World War II, Part Two

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

                  The Convergence of the Twain, Thomas Hardy

Where I could have or should have but didn’t has been my theme. I have come to see World War II as the Iceberg lying in wait for the Titanic, converging with my marriage. Sleeping Beauty also comes to mind, or the Frog Prince in reverse.

At P.S. 89, Queens, we still were too close to it when I was in the early grades. Although kids running pell-mell and helter-skelter on 88^th Street in Jackson Heights were already calling each other communists by the time I moved to Haiti in 1950, the Korean War about to begin, World War II, I think, had not yet passed into history even by the time I was in high school. Punic and Peloponnesian, Wars of the Roses, French and Indian, Franco-Prussian, Napoleonic, Crimean, Spanish- American, Revolutionary and Civil, the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy.  Wars I have studied, maps I have made. Alliances, treaties, ententes, détentes. A diet of worms. I can hardly blame my teachers. World War II came in a rush, in June, when even teachers couldn’t wait for summer to begin. The headmistresses at Shipley (my high school boarding school in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania), former Presbyterian missionaries in China interned by the Japanese during the war, did their best. Once a year, we girls had the privilege of sitting at Center Table where Miss Speer, a bit stiff, and Miss Wagner, double chins wobbling, sometimes told stories of the day that lived in infamy, Roosevelt’s voice coming to them cracked and broken over the radio.  They taught us to use chopsticks, an invaluable skill, but I got a better idea of rats, lice, and torture in the Japanese camps from The Three Came Home with Claudette Colbert. Two of the Hiroshima maidens came to Shipley while I was there. Swaddled in kimonos, faces powdered, taking mincing steps, they were no more than dolls to me, callous teenager that I was.

In college, I took a course called Intellectual History of America, but in my memory we spent most of the time establishing the Puritan work ethic, dodging fire and brimstone coming at us from Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In London where, in 1960, there were still some bombed-out buildings and, particularly at the University of Sheffield, I brushed up against the war, though I could not name it. A kind of humility and lack of expectation in the populace, even among school and college students, a dowdy modesty in women, the speed with which a queue would form. Sheffield was dingy and gloomy; English food was terrible. Some of what I sensed can be put down to cultural differences.  The rest was a hangover, a slowly dissipating fog.

That year I spent Christmas in Munich with my boyfriend G. Though our relationship was chaste, we took a doppelzimmer in a pension where the chambermaid cleaned the window sills with a toothbrush and placed a small fresh fir tree at the foot of our bed every other day, announcing, das tannenbaum ist kaput, before whisking the old one away. G and I took part in the family’s tree-lighting ceremony, let ourselves be jostled by shopping crowds in the streets and on trams, ate sweets with almond paste, took our coffee mit schlag. It was Frohliche Weihnacten everywhere we went, until at last on Christmas Eve it was quiet in front of the Frauenkirche, its twin turquoise domes inspired by the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, lightly frosted with snow.  Much of the heavy damage done during the war to this beautiful medieval church had already been repaired so that from the outside at least it looked perfect, and it was hard to imagine that there might be a single person in Munich who was not celebrating Christmas. Then we were off to New Year’s Eve in Trieste where the streets were certainly dangerous, but not because bombs were slipping silently from bays. No, it was (to us) a crazy Italian custom, out with the old, in with the new. It was furniture, some of it quite heavy, and pots and pans, raining down in hilarious bursts from apartment windows, as G and I, high on champagne, ducked and weaved our way home from a party.

All the way to Europe, and still I found it easy to avoid World War II. I should have studied history instead of English, been more thoughtful, more serious, not the dizzy blond – who would never learn anything – my 5^th grade teacher in New York said I was, older, a different person. Because everything I would need to know later had already shown up at recess at Union School in Port-au-Prince, between 1950 and 1953, where I attended grades 6, 7, and 8 in an old wooden building, someone’s elegant home at one time, now standing leaky and somewhat dilapidated on the Champs de Mars. Hatless, unprotected by sunscreen, I jumped rope and was lousy at soft ball in an open yard among our classrooms, ate radish, black pepper, and cream cheese sandwiches on airy white bread full of holes from Peters Bakery. It was Madame Peters herself who explained to my mother that no one in Haiti could remember every other day. Daily then, Madame Peters supplied us with delicious loaves, with baguettes, brioches, and coconut tarts I hunger for today, and with important information. No one in Haiti can remember every other day grounded us in our new country and became a favorite family saying.

Haiti in the early 50s was a place of escape, employment, survival, defeat, enterprise, freedom, failure, banishment, hiding, and forgetfulness. My father sometimes talked in these terms. These were the best years of his life, he later wrote, thinking back. But while we were living there, he sometimes said he was in exile, Haiti was out of this world. He had a big competitor, Hakim, full of tricks, the agent for Gold Medal flour. I remember my father’s outrage when Hakim imported hot roll mix, put up a neon sign, two daring novelties. How long could my father maintain the edge necessary to support us?  Wasn’t coming down here a cop out, evidence that he couldn’t succeed in the good old USA? He had no regular salary, only sales’ commissions, no pension plan, no health insurance. For us and for others, existence was precarious.  There was a boy in my class who lived in the shadow of his father’s suicide. Tall, handsome, quiet, not much of a student.  A German boy.  It was thought, it was rumored, that his father was a Nazi. I don’t know what his family lived on. I remember his mother’s tired, strained, baffled face. Port-au-Prince was full of Germans. Some were well-established old timers. When my father’s business expanded to include exporting coffee and additional agencies, he hired a manager and a secretary, Mr. Streitwolf, married to a Haitian, and his daughter, Miss Streitwolf. Jules Wiesel was one of my 8^th grade teachers, an explosive man with an accurate aim when he threw chalk and erasers and, once, a box of silver scissors, classroom size, at wrong answers. He taught me almost everything I know about English grammar; he praised my writing. More thrilling, he sent me with others to fetch beer and cigarettes at the Café Rex, dark and inviting, full of smoke, men talking business and politics, at the end of the school’s long driveway. Where Mr. Wiesel came from, how long he had been in Haiti, or why he appeared alone there, I never knew. But there were certainly Jewish parents and grandparents among my acquaintance who could have told me about Hitler’s death camps from which they had only recently arrived.

The various backgrounds of the children I went to Union School with (I can list offhand Haitian, American, Dominican, Trinidadian, Canadian, Swiss, Dutch, Danish, German, Syrian, Lebanese, Venezuelan, Argentine, and Austrian, often in exotic three-way combinations) meant little. We were growing up inside an art explosion, a political powder keg, a stronghold against Communism, a sophisticated world capital, a miserable, poverty-stricken backwater, recipient of foreign aid, a market for U.S. goods, a tourist destination, an elite society launched on the backs of slaves, insular, tradition-bound, a deeply religious country in which Catholicism and Vodou were mysteriously intertwined, the Pearl of the Antilles, a lethal Paradise beset by hookworm, dengue fever, and malaria, where yaws could leave a hole in a face where a nose used to be. Haiti was sensuous and licentious. What in the US was called deviance, miscegenation, was everywhere in flower. How much of this seeped into us on that playground? We made and unmade, made and kept friends according to our whims and inclinations. We swam and drank Kola at birthday and slumber parties. It was an ordinary childhood like no other.  I will make Haiti my excuse. I could marry anyone I pleased, anyone who pleased me.

