levels of nervousness crested. I would have to begin accompanying him to scans and doctor appointments, which—I reminded my friend Fran—I had never done before.

  Fran had given me such an imaginative and touching gift for my birthday. On one sheet of paper, she had typed a numbered list of the names of people or places. On another sheet of paper, she had typed an alphabetized list of events or snatches of conversation. While I matched the numbers to the letters, the people or places to the events or conversations, I marveled at the extensive past we shared: activities with my kids at their every stage of development and with her parents, siblings, nephews, and nieces; intense exchanges over our writing projects—hers historical, mine literary; and rowdy derision of academic bloviating.

  The antique magnolia was putting out sparse pink and white blossoms on its spindly branches when I went with Don to the hospital for various scans and then back to the neurologist’s office, but thankfully the results led her to conclude there was no need for more procedures.

  “You are in good health,” she declared. “You look great, decades younger than your age. It was maybe a mini-stroke or an instance of TGA, just episodic. Transient global amnesia. Try an aspirin every day.”

  Don did seem better. He often woke with a tune in his head, and the day after seeing the neurologist the words were a ditty his Uncle Don used to sing to him when he was little: “Picky, picky porcupine / I see you under the northern pine, / I take my shoot gun and shoot you dead / Picky, picky porcupine.” It was time to resume the activities that take up my retirement—reading, writing, and eating neatly—the goals so devoutly wished for by Leo the Late Bloomer, an inept young lion in a vibrantly illustrated picture book that entranced my girls at bedtime. With Don sitting in the parked car so we wouldn’t get a ticket, I could run up and gather the books and DVDs my graduate assistants were collecting in my office.

  Neither of my daughters could travel to us this Passover, and therefore with some misgivings I accepted an invitation to attend a seder at friends of our friends Jonathan and Alexandra. Ever since the girls were young and every year before this one, I had enlisted family or friends to haul up from the basement a long table to accommodate our many guests at the seder. We would position it to form a T with the dining room table. Fran had produced an ecumenical Haggadah that we always used.

  Even though she had stopped attending years ago, Fran’s spirit presided in the spiral booklets with their uplifting prayers for peace and justice. But this year instead of spilling wine on our plates, as we had at my seders to commemorate the suffering of the plagues, our hosts distributed plastic animals. Even more upsetting was their use of a 1950s children’s book for the Haggadah. “What to make of a diminished thing?” Maybe I should not relinquish my own traditions, exhausting though they were, I thought.

  In the past, putting on a face to meet the faces at Passovers had always buoyed up Don’s spirits, even though he insisted on loading the dishwasher afterward, washing all the pots, laundering the linen, and grousing about it. At all of our twenty or so seders, when we dedicated the first glass of wine to family or friends who had died, Don had raised his glass and spoken Mary-Alice’s name. It often triggered stories about her wit. When a doctor suspected she had lost her eyesight and asked her about the color of his shirt, she had said, “It’s very becoming, suits you perfectly.” And that memory invariably brought to my mind a later moment when Don and I were becoming more than friends—I had inadvertently left a book in his car—and he bounded up the stairs to my house, backlit by the sun and full of vitality, much more vitality than his sixty-odd years would suggest, in his usual outfit: dark pants, a laundered shirt, a sports jacket, and a tie. That was the instant when the embers sparked and I realized why so much food remained on our plates at our lunches together.

  He soon became my sartorial model. What a relief to abandon skirt suits in the classroom or lecture hall (Sandra dubbed me Esther Polyester in one of those outfits) and Laura Ashley dresses (we called ourselves the Milkmaids), to have an easy uniform always at reach. For his laundered shirt, I substituted a T-shirt, for his tie a scarf, for his trousers leggings. Late-life dressing has its own logic. When my mentor, the feminist critic and detective novelist Carolyn Heilbrun, entered her seventies, she favored loose pants, billowy tunics, and sturdy old lady shoes, precisely the attire I had to adopt during all the cancer surgeries.

  After Carolyn’s death, I brooded about her decision to relinquish life: was it a rational one or a sign of depression at not finding another writing project? A year or so before her suicide, Carolyn had packed up all the hoods she had been given with her honorary degrees and mailed them to me so I could use them for a quilt. There was no way I could get a needle through the thick satin and velvet linings, I explained, but she did not want them returned. As Fran and I traveled back from Carolyn’s funeral, Fran confided that she thought Carolyn was afraid of the loss of control associated with aging.

  The picture on the cover of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand features the main characters’ coats and hats on a coat stand, as if locked in an embrace. Although Simonson’s characters find the clothing of their deceased spouses comforting, the image disturbs me: coats hung upon a stick, their wearers gone. But the news about Don was good, I tried to assure myself. I should confine my worries to the sick baby and to my traveling back to New York. It would be easier now that the most fearsome late winter I could remember had finally ended.

