Four Elegies

Abstract

The Australian opals were beautiful, one had to concede that. Their blues had all the depth of lapis; the greens glinted with the brilliance of emeralds, like water transmuted into fire. Bessie Gruber could well imagine the love that caused her son and his new wife to part with their limited funds, thinking that there could be no better gift for a woman who so loved beauty. The difficulty was this: The stones would bring bad luck, as everyone knew, or ought to. Their iridescence was enchanting, but also uncanny, like a cat's eye, or the evil eye. Objects like these had power, though people nowadays might choose to ignore that fact. But to her way of thinking, matter was not just inert dust, and mind no abstract conceit. Each affected the other in ways that were not always easy to predict. These were forces a person didn't want to mess with. So down the toilet the opals went.The world she'd grown up in had been more congenial to her point of view. In the 1910s and 1920s descendants of German settlers living in southeastern Pennsylvania still practiced a type of faith healing called “powwowing,” a tradition that dated back to at least the eighteenth century. Powwowing was one part herbal lore, one part prayer, and one part harmless nonsense. Warts, for example, could be cured by planting the cut halves of a potato under the eaves in the light of a waxing moon. To manage aagewasche, or stomach cramp in infants, you simply measured the child with a bit of red string, and passed him around a table leg. More advanced practitioners claimed to be able to cast out demons, but an honest powwower gave modern medicine its due. Only a dumkopf would try to cure diphtheria with prayer alone.Homebound and shy, sensible and kind, with a mind that was sharp, yet capacious enough to allow for the possibility of forces existing beyond the realm of science, Bessie seemed a good candidate to carry on the old arts. An aunt on her father's side who powwowed offered to instruct her, but her mother vetoed the plan. Powwowing was backward nonsense, something only “the dumb Dutch” would believe. Even so, it could bring trouble: In 1929 a practitioner in the nearby town of York had been murdered by an acquaintance who believed he'd been hexed. Bessie was closer to her mother than anyone in the world, and Sarah Heiser Hartmann had never been a woman to brook disagreement.For a time, it seemed as though her fate would be bound by her mother's opinions and needs. At nineteen she had every reason to expect that what her girlfriends had would be hers as well. First, a season or two of fun (being crowned Queen of the May, trips to New York to see the latest fashions), which would then lead naturally to marriage and children. But when the Depression came her father's bakery failed, he hastened its decline by giving away bread to neighbors in need. Bessie, with her teacher's certificate and history degree, was the sole source of income for herself and her parents. It would be ten years before she'd meet her husband by chance at a college reunion. When he came to call, her mother was suspicious. “That man is looking for a woman,” she said. Bessie, twenty-nine by this time, decided there was nothing so very wrong with that.There was no white satin gown, no lace veil, no crown of flowers at the wedding of these two schoolteachers. As befitted lean times, the dress was simple and practical: navy blue rayon with an allover pattern, in white, of trellises and vines. The pattern was important, because plainness on such an occasion would have been an affront. Her ancestors painted hex signs on their barns to keep away evil spirits; she too believed that beauty was the ultimate hedge against malevolence. An empty corner was not just a place where dust gathered, but provided a toehold for evil. One had to keep those spaces filled, with pictures on easels or with fragile embroidered chairs, just as one had to tie red ribbons around the neck of every vase and cover the surfaces of breadboxes and hutches, headboards and seat backs with lovebirds and tulips and vines. This was not materialism, but a form of externalized prayer. By the time her grandchildren were born, her house had become a veritable wunderkammer, as intricate as a cloisonné brooch.How did they work, these continual spells against ruin? They could not prevent her husband from developing severe depression, which stalked him intermittently from his fifties until the end of his life. They could not prevent cancer, or bring back the finger amputated in her fifties to stop the spread of the disease. Nor could they halt, in the final decades of her life, the desecration of her beloved Pennsylvania countryside as asphalt and strip malls replaced the farms and country lanes she'd explored as a girl. These things mattered a great deal, but on the whole hers had been a good life, and a sweet one. Thinking made it so.As is true of so many of us, an outsider saw her best. Her son's wife