To invoke Hardy’s universe of doom, of human pawns predestined, seems melodramatic even to me. And yet I find it apt. Though naive, I was arrogant in my way, unaccustomed to rejection, unacquainted with grief. Have I changed so much? Before I had cancer I thought my escape due at least in part to some virtue in me, something I was doing right. It was because of my genes, my diet, my exercise program. But to all of these, cancer was indifferent. We took our time, Ernst and I. We drifted far afield of the coincidence of having been in Brooklyn on the same day in April, 1940. We let grass grow under our feet. But it amuses me to think that Ernst went ahead to Los Angeles to check out the place, as a proper husband should, leaving me to circuitous detours to Haiti, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Michigan, England, and El Salvador, before he sent for me – through G, of course, link to the past, conduit to the future, who brought us together by finishing his PhD on time and landing a job at UCLA. G and I agreed to meet in Denver and drive to the Coast. The West Coast! The sound of it excites me even now. In fact, I was there already, a little further south, teaching English in El Salvador, the only country in Central America which turns its face exclusively toward the Pacific.

Did the earth move when I met Ernst? I will say that it did and skip the rest: our first meeting and courtship, his father’s resulting heart attack, which made Ernst cry like the Japanese officer in the Three Came Home, our broken engagement. These I push aside for now to uncover the hardness of heart I eventually developed in relation to my in-laws. To talk about the deaths that ensued once we decided to go ahead with our plans. No Here comes the bride, no Mendelssohn (though he was Jewish), no amor vincit omnia, no time heals all wounds, no but some of my best friends are Jews. Such old saws were shattered, along with my belief that love for a child, even a second son, however prodigal, would outweigh any religious identity or collective idea. Ernst was dead to his family. Though they did not rend their clothes, cover the mirrors, and sit shiva, they could no longer see him as their son, potential producer of Jewish children, to replace those who died in the Holocaust.  I had not heard the word used in this way before. A holocaust, total destruction, horrific, might happen here, there, or anywhere. But this thought, among many others, I learned to suppress. I took a vow of silence on the subject of Israel, ate little, spoke less. I wished they would give me the tiniest glass of slivovitz like the one his father was drinking.

The Holocaust scorched the whole earth, subsuming the depression, economic and political causes of the war, Winston Churchill and Mussolini, Stalin and Roosevelt, pity for the rape of German women, frozen Russian soldiers, the French resistance, the blitz, Pearl Harbor, and the atomic bomb. I had learned more than I thought about World War II, but it was all for nothing. Shakespeare, Dickens, Wagner, and T.S. Eliot went up in the conflagration. Arabs and olive trees, people with dark skin, schwartzes. I admired a painting of two handsome couples on a cousin’s wall, one of the women in a hat such as Trudy wore in my baby book. Those were our parents, I was told, they perished in the Holocaust. Someone’s mother in Poland had gone to the hospital never to return. Her husband and children later jumped from one of those cars on the way to Auschwitz. A boy of twelve afraid to reveal in a public bathroom that he was circumcised, another afraid to show his broken arm to a doctor. We were sipping cognac on an afternoon in spring at the Beverly Hills hotel, eating pastries like the ones G and I consumed in Munich. It was next year in Jerusalem, it was kosher for Pesach. It was the Holocaust for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Ernst’s mother stuffed her children’s mouths with chocolates to keep them from crying at a border crossing. Always those ill-defined borders, unnamed forests they crawled through. She went back to Deutschkreutz after the war to look for my people, found no one.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

                  Fire and Ice, Robert Frost

World War II, Part One

The sun was warm but the wind was chill,

You know how it is with an April day,

When the sun is out and the wind is still,

You’re one month on in the middle of May,

But if you so much as dare to speak,

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

            
                 Two Tramps in Mud Time, Robert Frost

I was born on April 1, 1940, in Brooklyn Hospital, Brooklyn, New York. It was snowing, and the Germans were invading Norway. Snow was general all over Ireland, Joyce writes in his famous story, “The Dead,” and in enumerating the things and people, living and dead, upon whom it is falling, he effectively buries his birthplace. There are people who say they can remember being born, but I am not one of them. I use my mother’s words, not mine. Could she look out the window, or did someone tell her it was snowing? Was it falling in all five boroughs, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the New England states, across the Canadian border, in Norway? Skiers, I have heard, could make their way cross country into neutral Sweden to escape Nazi occupation. But it’s quite probable that on the first of April in New York there was no more than a snow flurry, not the kind of snow that sticks to the ground, much less enough to bury anything or anyone. News of the war in Europe, I imagine, was far more general. It was on the radio, on the lips and tongues of doctors and nurses. My father no doubt mentioned it, whatever he had heard or seen in the paper on his subway ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

Like Joyce, I was not entirely pleased, when the time came to be aware of such things, with the place of my birth. My parents were living in Manhattan which is where I would have been born but for Dr. Wallace, my mother’s obstetrician, who delivered babies at Brooklyn Hospital. For a long time, I deemed this an insufficient reason. My parents should have arranged for me to be born at the red hot center of things, not in remote, low class Brooklyn, to which I had no ties and rarely visited. I did not bury Brooklyn, I ignored it. When asked where I was born, or to fill out a form, I answered New York City.

The Germans in my mother’s narrative could not be so easily dismissed. They were on the move in Europe and, although the United States had not yet entered the war, were present at my birthday. Ich bin eine Deutsche. At least one quarter of me is.  My great-grandparents on my mother’s side, Anna Deindorfer and Phillipe Frick, were pioneers in Indiana in the 1800s. My grandmother, Margaretha Rosina Frick, spoke German growing up, and German exclamations of exasperation lingered in her speech throughout her life. My father also spoke a little German learned in an isolated German-speaking community in Montana where he taught school as a very young man. To interact with German-Americans was in the ordinary way of things for both my parents. As children during World War I, they had been taught to disapprove of prejudice against those of German descent, so I suppose there is nothing strange in the fact that they hired, one after the other, between 1940 and 1944, two German nannies to take care of me while they were at work. They left me at home with the enemy! Trudy and Ida could have been spies! Of course this is nonsense. They were harmless young working women, immigrants who needed jobs. I’m sure they kept me clean and happy.