  Falling in Love

  WITH LAGUARDIA SHUT down for the day, reading was the only way to calm my taut nerves; and who better expresses the awkward hesitancy, astonishment, and delight of the second chance of later-life love than the poet I had taken with me? I was too agitated about Don to help out with the baby, so I stayed alone in the empty apartment of my stepdaughter Susannah.

  The phone call from the ER the night before had shocked me: Don had stumbled on the first two steps leading up from the basement. He had torn a knee tendon—but it would be impossible to fly back today. In Bloomington, his other daughter, Julie, would email updates on the surgery and I had a seat on the first flight out tomorrow. Turbulence, the
airport reported, but the day looked picture-perfect: sunny and warm with all the bulbs in Central Park blooming. Just two days ago, Don had phoned to describe the glowing forsythia and apple tree. How could this have possibly happened, and what would anesthesia and an operation on his already arthritic knee mean at his advanced age? I had always considered February the cruelest month, but maybe T. S. Eliot was right.

  Still, I had to calm myself, for there was nothing to do but wait and hope that Don’s physical strength would see him through. All those decades of running may have hurt his knees, but surely they also built resilience. So many people, like my collaborator Sandra, recover quickly from hip replacements, and this would be an easier recuperation. Since the surgery required only a one-night stay in the hospital, I had to be resolute and with luck I would arrive in time tomorrow to pick him up when he was discharged. He would need me more out of the hospital than in. I should change the ostomy apparatus, email Fran to inform her of the situation, and rest for what would be a challenging day. Julie, deft and tenacious, would never leave his side and would keep me informed of his condition, I knew.

  Images of Don dragging himself up the basement steps, of his hauling his body across the family room to call 911, of his being taken on a stretcher to the ambulance, of his long wait in the ER, of Jan and Jon staying with him until he got a room at 3 a.m., of Julie suffering heightened anxieties before the operation: I needed to quiet myself with a book he had given me, a 1946 reprint of a very slim, very small 1936 edition of Sonnets from the Portuguese that he had purchased from a used-book barrow when he was a college student and that had easily fit in my handbag.

  The name of the poet does not appear on the cover, which is composed of a diminutive orange grid, forming squares like a miniature quilt in which a green bird on a branch alternates with a stylized pink flower sprouting a few leaves. The slight book looks delicate, old-fashioned, and feminine. The author’s name, apparently again assumed to be either trivial or self-evident, is also absent from the frontispiece: a languishing, white-gowned lady holding a red rose and swooning (from illness, fright, desire?) before the looming figure of her manly lover as they stand in front of an open door. The woman is blond, not brunette like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her hair in a bun, not in ringlets. She reaches over to clutch the doorknob: will she lock the phantom lover out, simply faint on the spot, or let him swoop down and carry her away beyond the threshold? On the title page, a drawing of a bronze cast of two clasped hands—one hand cradles the other—tells me that the little volume is a meditation on the cradling clasp.

  “How do I love you?” forty-year-old Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously asked in her once admired and later dismissed poems, and then she answered, as quite a few schoolchildren of my generation could repeat, “Let me count the ways.” In her historical period, when the life expectancy of women was about fifty years of age, she must have considered herself over-the-hill. As I pondered the different ways she loved Robert Browning and the surgery scheduled for 11 a.m., I whispered, “Baruch, my darling: blessed you are, blessed you will always be to me,” and opened the book to the startling first encounter of the lovers.

  In the melancholy years of her life, a mystic presence moves and draws Elizabeth “backward by the hair”:

  And a voice said in mastery, while I strove.—

  “Guess now who holds thee?”—“Death,” I said. But, there,

  The silver answer rang,—“Not Death, but Love.” (I)

  Surely Robert Browning did not have the audacity at one of their early meetings to yank Elizabeth Barrett’s hair! Perhaps Elizabeth feels flung back by Robert’s presence, expecting not love but death in what she considered her stunted later life. Given Elizabeth Barrett’s years of illness, tragedy, and confinement in her father’s house, she must have felt frail and vulnerable. Paradoxically, the union with Robert Browning would mean death—the death of her incapacitation and misery.

  Throughout the sonnet sequence, hesitancies about love ripening in later life plague the speaker. “What has thou to do / With looking from the lattice-light at me,” Elizabeth asks her lover, for she is a “poor, tired, wandering” person (III). The problem of feeling undesirable—which Barrett Browning transposes from the sonnet tradition of the lover-poet’s unworthiness—relates to embarrassment about not only the aging body but also the worn-down spirit: “For I have grieved so I am hard to love” (XXXV). How could Elizabeth confide her misery and sense of guilt over the drowning of her brother, her discontent with her controlling father, her dismay at her physical disabilities? She feels faded: “frequent tears have run / The colours” from her life (VIII). Her cheeks are pale or wet with tears, her hands and knees trembling. To herself, she appears “not one / For such man’s love!—more like an out-of-tune / Worn viol” that would “spoil his song” (XXXII).