scoffed at her superstitions, but in generous moments could concede that there was some quality in her mother-in-law's mien and bearing that called to mind a Romanian princess. The invocation of Romanian royalty specifically was curious, for at the time the country was locked away behind the Iron Curtain, and no one in the family had ever been there, or had any roots in that place. But Romania's actuality, its existence on a map or in the world, was not what mattered. Romania in this context was a symbol, a stand-in for all that was magical and unknowable, the opposite of ordinary. Romania was the enchanted castle, the crystal inside the geode, the witch's hut in the middle of the forest where you might find succor—provided you were pure of heart.Perhaps she found a use for such a place during her final battle with metastatic melanoma. There was no magic that could help her at that point, no healing charm to beat back the renegade cells. But then, cheating death had never been the point. The best faith healers believed that natural and the supernatural were not completely separate realms, but streams that ran parallel to each other and met up once in a while, at points. Magic, so called, was only the trick of catching those points of convergence and riding them, just as a trout might emerge from a still pool and join the swifter current, or a hawk might catch an updraft and rise into the air.And at the end of a long life, those streams converged anyway. People somehow became their own archetypes. To her granddaughters she'd always resembled a sorceress, especially with the one finger gone. Extreme old age only intensified this effect. She was a tiny bird of a woman now, holding onto the frail ends of life in her Fabergé egg of a house. She was small and shriveled in her long nightgown, and her waist-length hair had gone completely white. She looked, for all the world, like the witch she was meant to be.The wind, it seemed, was ever at his back. Start with the fact of his extraordinary size, at birth more boulder than baby, in his prime more tree than man. His mother delivered him—ten pounds and then some—at home, before the days of anesthesia or caesareans. That he and she survived his birth must be counted as his first stoke of luck. By fifteen he had reached a thriving six-foot-eight and was forever hitting his head on the doorjambs of the old family home in Southampton, New York.As far as John Herrick could tell, those bumps to the noggin were one of the few downsides to being so tall. Otherwise, height conferred distinct advantages. Due to some quirk of primate psychology, people tended to assume, eight times out of ten, that a tall fellow was more capable than the next man, more likely to be a natural leader. That was true of his peers, who admired John for his athleticism and good looks, but the same principle seemed to apply to his dealings with adults, principally those he met in his father's hardware store, where he worked in the summers, ringing up purchases and stocking shelves and showing neighbors the way to switch plates and five-penny nails. Most everyone was happy to talk to this tall young man with the knack for chatting, amiably but honestly, with strangers and his quick way with a joke. Encounters with the “rude rich” (thick upon the ground in Southampton even then) could rankle. But occasional unpleasantness was a small price to pay for a job that taught discipline, and left your afternoons free for golf, or for basketball, or for messing about in the houseboat you'd built with your own hands. It was good to grow up in a town with streets named after your own forebears, with pastures and beaches and byways you were free to explore, almost without restriction. Perhaps there were some near misses among his early adventures, an encounter with thin ice, or a riptide. Somehow or other he always returned to the white house on Main Street, with its highboys and lowboys, Delftware and pewter, and women who knew where every last cruet came from.All this would have been inheritance enough, but there were grander things in store. John was no Cinderella, but he did have a fairy godmother, in the form of a maiden aunt on his father's side who'd made a fortune at a time when others were losing theirs by investing in companies run by “men of character.” Aunt Ma's distaste for scoundrels redounded to the benefit of the Herrick siblings, whose educations she financed. Harvard was a natural choice for a boy like John; that he might be ill-prepared was nothing a season in Europe and a year at a select Massachusetts boarding school could not fix. By the time he graduated with the class of 1938, he'd gained a modicum of polish, and learned to salt his wit with erudition—usually in the form of obscure, off-kilter jokes. A classics professor took his torn pants to a tailor. Says the tailor: “Euripides?” “You bet!” the professor replies. “You menda dese.” (In those days, a Harvard man wore his learning lightly.) On