 I have a photograph of Trudy pushing my baby carriage, a fabulous perambulator, though it looks to be second-hand, and Trudy is pretty fabulous too in a stylish suit and Marlene Dietrich hat. She left me a scrap of a German song which goes something like this: Hop, hop, hop, / Ferchen lof gallop, / Iber something, iber something, / Hop, hop, hop…I know the tune well, hear the words in my head and spell them as I hear them. My accent is good (hop leans toward hope), but much is missing, too much time has elapsed. A song to bounce a baby on a knee by. Every child in Germany knows it, perhaps. I hope someone out there will recognize it, correct my spelling, tell me what it means, though I think I have the gist. A song of innocence, I think, not like Trot, trot to Boston to buy a loaf of bread. /  Trot, trot home again, the old horse fell dead. Yet how I loved that song when I was little, slipping, almost falling, through my father’s knees before he caught me. Safe. I was safe, with never a thought for the poor old horse.

Ida, less defined, less real than Trudy, also left some words behind her: Ida likes it. This to encourage me to eat something but, as the story goes, I refused. Ida could eat it, if she liked it so much. My parents were talkers, story tellers, mimics. In their repetitions in later years I sensed their delight in my combative spirit, in my unwillingness to follow a fuhrer. These words had a special meaning for the three of us, for us only, and now only for me, the last person in the world who remembers them, packed as they are with my parents’ voices and the built-in benches around the table in the tiny dinette where we had lamb chops, baked potatoes, and broccoli for dinner.

Ida and Trudy. Trudy and Ida. Surnames and citizenship unknown. Who were they really? What did they do all day? It was a small apartment. Surely German efficiency would have made short work of housekeeping. They were glued to the radio, that’s what, as was everyone else in America in 1940. Woody Allen shows this convincingly in Radio Days .Pretty soon I refused to say the alphabet, not beyond ABC. After that, I said New York. Sometimes you get a lemon, a friend remarked about some stubbornness in his own daughter, but I’m sure my parents thought the same of me. Would this kid ever get it? What was wrong with her? But it was Trudy and Ida, it was the war, it was WABC, New York.  Hearing organ music in church, I asked, Is there any news on? I was on alert, I was tuned in.

Except that I wasn’t. Of the war years I remember almost nothing. What follows is a blank, a negative, the other side of the record. The first movie I saw made me cry, not the movie I think, but a newsreel must have frightened me. When he was turned down by the Army because of near-sightedness, my father became an Air Raid Warden, but I cannot remember pulling down the shades or any gear associated with this office. My mother’s younger brother, William Eston Van Dyke, Yeoman 1^st Class, was on a dangerous ammunition ship close to Pearl Harbor, but I connect no anxiety with him, only the song that begins Bellbottom trousers, coat of Navy blue,  nor can I think of anyone of our acquaintance who lost a son, brother, father, or uncle. We lived in an apartment with two spacious wings, six to eight apartments on each of eight or nine floors. My parents had many friends and colleagues. There must have been someone. Yet, in my mind, it all boils down to the dotted swiss dress I wore to the movies, to the Chinese man-doll, with a braid down his back, my uncle Bill brought me after the war. His china face was an exotic mystery, his several silken robes a delight to put on and take off. We shopped at the A&P and must have used ration books, but I don’t remember them. The A&P had wooden floors, coffee grinders, butchers with bloody aprons. The tongue lolling huge and hideous behind the glass case had somehow impossibly been lodged once inside a real cow’s mouth. At home, my mother and I tossed a package of margarine back and forth until the orange dot of color spread throughout to make it look like butter. We had a Victory Garden the size of a handkerchief, roped off with string, its seed packages displayed on Popsicle sticks. I may have eaten the radishes we grew, but I see that plot of ground best from our kitchen window three floors up.

For me, the war, like our Victory Garden, was far away. I was protected by my youth and by my parents. Blond hair and blue eyes protected me. I was not a member of a persecuted tribe. And in this state, compounded of innocence and ignorance, I persisted through elementary and high school, into college and beyond. I don’t know when or why Trudy left my parents’ employ, but Ida was fired. Because she listened to the radio too much, made suspicious phone calls, was really a spy after all? Or was this just a conversational gambit, teasing speculation, family joke? Don’t move, I commanded my dolls, a delicious absurdity, but when viewed as something Ida said to me, these words had a sinister, Teutonic ring which was finally too much even for my open-minded parents.

In search of cheaper rent and more green space for children, we moved at some point to Jackson Heights, Queens. Another undesirable address. To think that my bachelor father once lived on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, as his flat red book of French verbs tells me he did, is galling to me. When we visited old friends there, rising to the top floor in a cage-like elevator, the quaintness of the Village called to me. But my mother was pregnant. She’d already given up smoking when I was born; now it was her job, her career as it turned out, as a case supervisor, with a hotline to Mayor LaGuardia, for the New York Department of Welfare, and household help, all the romance of her early married life. In recounting all this later, she seemed to speak without regret. Times were hard; things were scarce. My sled was a ski-sled, so-called, and on this inferior piece of wartime manufacture I flew downhill in the much-prized vacant lot at the end of our block, in Queens, on runners made of wood instead of metal.

During a space of time in 1944, pregnancy and illness made my family turn inward. A month or so before my sister Elizabeth was born on March 28, my father came down with a serious case of pneumonia and, because of a shortage of hospital beds, he was treated at home. I remember visiting nurses, dark rooms, prohibitions, a new doll I named Elizabeth who came to a bad end in a city sewer. I think my father would have died without Etta Parr, a childhood friend of my mother’s from Oklahoma, then a Navy nurse stationed nearby. Sulfur drugs (Penicillin had been invented, but was not yet widely available) cause excessive sweating, but Etta knew how to change the sheets for a man too weak to sit up while she did it. Part New York cop, part ministering angel in her dark blue uniform with white stripes and gold buttons, blond hair puffing out around her cap, Etta took charge. She brought us butter and sugar and nylon stockings from the PX. I got the chicken pox, a form of revenge for having been sent to stay for a week with friends on Long Island, for being kept from my mother for hours at a time. My father got them too. And then it was over, the war on our private battleground, apartment 3M, which stood for Melville, Marguerite, and Marian, as I believed. Convalescing, my father and I moved into the living room, the sunniest room. My hair, which had grown long, was brushed out, felt thin. He sat in the wing chair, his beard sprouting around the remaining pock marks dotted with calamine lotion, but neither of us retained a scar. When she got big enough, we made room for my sister in her own middle, the four of us together in my parents’ double bed on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

When Ernst and I met in Los Angeles in 1964, we considered ourselves an unlikely pair. Ernst was born, probably at home, on September 30, 1936, a second son to his Orthodox Jewish parents, Margaret and Joseph Lipschutz. The town was Deutchkreutz, the country uncertain. He seems to have come from a kind of no-man’s land, a remnant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a mythical place to be colored in on a map as part of a history lesson. His naturalization papers record Austria, but his mother said it was Hungary. Perhaps some division in the town, which still exists though free of Jews, makes sense of this. I sometimes think of going there to see for myself the muddy market town I imagine from my Internet searches on one side, city sidewalks on the other. Though his father was quickly released after being arrested in 1938,on a trumped-up charge of stealing made by a household maid, the family, with the new addition of a baby girl, fled to America, leaving mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, languages,  worldly possessions, even names behind. Mispronounced, mistranslated, transformed, abandoned, denied. High-sounding Sigmund, Ernst, and Renata were un-American, or had they become ugly, German, names?

