A Widow's Story Read online

  In 1966, I was twenty-eight years old. I had suffered no losses of any magnitude—not one! I had no actual knowledge—scarcely a glimmering of knowledge—of what Crashaw might have meant by “What death with love should have to doe”—“Why to show love, she should shed blood.”

  When we’d first met, at a time in my life when I was both very lonely and very excited about the future—my future—as a graduate student in a distinguished English department—Ray entered my life as an “older man”—older by eight years—in his final year at Madison, completing an ambitious Ph.D. dissertation on Jonathan Swift, and undertaking to look for his first academic job. To use the jargon of academic English studies Ray was an “eighteenth-century man”—he seemed to me wonderfully poised, informed, astonishingly well read in the areas in which I’d just begun to read—Old English, Chaucer, pre-Renaissance drama and Renaissance drama excluding Shakespeare—though he was very kind to me, and patient with my naivete in most matters, his humor was markedly sly, sardonic and satiric—his literary idols were Swift, the great master of “savage indignation”; the brilliant satiric/comic poet Alexander Pope, whose masterpiece “The Rape of the Lock” Ray could recite at length; the legendary Samuel Johnson, less in Johnson’s own somewhat didactic work than in the great Boswell biography; and the very witty playwrights William Congreve (The Way of the World) and Richard Sheridan (The School for Scandal). Ray’s single book-length critical study is Charles Churchill (1977) which he began with initial enthusiasm—Churchill is no Swift, but he is a devastating satirist, at least intermittently—that quickly faded as Ray’s interests shifted from academic studies to establishing our literary magazine Ontario Review, begun in 1974. By the time Ray finished his book on Churchill he’d come to dislike his subject thoroughly, like so many who undertake in-depth book-length studies of literary figures entwined with biographical material; making of the sardonic political satirist a figure of some depth and intellectual interest was a challenge Ray felt hadn’t been worth the effort. By degrees Ray’s interests shifted from the eighteenth century to twentieth-century poetry; he would write a series of sharp, insightful, appreciative essays and reviews dealing with H.D., Pablo Neruda, Richard Eberhart, Howard Nemerov, Ted Hughes, James Dickey, William Heyen (whom Ray would later publish in Ontario Review).

  We’d particularly shared a love of Nemerov’s poetry. It’s thrilling to come across these lines of Nemerov’s at the conclusion of Ray’s essay on the poet which appeared in the Southern Review in 1974—lines indelibly imprinted in my memory:

  O swallows, swallows, poems are not

  The point. Finding again the world,

  That is the point, where loveliness

  Adorns intelligible things

  Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.

  —“The Blue Swallows”

  Though now—in this posthumous state—finding again the world doesn’t seem to me very likely.

  In the nest, reading—(re)reading—this material, I am beginning to shiver violently, though I don’t think—I am sure—that I’m unhappy. I can’t seem to stop trembling, I must go into my bathroom to run hot water on my hands, that have grown icy. How strange this is! I’ve been thoroughly engrossed in my husband’s literary criticism—I’d totally forgotten that he had once reviewed for the journal Literature and Psychology, and that he’d ranged far afield to publish a brief piece on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment—a novel we’d both taught in the 1970s—yet now this fit of shivering has come over me, even my teeth are chattering.

  On my bedside table is Ray’s novel manuscript, on which he’d worked for years in the 1960s, but which he’d never completed. I can’t recall if I saw the most recent draft, or if for some reason Ray hadn’t shown it to me; I think that he’d intended to revise it, but set it aside. I am eager to read this novel which I found in Ray’s closet, which has been untouched for years, but I am beginning to feel some apprehension, too. I wonder if Ray would want me to be reading this manuscript, still far from completion; I don’t think that, since moving to Princeton in 1978, he’d so much as glanced at it, and had long since ceased alluding to it. I look at the first page—the title is Black Mass—the manuscript looks old, worn—very like a manuscript that has been hidden away at the back of a closet, forgotten for decades—and I feel very sad suddenly.

  This is a mistake.

  You don’t want to read it.

  What you don’t know about your husband has been hidden from you for a purpose.

  And in any case your husband is gone, and is not coming back.

  You can resolve to be “brave”—“resourceful”—you can cheer yourself up by (re)reading his writing, or trying to—but he is not coming back, he is gone and he is not coming back.

  A strange fact of Widowhood: such epiphanies come rushing at odd, unpredictable moments and yet—are forgotten almost at once. For, in the Widow’s posthumous world, there is the most primitive sort of time: what has happened, irremediably, has somehow not-yet-happened; if the Widow can but turn back time, the most devastating of epiphanies can be erased.

  Chapter 33

  Ghost Rooms

  Ghost rooms! One by one they are overtaking the house.

  There is no volition in me, only in the rooms of this house.

  During the hospital vigil—which was, for all its anxiety, hopeful—the rooms of the house were lighted in anticipation of a homecoming. Outdoor lights were left on—extravagantly, recklessly—through the day. There was a sharp scent of furniture polish, of Windex; a more perfumy scent of candles on the dining room table, newly removed from their cellophane wrappers. I would make one of Ray’s favorite dinners: grilled Scottish salmon with mushrooms, tomatoes, fennel, dill. He will be hungry for something other than hospital food, but—he will probably be tired and want to go to bed early.