occasion, he could approach brilliance. He lost an eye to cancer in his seventies; once at a formal dinner the glass replacement escaped from its socket and dropped into his soup, to the surprise and consternation of his dinner companion, a woman he knew but slightly. Some days later, he spun his faux pas valiantly. “I cast an eye in her direction,” he said.Evidently, the early summers among the nuts and hammers left a stronger impression than the years immersed in classic literature. He had a lifelong fondness for things, for products and gadgets and contrivances of all kinds, particularly those that changed the texture of everyday life and that proliferated, like mold in a petri dish, in the agar of the postwar American economy: things like coffee filters and paper cups, teabags and toaster ovens, contact lenses and crossword puzzles, credit cards and Kevlar, dishwashers and clothes dryers, pocket calculators and Velcro, frisbees and Brillo pads, Scotch tape and Post-It notes and the humble ballpoint pen. He admired the inventor's improving zeal, the tinkerer's faith that the world could always use a better mousetrap. The man who invented Pringles drew his unreserved praise. It took an insight of the highest order to recognize that the best potato chip might not be a chipped potato at all, but a kind of cookie made from a paste of wheat, rice, corn, and potato flour and molded—oh stroke divine!—into uniform saddle-shaped discs. He had no gift for inventions of this kind, but no matter. There was no such thing as a thing in itself—had someone not once said that? What was an Oreo cookie anyway, without a plastic tray to hold it and its companions in those appealing upright rows? The supportive detritus of modern life became his business, and kept his wife and six children in chipped beef and spaghetti in a fine house in the Boston suburbs.His vices, such as they were, would disappoint even the strictest moralist, for he wore them lightly and cast them off in timely fashion, like a coat put away in fine weather. He smoked into his seventh decade, but felt no ill effects until the age of ninety, when a lung complaint curtailed his customary three-mile walks. He was a menace behind the wheel even in his prime; the lost eye made matters worse, but here again fortune smiled, for the only accident he caused resulted in whiplash and a tawdry lawsuit, nothing more. At times it seemed he regarded mortality as something that befell other men. He talked a surgeon into installing a pacemaker at ninety-two, got dental implants the same year, and appalled his children by eating raw oysters—cheap ones—until the bitter end. In retirement he spent countless hours attempting to trisect an angle using only a compass and a straight edge, a task that eluded Pythagoras and was proved to be impossible by a nineteenth-century mathematician. Doubtless those other men had given up too early. After all, John's generation had split the atom and defeated Hitler. “You can't do that” were not words he'd ever heard. But what moral lies here, except that by refusing to accept the vulnerabilities of old age we drink more deeply of its absurdities?“What is life for a man?” he once wrote. “Birth, Marriage, Work, Death. After that, nothing.” This journal entry, circa 1938, contains a rare glimpse of anguish from a man who for most of his long life performed his many duties without complaint. He kept, resolutely, on the sunny side. His decision to do so may have cost him some depth, but perhaps this was just as well. A swerve toward melancholy on his part would have yielded no useful insights, would have bent no bow toward justice, nor contributed one jot to the collective wisdom of mankind. What is there to life, but life, he might just as easily have said. Darkness did not become him.The best time to be at the beach was mid-morning, around ten or eleven o'clock. In old age, Doris Herrick liked to watch the surf from the comfort of a folding plastic chair, a can of Coors Light in one hand, an empty on the sand beside her. She was aware that she made a comical sight, ripe for the pen of a satirist, or a granddaughter's sharp tongue: Look out, or grandma will drink all the beer. She didn't care. Severely arthritic hips provided some excuse, but the real reason for the morning drinking lay in the pleasure principle, in the sheer joy of being out in the sun and wind.Like most women of her time, she'd been no one in particular and many things at once: a beloved first-grade teacher for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a political progressive and a social snob, a chain smoker, a crash dieter, inveterate name dropper and occasional abuser of pain pills, a nature lover, an amateur poet, and a highly strung mother of six. To her husband and her many friends she was never Doris, always Dorrie. The nickname was more in keeping with how she saw herself: fun, feminine, and oriented toward the light.To her children, she was something of a