What were the chances that Ernst and I would marry in Los Angeles, on October 16, 1967? We reveled in our differences, in the upheaving of family, nationality, tradition, culture, and religion our union required. In haste and in confusion, in sorrow and terror, his family boarded the Hansa. On what day of the month, in what continental or English port I do not know, but for us that was a lucky day. We looked for signs, thinking of the world, as Baudelaire does in his poem, Correspondances, as a forest of symbols through which we dimly perceive the profound unity of Nature. As Ernst’s family fled the Nazis, our relative positions shifted; we moved from unnumbered possibilities into a zone of probability in which the likelihood of our marriage could flourish.  Our mothers’ and my grandmother’s names were variants of the English Margaret. To us, a meeting point. As was Brooklyn! For Ernst was on Mott Street, in Williamsburg, on the day I was born. Ernst was safe. For his sake, I have resurrected Brooklyn, which is chic these days, so I can say without shame that I was born there. Nor am I ashamed of being partly German, though among Jews, especially if asked a direct question about them, I prefer to bring forth my Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and Dutch forebears. Bavarians are the softer Germans, I tell myself, and who would give up a link, however tenuous, to Beethoven or Bach?

War and winter bared their teeth on April 1, 1940, but did not seize me. Spring soon followed, and World War II came to its eventual end. I wish I could remember the ticker tape parade, the dancing and kissing, the embracing of strangers on the streets of New York, but they are lost to me. I will pass on instead the excellent advice Dr. Wallace, long since forgiven for his defection from the center of the world, gave to my mother as she was leaving Brooklyn Hospital with me in her arms: “Don’t let her make a goop out of you, Maggie!”

                                                      Time let me play and be

                                                Golden in the mercy of his means                 

                                                                                          Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas

Footnotes

                 

The Thane of Fife, he had a wife; where is she now?

                                                                             Macbeth, Act V, scene 1

Can a blog have footnotes? Am I breaking any rules? I wanted to add that the Shaw Records, mentioned last month, were compiled by Harriette F. Farwell and published in Bethel, Maine, by E.C. Bowler, in 1904. Although her name does not reveal it, she must be related to our line of Shaws, because she refers to a common ancestor and dedicates the work to her brother, Eben Shaw Kilborn, who supplied funds for the enterprise. According to Farwell, the line of American Shaws she traces from 1594 to 1882 came originally from the Scottish Highlands, though some resided in England before coming to America. In a preface, she includes the following quotation from Clans of the Scottish Highlands, by Robert Roland MacIan: Antiquarians and genealogists assent to the tradition that the Shaws are descended from MacDuff who aided Malcolm III, the rightful heir to the Scottish throne, in overthrowing Macbeth in 1056-7.

At twelve or so, I pored over this book, in a race with Haitian termites, busily boring their way through it in secret, leaving lace-like pages, full of holes. For a developing consciousness of identity and place in history, it was perfect. But the initial thrill of generation soon palled; I got lost, swamped in begats, which reminded me of passages in the Old Testament I always skipped. I think now that pointed searches might be the way to attack it: work, wars, politics, religion, participation in government, who made that first westward move and why? At the moment, though, I find myself stuck at the very beginning, struck by my man Macduff. Not the historic Macduff about whom I know next to nothing, who may or may not be my relation, but the Macduff who appears in Shakespeare’s MacBeth.

What is a man? Shakespeare asks. Not just once, but in play after play. Sometimes he means a human being but, in the case of Macduff and others, his interest is in masculine gender. How far can a man lean toward Woman and still be Man? Shakespeare’s women are various and sometimes powerful, but I don’t find in them the same preoccupation with definition that I do in his men.  In array and disarray, in Bach-like counterpoint, Shakespeare parades an inexhaustible supply of men before us, some so driven by a single humor as to be caricatures; others, like Hamlet, Iago, and Shylock, so deeply drawn that we shall never fully sound them.

 Boozer, schmoozer, simpleton, bumpkin, prince, pauper, king and courtier, Puritan, knave, bastard, tyrant, pimp. Yes-man, kiss-up, brown nose. The young man, hot and rash, the bachelor, confirmed and unconfirmed, the shrew tamer, the unrequited lover, the foolish, fond old man, the dotard. The jealous husband. The second son. The helicopter father, the father fleeced and betrayed. Pirate, cut-purse, highwayman. Dandy, fop, coward. Merchant, soldier, scholar, slave. Blackamoor, Jew, Turk, and Christian. The hero and the holy man. The fool, the madman, clown, and court jester. The actor and the mime. The boy actor playing a woman, playing a man.  Man naked in the storm, or decked in borrowed robes. Spy and counter-spy. The unbridled hedonist. The man who never thinks, and the man who thinks too much (this is where Horatio begins to look good). The suicide, the murderer, the gravedigger who turns up a grinning skull. The ghost.

 It’s time to haul out the computer, the ordinateur, as the French call it, to make sense of this jumble, to see why Macduff stands out. A computer can certainly tell us how many times the word man appears in Shakespeare,  maybe even when it means man and when human kind, and when, if ever, Shakespeare uses the word woman, in this second way. How many jobs and professions, high and low, are represented, how many are married with children, how many go to war, how many are gay. Such lists could be fascinating and telling in themselves, but they would not satisfy. I used to get students to play a game with me, to line up characters from a particular play on a continuum between two poles:  good and evil, appearance and reality, music and noise. Pick any pair you like; then move them about like counters. What shall we do with Hamlet’s Uncle Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet’s father by pouring poison in his ear? Perhaps he truly loves the queen and satisfies her sexually. He kneels, we overhear him praying. Doesn’t that count? It might, but not in this case, because Claudius cannot repent and compounds his crimes at the end of the play. Claudius, go to the end of the line!

Or how about a different kind of Match.com? A sort of oracular Dear Abby. Feed in descriptions of your friends and relatives, and up pops the verdict: Your father is Capulet: he’ll be sorry he kept you from Romeo, but only after you’re dead. Your girlfriend is Lady Macbeth: she’ll upgrade your social and professional status, but don’t let her have a baby lest she dash its brains out. Your buddy is Falstaff: carouse with him now, but be sure to dump him before he ruins your career plans. Or plug in famous public figures like the Kennedy brothers, Gandhi, Qaddafi, Martin Luther King Jr., Elliot Spitzer, and John Edwards. How do they stack up? The other night I saw Kissinger on TV. He looks pretty good, sounds just the same, was surprisingly kind to Obama, I thought. Can we find a place for him between salvation and damnation, his exact niche below God and the angels in the Great Chain of Being, now that he’s white-haired and relatively harmless, in late-night hugger-mugger with Charlie Rose?