  Now, most of the rooms are never lighted. Most of the rooms are off-limits to me, I dare not enter them, nor even glance into them.

  But where is Ray? In which room is—my husband?

  The outdoor lights are never on any longer. I am not so extravagant now. When these lights burn out, how will I replace them?

  One by one, lights expiring.

  And even the nest sometimes fails me, and so there is nowhere to hide.

  The vigil continues, though there is no hope.

  I did not dare to read Ray’s novel, after all—I have put it carefully away for the time being.

  The basilisk, that knows my heart more intimately than Ray ever knew it, understands my apprehension. It is the basilisk who supplies me with this wisdom.

  If he’d wanted you to read it, he would have given it to you. You know this!

  And sometimes—Obviously, you failed him. You should have offered to read this manuscript when you might have helped him with it. Now, it’s too late—you know this.

  Now the flurry of death-duties has abated, the siege is taking other forms. As virulent bacteria will mutate, to insure their virulent survival.

  One by one regions of the house are becoming ghostly, unoccupied. The living room that was once so welcoming—the sofa, the white piano, the dark rose Chinese rug Ray and I selected for the space, when we’d first moved to Princeton. On the marble-topped coffee table we’d bought together in a furniture store in Detroit, in 1965, are Ray’s books which I’d brought home from the hospital, at his end of the sofa—Infidel, The Great Unraveling, Your Government Failed You. Back issues of the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker.

  Finally I’ve taken away the stacks of Ontario Review submissions. A scattering of pens and paper clips Ray had accumulated.

  (Between the sofa cushions—and beneath the sofa—more pens, paper clips! As I’d once laughed plucking these out to show to Ray, now discovering them will be utterly depressing, like bad, sick jokes.)

  But the living room is a ghost room, and the small solarium that opens off the living room where every day Ray and I had lunch—except when we sat outside on our terrace, in wa
rm weather. This glass-walled room with a glass-topped round table and wicker chairs and a red-brick floor that seems, bizarrely, even in winter to attract spiders and, in abundance, the insect-prey of spiders, is an unlikely ghost room, since it is flooded with light on even overcast days—yet so it has become.

  I will not enter the solarium for months, not even to sweep away the cobwebs.

  I will avoid looking into the solarium. There is too much heartbreak in even a glimpse of the glass-topped table with the pale beige cloth place mats.

  The farther wing of the house which we’d designed with such enthusiasm for my parents to stay in has become a ghost region—of course. This is a part of the house I can shut off from the rest—I have turned down the heat—there is no reason for me to step inside this space for days, weeks at a time. It was in this room, at the long white Parsons table, that Ray ate, or tried to eat, his final breakfast at home. Read, or tried to read, the New York Times for the final time at home.

  We occupied the house often for hours at a time without speaking to each other, or needing to speak.

  For this is the most exquisite of intimacies—not needing to speak.

  Now, I dare not look across the courtyard at the plate-glass window that runs the length of the room. I think that I am terrified to see no one there. Yet more terrified, to risk seeing a reflection in the glass—for in our house there are myriad reflections of reflections in glass—a kind of vertigo springs from such reflections, like the sharp flash of light that precedes migraine.

  Mirrors too have become off-limits, taboo. As if toxic fumes inhabit these ghost mirrors, you dare not draw too close.

  Of course, you dare not glance heedlessly into any mirror!

  The miniature rose for which I’d had some hope prevailed for a few days but has finally withered, and died—along with the (inedible) moss. Piles of mail—much of it unopened—on the dining room table and a squat pearl-colored ceramic vase festooned with a dazzling-white satin ribbon proclaiming COMFORT COMFORT COMFORT COMFORT at which I find myself staring as if hypnotized.

  What are these things? Is there nothing in the universe except—things?

  Sometime soon—in another day or two—I will begin to thank people. This is my resolve.

  Except—I seem to have lost many of the cards that accompanied the sympathy gifts.

  Except—I seem to be unable to force myself to read many of the cards and letters, which I have been putting away in a green tote bag in my study.

  Is a widow expected not only to write thank-you notes for presents, but for sympathy cards and letters as well? My heart sinks at the prospect. What a cruel custom!

  Yet I hope to be a conscientious widow. I hope to be a good widow. A Princeton acquaintance who’d lost her husband last year, a very nice woman whom everyone greatly respects, told me how painstaking she was to reply even to sympathy cards, how much pleasure she took in writing letters to the many people who’d written to her. It was something for me to do. I was grateful.

  Unlike this conscientious Princeton widow I am not lacking for things to do—I am lacking for the time in which to do them, and for the energy with which to do them. I am lacking something essential in my soul—I don’t want to be a widow! Not me.

  As I hadn’t wanted to play with dolls when I was a little girl. Breaking my grandmother’s heart by blithely giving away an expensive doll she’d given me for my birthday—passing on the doll to a neighbor girl with a gesture of disdain—I don’t want to be a silly little girl! Not me.