  Elizabeth’s outbreaks of inadequacy are interrupted by the ping! of the iPhone—Julie telling me the surgery has been delayed—so I skip to the poem that always reminds me of Don at Lake Ogle. One of Robert’s first kisses “sought the forehead, and half-missed / Half falling on the hair” (XXXVIII). Awkward, it misses its mark, as did Don’s and my first kiss when we were walking a trail in Brown County State Park, adrift in yellow and orange leaves. We had stopped to wonder at the golden light when drawn together and then we were more amused than mortified by a mistimed bumping into each other.

  How long ago that first embrace seems today, and how very long this morning, though numerous email messages from Julie assure me that Don is pain-free, confident, and they expect the surgery around 2 p.m. Of course I shouldn’t be here, so far away when he is in such dire straits. Wasn’t he always the one who in the past had said, “Whither,” meaning that he would accompany me on trips he had no wish to make? It was a mistake to leave him, for I shared Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s amazement at her extraordinary luck in encountering later in life the sense of two-being-one or one-being-two. Once acknowledged, love dissolves Elizabeth’s lonely singularity. Robert’s touch means her heart pulses with “a beat double” and her eyes shed “the tears of two” (VI).

  At a climactic point in the sequence, Elizabeth imagines the commonality and reciprocity of “our two souls”:

  When our two souls stand up erect and strong,

  Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,

  Until the lengthening wings break into fire

  At either curved point,—what bitter wrong

  Can the earth do to us, that we should not long

  Be here contented? (XXII)

  What a resplendent portrait of passion both spiritual (souls standing erect) and erotic (drawing nearer until breaking into fire). Touched by winged Eros, the lovers sprout wings. The image of flight leads Elizabeth to the surmise that a transcendent world elsewhere might encapsulate their love, keeping two intact as one, protected from the “bitter wrongs” visited upon those embodied and embedded in quotidian existence.

  But she rejects a flight from materiality in a reversal that would ground Barrett Browning and her poetry in earthly realities:

  Think. In mounting higher

  The angels would press on us and aspire

  To drop some golden orb of perfect song

  Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay

  Rather on earth, Belovèd,—where the unfit

  Contrarious moods of men recoil away

  And isolate pure spirits and permit

  A place to stand and love in for a day,

  With darkness and the death-hour rounding it. (XXII)

  Whereas in heaven the lovers would be surrounded by throngs of angels pressing perfection on them, on earth contrary creatures will lend them a private space to experience the poignant transience of love in a daily life that will surely end with death, but with an hour of death that curiously encapsulates life.

  Perfection can wait, the ripe lover decides, since aging informs us daily that death will come soon enough. Better alone together on imperfect earth t
han crowded in a perfect heaven. Ripe love converts Elizabeth Barrett Browning from faith in the hereafter to allegiance to the here and now, from divine to human love.

  A succession of pings. An email from Sandra, laid low by a tumultuous scene with her partner, but the anesthesia has begun. Unnerved, I try to take heart by turning to the most exultant and erotic sonnet in the sequence, which imagines the subtraction of two beings into one. Here “our two souls” do not stand face to face or pulse with “a double beat,” but instead become one, as Elizabeth meditates on her own orgasmic obliteration. The poet presumed to be the epitome of Victorian propriety first seems to tap a discouragingly conventional image of herself as a parasitical plant dependent upon its strong male host, for she thinks of herself as the scraggling vines obscuring the woody trunk of Robert, envisioned as a palm tree. Do the clinging vines reflect her dread that her infirmities and resultant dependency would thwart his flourishing?

  Perhaps, but the rest of the sonnet revels in the ecstasies of her lover’s potency and her own ecstatic desire:

  Renew thy presence; as a strong tree should,

  Rustle thy boughs and set thy trunk all bare,

  And let these bands of greenery which insphere thee:

  Drop heavily down,—burst, shattered everywhere!

  Because, in this deep joy to see and hear thee

  And breathe within thy shadow a new air,

  I do not think of thee—I am too near thee. (XXIX)

  As she falls, splitting open the fruit or flower of herself, their intimacy annihilates individuation. Hers is not a clingy femininity, though she has known disability. Perhaps because he may have to become her stalwart shelter, she needs to comprehend—and needs him to comprehend—her capacity for self-obliterating union.