Why bring up Shakespeare after Waiting for Godot? Post-Einstein, post-Sartre, post Pinter’s silences, post-Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil. Read a post-apocalyptic novel instead, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, or In the Country of Last Things, by Paul Auster. Read the book of Revelation. We’ve been looking forward to the end of the world since the beginning, or so it seems. Stop reading altogether, as some pundits predict we will. But where is the computer with a mighty moral nose? A computer to delineate every gradation in a single trait, to take on the human comedy entire, as Shakespeare does, even if he shows us nothing but sinners. In Hamlet, or in Hamlet’s father, I think he comes close to a model man. Ophelia sees in Hamlet an Elizabethan idea of perfection: The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue, The expectancy and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion and the mold of form, The observed of all observers. But when she speaks these lines, Hamlet is already a fallen creature, quite, quite down. Hamlet, in turn, hero-worships his father, speaks him a splendid epitaph, half acknowledging that he wasn’t perfect: He was a man, take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again. Exactly what I would say of my own father! Too bad Hamlet got there first.

 When the Ghost speaks for himself, however, he disappoints, appears self-pitying and selfish. OK, he’s a soul in torment. But why does he ignore the heavy burden he lays upon his son, the train of evil he sets in motion? A student once raised her hand to ask if parents could command children from beyond the grave. No doubt hers was a temporary adolescent anxiety, but an excellent question, I thought, worthy of study and meditation. What do the dead expect from us, what duties do we owe them? A ghost, of course, is but a shadow of a man, a spirit merely, no more perhaps than a figment of imagination, far, far beyond earthly concerns.

Macduff, however, is made of solid flesh. If you know the story, you know how brilliantly Shakespeare sets up the circumstances in which Macduff, surrounded by cowards, bullies (including Lady Macbeth, an unsuccessful male-impersonator who confuses ambition, unprovoked aggression, and cruelty with masculinity), and murderers, will strut and fret his hour upon the stage. But even if you don’t, three short speeches should convince you of Macduff’s contribution to Shakespeare’s exploration of manhood. In the first, Macduff expresses amazement and horror at the deaths of his wife and children, ordered by Macbeth, who has lately killed the too-trusting King Duncan and usurped the Scottish throne: What? All my pretty chickens and their dam At one fell swoop? Here, all that is conventionally feminine, the prettiness and domesticity of a hen with chicks in a barnyard, has been destroyed by rapacious “male” power in the form of a bird of prey, a hell kite. Macduff, who might have stood between them, has been called away from home and country by typically male concerns: politics, honor, duty, and destiny. In England to gather support for a showdown with Macbeth, the terrible news about his family disarms him, catches him naked. Advised to Dispute it like a man, Macduff answers: But I must also feel it as a man.  He is not ashamed to express raw emotion, or to acknowledge that a husband and father is as much a man as a warrior: Sinful Macduff, They were all struck for thee. Macduff knows he should have been there. In this recognition, brief and sudden though it is, Shakespeare achieves a balanced merger of Man of Action with Man of Sensibility. Compare the brooding Hamlet whose indecision and delay bring his play to a near standstill. Or Laertes, who takes no time to weep for his drowned sister Ophelia, but rushes instead to collude in a treacherous plot with Claudius for which he pays with his life. Chastened Macduff goes on to defeat Macbeth but, at the same time, points the way to contemporary notions of shared housekeeping and stay-at-home fathers.  Though it’s still news, I notice, when a politician weeps (shorthand for womanish behavior) in public.

Who can forget at one fell swoop, forever embedded in our language, though the deadliness has gone out of it with the loss of fell as an adjective. My mother often used this phrase to describe an action both swift and complete – no sense of quotation in it, though she could quote Macbeth and had a particular fondness for the line in which sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of care.  Sirene has her grandmother’s high school text in which she writes what must be her teacher’s pronouncement: one of most powerful scenes in any play. A typical tenth grader, impressed, but not yet ready to venture her own interpretation, or to say why or what was so profound. More sophisticated readers see that Macduff’s monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon, as opposed to Latinate English, its imagery drawn from familiar surroundings, suggests that plain speaking he-men can be eloquent. Think Humphrey Bogart.  Ironically, Macbeth himself, in response to Lady Macbeth’s taunts that he is less than a man when he hesitates at first to murder King Duncan, delivers an even more potent summation, setting a limit he is about to exceed: I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none. Alliterative, aphoristic, and paradoxical, these lines remind me of Lyndon Johnson, who proclaimed, we want no wider war, even as he sent more troops to Vietnam. Of the many U.S. senators and citizens who admired George Bush because he kicked butt, but later came to regret the war in Iraq. Of Obama, explaining his pursuit of the war in Afghanistan while accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace.

It pays to attend to who says what in Shakespeare. The most beautiful lines in The Tempest come out of the mouth of the monster Caliban. Admirable though he is, Macduff is not the hero of the play. That title belongs to regicide Macbeth, an eerie adumbration of Papa Doc Duvalier, who moves from vaulting ambition, to traffic with dark spirits, to hallucination and near-madness, to licensed killing sprees by hired thugs, until he is so far steeped in blood he cannot turn back, until paranoia sets in, a fear of opposition that can never be assuaged combined with an implacable will to stay in power.  Seen in this light – and Aristotle can supply other reasons having to do with recognition and reversal – Macduff seems a poor player, drafted by Shakespeare to swing his plot around; someone, after all, must turn this tide in the affairs of men, restore the kingdom of Scotland to order. In fact, we know very little about Macduff and can only guess at his future. Will he remarry, produce more children, participate in a coup, lose his life in battle, turn cynic, become a wise, old hermit of the highlands? No one knows or cares. Nor can Macduff do more than the plot requires. Though he may be aware that Malcolm, the rightful heir, is weak and devious, he cannot choose a better king. His imagination, like his world, is narrow, clannish. Macduff is no metrosexual; he probably wouldn’t want Hilary Clinton for a wife. Shakespeare could certainly fashion a suitable husband for her, but not a perfect man. Like a modern novelist, Shakespeare invites our participation. We must construct the model out of shreds and patches, much as we invent ourselves.