cipher. When asked to speak of her, years after her death, they seemed to find the question baffling, as though answering it required them to drill through layers of dense rock to some essential mystery at the core of her personality. A good enough mother, declared the eldest, while conceding that her indifference might have felt like cruelty to the siblings squashed in the middle. What was best about her, what was she like, what did she like? The eldest and the youngest offered up a series of details that bewildered with their particularity: that she loved to gorge on lobster, but rarely got the chance, that in the 1950s she'd spent a lot of time in bed, undoubtedly with postpartum depression, that when her children left home she filled her spare time by collecting driftwood, building terrariums, and sculpting artificial flowers by dipping wire molds into melted plastic. To contemplate this list—all forest no trees—was to realize that language reflects the psychic needs of infants: mother, in Latin mater, matter—undifferentiated stuff.She had a dozen devices for keeping intimacy at bay. Some of these were comical; others could sting as badly as her slaps and spanks. There was the expertly raised eyebrow, the critical stink-eyed stare. Any achievement, from a table neatly set to a scholarship won, she greeted with the same response—Beautiful! Beautiful!—as though she'd long since lost the inclination to make more tailored judgments. To be in her company was to be acutely aware of one's own shortcomings: poor posture, a tendency to talk too much or to overeat. Conversations with her often left one with the impression of having come face to face with a profound otherness, the way it is when you encounter a cat on the street, or an octopus in a tank, or any animal that tarries with you gladly, but only for a while, and only on its own terms. She would be all friendliness and smiles and then her blue eyes would suddenly go dark and take on a glittering, adamantine edge. You never knew when this would happen, or what minor imperfection in your manner would cause it. What was certain was that a veil had gone up, a veil that said, “I'm done.”The operative principle must have been self-preservation, plus a capacity for joy. Raising six kids was no picnic, even in the merry 1950s, and the daily grind could make you deaf to grander music. Her own childhood in dreary Carthage, New York, had taught her the importance of that. Her mother, Viola, had been a dour woman, pinched and duty bound and defined by her role as a housekeeper. Housekeeping, to judge by the painstaking records she kept of her endeavors, was defined almost entirely by dust: the amount of dust that blew into the house on any given day, the quality of that dust, the hours spent sweeping it up. Her daughter was determined to be different, and succeeded admirably. When it came to domestic matters, Doris liked to say, cheerfully, that she was “a little behind in her mending.” Why slave over laundry when you could throw it down cellar and leave it to rot? Someone would get to it—when someone needed a shirt. Why fret about rinsing cloth diapers when they could be dropped in a toilet and forgotten? With five bathrooms, who would notice? One cleaned up for visitors, or for parties. There were many of these, attended by dozens of Wellesley's responsible hedonists. The booze flowed amply, the flirting stayed discreet, and the food ran out by nine o'clock. If one was expecting, one held back discreetly, or tried to, at least until it was time to announce that one was once again enceinte.Like any creature, you had to see her in her habitat to understand her fully. That was true of people as it was true of whales, or alligators, or the snowy egrets and great blue herons that thrived in the marshes of northern Florida, where she lived for her last two decades. Her niche—the place she made the most sense—was always the beach. Near the water, staring out at the horizon, her eyes lost their critical look. Petty irritations were no match for the endless interest of the natural world—the greedy gulls, the split shells of horseshoe crabs trailing bits of intestine, or pelicans flying in their neat formations, dive bombing for mullet.The Old World cousins of these birds—the great white pelican, the Dalmatian pelican—had long been seen as emblems of Christ, or else of an idealized, self-sacrificing maternity. This legend, the sources of which lay in the ancient Near East, held that in times of famine, the mother bird would immolate herself with her bill in order to feed her young with her own blood. The story was pretty, but it was also a fairy tale, invented in antiquity and perpetuated by medieval schoolmen keen to interpret the natural world in strictly Christian terms. Pelicans of all species did sometimes strike their chests with their bills, but this was grooming behavior, done to smooth feathers and remove nits. The breasts of the Dalmatian species also turned red during breeding season, but that was an adaptation designed to attract mates.Once you cleared away the overwrought symbolism, the actual birds were interesting enough in themselves. Audubon had observed them affectionately but accurately, noting not just the joyous spectacle they made at sea but also their messy nests, which they left befouled with bits of regurgitated food—a state of affairs that concerned them not a bit. As parents, they were decent but hardly self-sacrificing. They brought their young into the world with great ceremony and care, incubating the eggs not with their bellies but with their great orange webbed feet. They fed the chicks for a season, then let them go. They were what they were: gregarious creatures who liked to hang out at the beach and eat fish, for whom life at its best was one big party with not quite enough food to go around and the children always getting underfoot. Doris said once, in her eighties, that her sympathies had always been with those birds. She made this pronouncement from a hospital bed, after a stroke had left her paralyzed and unable to speak without colossal effort. On this occasion, though, her words came out easily, and had the ring of a simple truth—a truth that might have been accessible all along, had anyone cared to ask.In his granddaughter's memory, William Gruber's strongest legacy was an image: an old man, diffident and frail, standing on the threshold of the den in the house where he lived, seemingly caught in the grip of two inconsistent needs—the need on the one hand for company and repose, and on the other, the instinctive urge to gauge the mood of room's inhabitants—did they want him there, or not? His hesitation was understandable, for mostly they did not want him. This house, after all, was not his own, but belonged to his son and his son's wife, and most evenings it was filled with his college-age granddaughters and their friends. He sensed, correctly, that these young people's words of welcome were always a shade too cheerful, too robust. That probably couldn't be helped. They were young and he was old, and his sadness was palpable, a pox on their youthful hopes.Small wonder, then, that during the last few years of his life he spent many evenings upstairs in his bedroom, watching nature shows on the Discovery Channel with his youngest grandchild, a boy of six or seven. When he was not about, the other members of the family would discuss him, trading all manner of petty irritations, which they worked over endlessly. The granddaughters disliked the smell of his aging skin; their mother resented the forty-five minutes he spent in the drugstore choosing birthday cards to mail to his friends back home in Pennsylvania. The consensus among the family members was that he resembled a character out of Chekhov, or Beckett. (This was a family who read a lot, and consequently believed themselves to be very smart.) Beckett they invoked because their grandfather had a ruminating turn of mind, forever obsessed with its past failures, most of which were laughably minor. Chekhov applied as shorthand for a hodgepodge of facts and impressions they were too lazy to put into words: their grandfather's small town background, a life circumscribed by timidity as much as by circumstance, plus a range of things they meant to avoid in their own lives: passivity, self-delusion, blindness.He had plenty of reason for sorrow—this they knew. His wife had died some years before, and afterwards he was never happy, and never pretended to be. They knew, also, that he'd suffered from a lengthy bout of depression in his fifties—ten years during which he rarely spoke, except to shout at know-it-all sportscasters on the radio and television, or to rail against the ineptitude of his favorite team's coaches. His history of depression was a great curiosity to his family, for none of them suffered from that particular malady. Rightly or wrongly, they believed that it could be cured by vigorous effort—physical, mental, moral—on the part of the sufferer. Treating the issue in moral terms necessitated some definitional adjustments as regarded a member of their own. His son (a man whose morning singing was so aggressively cheerful that it virtually shouted, see, I'm happy!) insisted that his father had not been depressed, but merely very sad. Given the decade lost to silence, the distinction was of course beside the point.The family also tended to forget, for the event was nearly eighty years in the past, that their grandfather's life had been early marred by tragedy, in the form of an accident that claimed his brother's life. Earl Gruber had been the elder by three or four years, and William followed where he led. The boys spent most of their free time together out of doors, exploring the countryside of Berks County, Pennsylvania, engaged in pursuits that in early-twentieth-century America were regarded as a young boy's birthright: fishing, searching for arrowheads in freshly plowed fields, hunting foxes in