 Some understandings are years in the making. At some point I lost interest in the facts of my family history and chose the fictional Macduff to be my cousin. How many times did I hear my mother say at one fell swoop, uncomprehending even after I had read the play, before I found the poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins which begins, I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. I was far away from her in college when I figured out what fell meant, and further still from any idea of what depression might be like. Years again before I taught Macbeth so often I knew the text by heart, bending the ears of innocent sophomores till they cried hold, enough!  Still, I won’t apologize for my literary rants. I cannot help it that a certain electrical impulse or alignment of genetic code makes me want to go on listing male types in Shakespeare to the end of time. I recommend King Lear, Leontes of The Winter’s Tale, and Prospero of The Tempest for further solutions to the puzzle of manhood. But I do realize that other triggers exist in others to create different but equally heady delights. I once challenged a friend to tell me what was so great about biology. She felled me with two words: “It’s life!”

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would fardels bear,

till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,

But that the fear of something after death

Murders the innocent sleep,

Great natures second course,

And makes us rather swing the arrows of outrageous fortune

Than fly to others that we know not of…

But soft you, the fair Ophelia:

Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,

But get thee to a nunnery – go!

Mark Twain

Fresh Breeze

My heart is warm with the friends I make,

And better friends I’ll not be knowing,

But there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,

No matter where it’s going

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Like a fresh breeze from the clean prairie. This was how my friend C. and I struck my father in 1958 or ‘59, two Connecticut College girls, down to meet him, up from Port-au-Prince on a business trip, for lunch at the Commodore Hotel in New York. This characteristic handy saying was one of the ways he had devised for keeping the prairie with him all his life. Look at all the snow, he might say, looking down at the royal palm trees from my bedroom window in Port-au-Prince. Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey is another expression familiar to me from childhood. People where he was born, in Fessenden, North Dakota, put on their long underwear in the winter and didn’t take it off till the spring thaw. Although he lived in Haiti, El Salvador, and Southern California from 1950 onwards, he was never without an overcoat – the last one, boxy and black, hangs in my downstairs hall closet. And through his many readings of Main Street, he spent a lot of time with the residents of Gopher Prairie.

I formed this idea last summer while reading some autobiographical essays my father wrote in 1966, for a creative writing class at Cal State L.A. I had read them before, but paid them scant attention. They were filed away somewhere and, when he died, I marveled at how little he had left behind. Not only was there no money to divide or property to fight over, there was not a single material object, neither pen, nor watch, nor book edition, of any value. Just these suddenly precious pages. Here he establishes himself in his time and place, a misfit in Fessenden. He was near-sighted, awkwardly tall for his age, and thin. His parents’ divorce embarrassed him, set him apart. An oddball, he calls himself, no good at hunting gophers with the other kids. Pegged early as a bookworm, he didn’t want to lick anyone; he wanted to study French.

He talks about being a Boy Scout, Hopalong Cassidy, horse markets and wheat harvests, grain elevators, land grants, a farm implements business owned by an uncle, and T.L. Beisicker, the richest man in town; President Harding, the Teapot Dome scandal, an earthquake in Tokyo, a fight between Jack Dempsey and Tommy Gibbons, a ban on the study of German in high schools during World War I, and popular songs like Oh Frenchie, Frenchie, and You, You Tell Her, ‘Cause I, I Stutter Too Much. His prodigious railroad lore (names and numbers of trains, arrival and departure times, separate waiting rooms for men and women, wooden platforms, round houses, freight yards and depots, switch engines, the making up of trains, yard bulls and more) betrays a profound longing to leave this territory where his does not belong, but which is still beloved, and is home. He is an embryonic Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis. Grandchildren: Emily, Nicholas, David, and Sirene! Great-granddaughters: Lucie and Farah! These are authors you must read if you would understand your ancestor and an important theme in American literature. He packed in a lot, but he didn’t get far; his narrative stops abruptly in 1923. I wanted more. So Melville Austin Shaw (1903-1983), not cancer, was the inspiration for this series.

I began to notice things he never let go of, like his boyhood self, like the prairie. Late in life, he went back to the house where he was born, amazed to see how many trees had grown up in that flat and windswept place. Even at sixty-four, it still rankled that he had never completed his B.A. Here’s how that came about:

In the spring of 1923 I was a junior at the University of Minnesota and a front desk clerk at the Plaza Hotel, working a shift from 5pm to midnight. I was 20 and had just finished my final examinations for the quarter when, on a June afternoon, in walked Wesley Davis, a young Montanan I had known for some years, but had not seen for quite a while. We did a lot of talking, and Wes convinced me that in the four years I had spent in the big city of Minneapolis, I had grown soft and stale, that the city was no place to live for anyone who had once experienced the big sky and wide open spaces, the plains, mountains, rivers, and forests of Montana. He held that clerking in a hotel was degrading, a stultifying occupation. He said that I could easily find some more elevating work among the friendly, warm-hearted, firm handshaking and generous people of Montana. He suggested that my evenings could be better spent in a pool hall or going to a country dance. This was music to my ears as I had only had 3 nights off in 3 years. I resigned my job at the Plaza the next day.

Did not having that diploma hinder my father socially, or in his working life, when college degrees were far less common than they are now? I remember talk of the Wharton School in our New York days, so perhaps it kept him from getting an advanced degree. But once settled at Pillsbury Mills, making use of his romance languages major to handle their extensive business in Latin America, entertaining the big Latin customers, finding decent accommodation for Haitians and Brazilians (not so easy in New York at the time), that nagging worry might seem to have been behind him. On he went to the Pillsbury and other agencies in Haiti and, eventually, to his appointment as Commercial Attaché to the U. S. Embassy in El Salvador. Yet, almost as soon as he retired, he set about to earn those few remaining units.

What we refuse to let go of, what we come back to as we grow older. How circular our lives sometimes seem. Are we onions, peeling off layer after layer, to lay bare nothing? Or avocados, with centers fixed and firm? The core of his being, we are prone to say. Perhaps we have no choice but to remain true to ourselves. What, then, allows us to let go? The Haiti chapter is over was another of my father’s sayings, one it pained me to hear. But these days I find myself rehearsing it, dreading it. I mean to go back, to volunteer as an English teacher. But do I have what it takes at my age to face the ruin and chaos that is Haiti today? Not to mention my ties and responsibilities here, or my fear of running out of money.

Certainly there were closed chapters in my father’s life. Like me, he exaggerated and invented. Told lies, hid guilt, kept secrets. I know very little about his family and find myself uncertain of what I half-remember. Unlike my mother, who kept in steady contact with her faraway relatives, my father chose to maintain distance. Many details were filled in for me by my mother, who was protective of my father and had her own ideas. Scraps, rumors really, are what I am left with. After his parents’ divorce (who divorced whom?), his father, a lawyer and a judge, took off for the West Coast, married a red-haired manicurist closer to his son’s age than his own, drank too much, died young. My father writes, without a hint of emotion, that he was not fond of him. I have photographs of both sets of my mother’s grandparents, but not one picture of my grandfather, George K. Shaw, Jr. The Shaw Records, which trace our family line to the Earl of Fife in the Scottish Highlands and, more consistently, to one Roger Shaw, who shows up as a selectman, Town Clerk, and landowner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1636, notes his birth in Bay City, Michigan, August 24, 1874. A brother Benjamin, who died in childhood, follows him, and there the Records end.

I hang on to our lunch at the Commodore which stands out because I went away to boarding school at thirteen and saw my parents rarely. My father had in mind the coffee shop, but I quickly convinced him that only one of the hotel’s more expensive restaurants would do. In the background were the many shrimp cocktails, steaks, and parfaits I had been treated to by the fathers of wealthy school friends. Play-actor that he was, Daddy absorbed in my sense of the occasion. I was immensely proud of him. C.’s father was dead, but here was mine. He was beaming. He was wearing his overcoat. So evidently pleased to see and be seen with us, to talk to us, and to listen to what we had to say. He had a contagious laugh, a way of leaning into conversations, sometimes taking on a foreign accent in English in order to conform to a companion. C. and I were lively, attractive, intelligent, and well-read. Not yet twenty, poised for independence. And he was still young enough himself, successful enough, to see us as we were, and as emblems of much more, without envy. My selfishness, my thoughtlessness, my penchant for style over substance, especially when it comes to restaurants, are on flagrant display here, but they are not important to this story. We talked, we ate, he paid, and we were all three satisfied. I know what my father was thinking: that he was almost done with me; that the little bird would fly away from the nest. If my fancy eastern schools had left their mark, so be it. Children belong to the world, he always said, not to their parents. I had been hearing these wise sayings of his since I was little, but it would still be many years before I could accept them.

In my mind’s eye, I see my young, long-legged father. He is skating on the frozen Yellowstone, camping on a bed of pine needles on the bluffs above Forsyth, scolding his sister Marian for acting countrified, jumping on the iron ladder of a freight car, with forty dollars in his shoe, to ride along with hobos who urge him to join the IWW. Yearned for big cities, and dinkier ones, lie ahead: Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and New York where, in 1933, he will marry my mother, still a little girl in Des Moines. In 1934, Marian will die her terrible early death and, in the early forties, my sister and I, with our high price tags, our expensive educations, will be born. He will travel to Ketchikan and Rio. To Sao Paulo, Recife, Fortaleza and Caracas. To Managua and Tegicigalpa. He will know Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien, Mirebalais, Port-de-Paix, Les Cayes, and Jeremie, all the Haitian outports so important to his business in the fifties. Paris, London, and Rome. Los Angeles and San Francisco, where he died. All unimaginable. All yet unordained. Just now, in 1916, he is a boy in short pants with a new pair of glasses, riding the transcontinental North Coast Limited with Marian in a bright red coat, his mother and step-father Bert Edminster, and their baby Bobby, to their new home in Forsyth, Montana. Beisicker has made Edminster, spendthrift, back-slapper, and Elks Club man, the manager of a bank.

Forsyth turned out to be a cow town with hitching posts and log buildings right along Main Street. When the ice melted on the Yellowstone, a raging river covered the town. No matter. The street signs and the numbers on buildings will impress him. Forsyth was a railroad division point, a county seat, the largest town between Miles City and Billings, a distance of 150 miles. He didn’t stay there long; in an attempt to run away, he wound up back in Fessenden, living with his grandmother, finishing high school. Nevertheless, he is on his way. The train has a valet, a maid, and a barber. He visits the observation platform, eats in the diner, and goes to bed in the Pullman car only to stay awake all night, lifting the curtain over his window to see Bismarck, Mandan, and Dickinson alight in the darkness, to catch glimpses of North Dakota.

As I was his, so is he my fresh breeze from the clean prairie.

Boomalaka, Boomalaka,

Sis boom bah,

Fessenden High School,

Rah, rah, rah!

Play Acting

I don’t think I’m as morbid as Emily Dickinson with her rafters of satin, roofs of stone, her way of talking about her own death as though it were already in the past: Death kindly stopped for me. I heard a fly buzz when I died. I once assigned a complete explication de texte, down to the phonemes, on this poem to a class of high school sophomores. What was I thinking? In fact, they did a surprisingly good job. I’m tempted to look for passages from their papers which I may still have stored in the laundry room. Yes, definitely a morbid streak. I like to go under, to be put out.  Of my misery? A death wish perhaps? Not what I would call it, but I do look forward to the drowsy numbness that will fill my veins before surgery. Not to waking up in pain, even to good news. Or bad.

The habit of playacting death and dying took hold of me as a child in Haiti where we took a siesta every afternoon. For my parents, these naps were usually brief; my father had to get back to the office, my mother to some household duty, a canasta or bridge game, but I could stay in bed as long as I wanted, sometimes until almost dinner time. Darkness in Haiti doesn’t fall suddenly, and I liked to lie there, watchful and aware, registering one shade at a time, until I became the dying Beth in Little Women, her needle growing heavy in my hands. This was an exercise in pure sensation, entirely private, not a bid for attention, as in you’ll be sorry when I’m dead. I am attracted to the fin de siècle, to the Jacobean stage littered with skulls, to the thought of Donne’s rehearsing his own death by preaching in a shroud. I much admired the critic and professor, Austin Warren, at the University of Michigan in the early 60s, who wrapped himself in a sheet to read Death’s Duel to his classes in metaphysical poetry on Good Friday afternoon, attendance required, though spring break had already begun. I am drawn to Keats, parched, burning, half in love with easeful death, to Sylvia Plath, who writes: I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real.

Practice makes perfect. So a friend described her sex life, and we laughed. But orgasm, le petit mort, is death in little, a microcosm, a form of practice. Artists, writers especially, help us to prepare, to feel our way forward to what is finally unbearable, unimaginable. I think of those five months when Ernst was dying. First he was impotent, and then he was dying. Impotent and bedrid, two impossible things and, perhaps because of this, we did not confront them  except  in the deep and separate recesses of our minds. We lived instead as though the answer to Ernst’s question, how long have I got, was not six months. He grew old in an instant. He was 58. You’re a young man, the doctor said, and immediately I hated that doctor and continued to hate him, from procedure to hopeless procedure, until he prescribed the morphine.

What a crazy time. I nursed my anger, turned away a social worker assigned to me at UCLA after an initial surgery revealed that the cancer had spread too far to make the Whipple operation feasible, taught my classes with an ear cocked toward the phone in my office, graded papers in the emergency room, made pot upon pot of a fowl smelling Chinese herbal concoction, refused to go to a shrink, attended a performance of Angels in America, Part I, ignored a pamphlet which would have revealed to me that the cancer was already stage 4 at the time of diagnosis. I even went to a Union School reunion in Port-au-Prince, saying nothing to anyone there about what was going on at home. On his side, Ernst wouldn’t let David come down from UC Santa Cruz to spend time with him. I don’t want a death watch, he said. As one by one doctors gave up on him, Ernst, who took pride in logical thinking- I was  the irrational one- drank the magic Chinese potion along with Una de Gato(Cat’s Claw), a Peruvian tea, ingested shark cartilage, read Spontaneous Healing, and allowed a Chinese practitioner, who advertised with a picture of himself sporting weights tied to his testicles, to pummel him viciously, all the while claiming that the tumor was shrinking, that he was getting better. I let him pound me too, developed sciatic pain, crawled screaming on the kitchen floor where I hoped Ernst couldn’t hear me. In the powerful grip of illusion, we staggered together to Mexico City, San Miguel de Allende, and San Francisco.