forests of sugar maple and pitch pine. But one day in January 1916 the boys decided to amuse themselves on the grounds of the Wernersville State Hospital, a psychiatric asylum where their father worked as blacksmith. It is impossible to know, a century onward, whose idea it was to joyride on the roof of a freight elevator, or for how long the boys had been playing when disaster struck. In any case, the car did not stop when it should have, and Earl was killed, his body crushed between the roof of the car and the elevator shaft. William, at the time, was merely in the vicinity and therefore survived. For his granddaughters, contemplating the gruesome details of the accident was hard enough; the terror and sorrow the nine-year-old bystander must have felt was simply beyond their imaginative ken. If the girls spoke of the accident at all, they did so only to comment to their friends (in flippant tones, though they nonetheless believed their insights to be very great indeed) that perhaps his lifelong habits of caution had been born that day.In fact, the accident changed his life profoundly. Grief was a given, but some families might have learned to work around the yawning loss, with little change of habit or occupation. Not so in the Gruber family. One surviving brother, Charlie, was too close to manhood to brook the imposition of a strict new code. But for William, the youngest, the outdoor life was over. From then his parents kept him close to home, occupied with domestic tasks, things that previously had fallen mainly to his older sisters—cooking, sewing, darning socks. Perhaps the methodical nature of these tasks helped assuage survivor's guilt; in high school, Latin declensions and French verb conjugations may have fulfilled a parallel psychic need. The quiet life was not without its solaces. Books, music, and study provided some compensation for the loss of adventure in the woods and streams. He grew inward, emotional, and scholarly and came to love the most emotional forms of art and literature—Romantic poetry, the music of Chopin. Later in life he betrayed no trace of bitterness for the years when he was raised, in his own telling, essentially as a girl.Even as late as the 1940s and 1950s, the world of small-town Pennsylvania retained a pattern of life that was, in many ways, curiously preindustrial, even feudal. As the youngest of the family, William was expected to remain at home and care for his aging parents. Marriage, under those circumstances, came late, to another schoolteacher whose choices had been mortgaged to family need. A lifetime spent in the same small town also meant that you knew the financial condition of your neighbors almost as intimately as your own, just as you knew the compromises that had made them sharp, or stingy, or both. A close neighbor, Walter Miller, grew rich through marriage and came round every spring in a shiny new Ford. He liked to say, by way of needling his friend, that you could make more money in a minute by alliance to the right woman than you could in a lifetime of toil. The town banker, George Rader, might give you a good interest rate on a mortgage, but you'd find yourself working summers on the grounds of his estate—for seventy-five cents an hour, while he complained about the cost of labor. Rader, though only a minor millionaire, resembled a cartoon industrialist, austere and exacting about the most inconsequential tasks of daily life. He insisted, for example, upon winding his watch at the same time every day, and thought everyone should do the same, because the equal distribution of stress upon the mainsprings would extend the life of the instrument and therefore save money. Yet when William went to him for a loan to build a second bathroom on his home Rader was not above remarking that he must want to “live like the rich.” Imitate our habits, not our aspiration—the age-old condescension of haves to the relative have-nots.The thing to do was tend your garden. With his peasant-like diligence and sensitivity to beauty, he could make anything grow. He terraced his sloping front yard by hauling earth from the woods behind his house, one barrow load at a time until the job was done. He must have taken pleasure in the labor, or reveled in the hundred small acts of thievery, for he was not so poor he could not buy dirt. The payoff came in spring, when his yard bloomed like a brightly colored scarf unfurling: first forsythia, joyous and unsubtle, then saucy boughs of lilac in the hedge by the road; next the showy azaleas and lastly the viburnum, with its modest blooms and sweet insistent scent. On a sunny patch of land to the northeast of his house he grew row upon row of summer flowers: cosmos and dahlias and black-eyed Susans, asters and snapdragons, white phlox and purple, and sweet peas carefully staked. Fall and winter he spent indoors, reading about places he dreamed of visiting, but never would: Paris, perhaps Bavaria, where his ancestors had come from, or Salzbu