How is he? I asked the young man who came twice a week to take Ernst’s vital signs and give him a sponge bath. Moribund, he answered. I looked it up to be sure: at the point of death, about to die. Of course I knew this already, wished for it sometimes.  In the midst of life we are in death.  The priest intoning over the open grave, the black clad mourners and hot house flowers, the lowering of the casket, the first shovelful of earth… how often in movies is it raining? No matter. No matter how much we have practiced, we do not learn our parts. No matter that this is the oft proclaimed human condition, brute fact of existence, that we have been walking this line nearly all our lives, knowing and refusing to know that no one escapes. One day or another, soon or late, all who live must die.

So what’s the upside? Leonard pipes up, always ready with a smart remark. Calls me the Grim Reaper, makes me laugh.  For me, it’s like Hamlet and Horatio. Doomed and dying, Hamlet begs Horatio not to kill himself, but to stay alive to tell Hamlet’s story. Horatio is a good choice, indeed the only choice, because everyone else but Fortinbras is dead, and warmonger Fortinbras, though he has done well to remind us of Hamlet’s royal and soldierly aspects, will never get off his horse long enough to take this on. Unfortunately, however, Horatio is also the man whose philosophy is neither wide nor deep enough to accommodate a ghost. He’s a great guy, Horatio, he’s Hamlet’s true friend and confidant, but next to Hamlet, Horatio is a dolt. He will never be able to tell Hamlet’s story. Only Hamlet can tell it.

This is my letter to the world.

The Day of Atonement

November, 8, 2010

Yet stay; heaven-gates are not so highly arched

As princes’ palaces; they that enter there

Must go upon their knees.

The Duchess of Malfi, Act IV, Scene ii

Oh, look who died. That’s Leonard almost daily, sounding gleeful, reading some obit from the New York Times. It’s a bit jarring first thing in the morning, not the note on which I want to start my day.  But by now I’ve gotten used to it. I used to skip the obits, too morbid, but now I read them too, just not aloud. Jill Clayburgh, only 66, Joseph Stein… Artists, writers, directors, movie stars.  Soon it will be up to us, mere babies, to remember World War II. We shiver.  75 is old, but what about 73? They’re very well written these obits. Packed with history, they inform and instruct. Last week it was the soprano Shirley Verrett. The first time her parents, strict Seventh Day Adventists, heard her sing in performance, they went down on their knees to beg forgiveness for not having recognized or encouraged her talent.

I should go down on my knees, I realize. And not just to my children. The other day, a friend told me she had found me dismissive, of her and things she cares about. But when was this exactly? Was it recently at a cooperative dinner with old friends at her house? Or has she always felt this way-we’ve been friends now for 40 years.  Just off-hand remarks of mine, she said. No examples. Because she had none, or didn’t want to say?  I reach for it, the moment I said whatever I said. It might have had to do with tipping, but then again, maybe not.  Moonlight and candle light, wine glasses, summer heat, but the conversation won’t come back. Leonard and my children call me a snob, and I know all too well that I can be dismissive. My parents often were: so and so was a pantywaist, another a pussy-footer, a Southern cracker. At different times I have dismissed Anais Nin, Kahlil Gibran, Hemingway, more recently, crossword puzzles, Martha Stewart, and Charlie Rose. But it pains me to think that my friends have felt the sting. I must become alert. I must watch myself.

These days I have the impulse to atone, to be at one with the universe. To listen to the things my parents wanted to tell me. To take back the mean things I did as an older sister. To show my godmother, Aunt Esther, who took care of me in loco parentis when I was in boarding school, the proper degree of affection, admiration, and respect. To begin over again with the students I failed to inspire. To tell David I never stopped loving him for a second when we adopted Sirene. To apologize to Sirene for not seeing. To make peace with Ernst’s family. To wipe away my misdeeds in 28 years of marriage. To say all the things I wish I’d said to Ernst. Oh hopeless proposition!

 One year we decided to fast on Yom Kippur and to attend the service at a temple on Beverly Blvd  Ernst had gone to with his family as a boy. Ernst’s cousin Herman agreed to go with us.  In what spirit did we do this? I’m sure we paid no attention to the other marks of physical abstinence: no leather shoes, no major ablutions, no cosmetics, no sex.  Nor did we seek to attain the level of angels or the protection of God. We undertook it lightly, a test to see if we could go one day without food or water.  Nostalgia for Ernst, curiosity for me, for I had never been inside a temple.  Part social occasion, a chance to see Herman. But when we got there, we were supposed to have tickets. That was the first thing. Probably the congregation had expanded since Ernst’s time, and Yom Kippur is like Christmas for Christians. People who never go, go. Men who didn’t have one could pick up a yarmulke on the way in. But tickets? That you had to pay for? It put me off. Then I was sent up to the balcony to find a seat among the women. It was noisy and crowded. There was some embarrassing squabbling which was all my fault, shiksa without a ticket. Far below us prayers were being said, the Ark of the Covenant paraded up and down. I can hardly remember anything about it, the only service I ever attended. I didn’t hear the reading of a passage from Jonah, or the piercing blast of the shofar at the end because Ernst and Herman had quickly had enough of fasting, of reliving their boyhoods, of being Jewish. They came to get me and, passing by a weeping woman reciting Kaddish in the lobby, we went out to lunch at a restaurant on La Cienega. I don’t remember the name or what we ate, but we entered as though through the mouth of an enormous fish.

This year, once again, I have let the Day of Atonement slip by, though I like the idea of clearing the slate. Once again, I did not observe the ten days of turning which follow Rosh Hashanah, a period of introspection, the time to ask forgiveness, in person, of everyone slighted or hurt during the past year. In thought, word, and deed, is that it? Couldn’t it be done via email, or left in a phone message? I think I’d rather be a Catholic. Confession once a week in darkness, not face to face with the person harmed, but through that slatted screen I’ve seen in movies, to a priest. Absolved, anonymous, all burdens lifted. For at least a week. Is this the cancer talking? Perhaps, if I come through it all with flying colors, as V. says, I’ll find that surgery has excised these morbid thoughts along with my uterus. But today, like Shirley Verrett’s parents, I go down on my knees. Figuratively, of course.  Even the Duchess of Malfi stoops to die.