  Now, this is adult life. Much more is expected of an adult and certainly of the widow of a good man. Though I am grateful for the kind attention I will probably just continue to hide away the cards and letters in the green bag with the vague resolve I will read them later. I will answer them later. When I feel a little stronger.

  This may not be for a while. Months, years.

  Eventually, I move the green bag into Ray’s study. The corner of my room in which it was placed had become a corner from which my eyes shrank.

  When I’d returned from the hospital that night, with Ray’s toiletries, I’d replaced them in his medicine cabinet and on his sink counter. As I’d replaced his clothes in his closet and put into the laundry his (very mildly) soiled things and when I did the laundry, I put into his bureau his socks, underwear, shirt.

  All of his clothes are in place. Not an article of clothing has been discarded. As all of his mail, papers, financial statements etc. are arranged on his desks and on the floor of his study.

  His clothes are very nice clothes, I think. A camel’s hair sport coat, still in its dry cleaner bag. A coat of soft dark-gray wool. Dress shirts, newly laundered and not yet worn. A blue-striped shirt which is a favorite of mine. Neckties—so many!—dating back to a long-ago era when men wore inch-wide ties—was this the 1970s?—my favorite is a silk tie imprinted with scenes from the Unicorn Tapestry which we’d bought at the Cloisters one giddy spring day when we’d slipped away from the interminable ceremony at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Upper Manhattan.

  Sure was glad to get out of there alive!—this phrase from a song of Bob Dylan—“The Day of the Locust”—(coincidentally, set at Princeton)—often passed between us.

  Earlier today I was drawn again to look into the manuscript of Black Mass—Ray’s unfinished novel. My heart beat so strangely, I could not continue.

  There is some secret in Ray’s life, I think. Or perhaps “secret” is too strong a term. Things of which he didn’t care to speak, and after the early months in which we’d talked of our family backgrounds—as I suppose everyone does, when new to each other—these things passed into a kind of taboo territory about which I could not make inquiries.

  Quietly the other evening at her house my poet-friend Alicia Ostriker said to me I can’t imagine what it’s like to be you and I said I can’t, either.

  Friends have been wonderful inviting me to their homes. I think that they are trying to watch over me—I think they must talk about me—I am deeply moved, but also anxious—I can’t fail them—I am most fascinated by the absence of ghost rooms in their houses—the unwitting ease with which they speak, smile, laugh, move from room to room as if nothing is threatening to them—they will live forever, there is no Why? in their lives.

  Sometimes if I fall asleep toward dawn it is very hard for me to wake up in the morning and very hard for me to leave the nest and the thought comes to me Why?

  I am utterly mystified why there is life and not rather the cessation of life. The earliest effort of life—single-celled organisms in a sort of seething chemical soup—millions of years before Man—to prevail, not only to prevail but to persevere, not only to persevere but to triumph by way of reproduction—Why?

  Once in a while when I am feeling a need for exercise, excitement, I run the vacuum cleaner through the rooms. I am always happy vacuuming—the thrumming noise drowns out the noises inside my head and, underfoot, a sudden smoothness in the texture of a carpet has the visceral feel of a spiritual calm, almost a blessing.

  Well—not quite a blessing.

  Ghost rooms! But there are ghost acts as well.

  For instance, I can’t any longer “prepare” meals in the kitchen. I am not able to eat anything that isn’t flung together on the counter, spoonfuls of yogurt into a bowl, some cut-up (rotted?) fruit, a handful of (stale) cereal; maybe in the evening, a can of Campbell’s soup (chicken with wild rice) and those Swedish rye-crisp crackers of which Ray was fond.

  The prospect of sitting at the dining room table for any meal is repellent. All my “meals” are at my desk while I do e-mail or work or in the bedroom where I might watch TV, read or try to work.

  When you live alone, eating a meal carries with it an element of scorn, mockery. For a meal is a social ritual or it is not a meal, it is just a plate heaped with food.

  When I traveled, and Ray was home alone, he took advantage of my absence by bringing home a pizza. When I called home I would ask how he
’d liked the pizza and he would say It was all right in the way of a shoulder shrug and so I would ask what had been wrong with it and Ray would say It was too big for just one person and I would say Well, you didn’t have to eat all of it—did you? And Ray would say I guess I did. I ate it all.

  Better even than meals hastily dumped into bowls are bottles of Odwalla fruit-blend drinks. These were left for me in the courtyard a day or two after Ray died, a dozen or more in a plastic shopping bag, from a woman friend who is also a novelist. You have to eat, Joyce she’d said and you won’t want to eat. So drink this.

  Bottles ideal for gripping while one is driving. The ordeal of eating alone is mitigated by subordinating eating to another activity, like driving a car.

  Often I’ve noticed that friends/acquaintances who live alone seem to be eating when we speak on the phone. I’d assumed that this must be incidental, or that the individual had a nervous habit of eating continuously, hence could not stop just because I’d called; but now, I think that the opposite is the case—eating alone is so terrible, one must subordinate it to something else, like talking on the phone.

  If I’m careless, or distracted, I will make a mistake—glancing into one of the ghost rooms unprepared. And stunned seeing—at Ray’s end of the sofa—a shadowy figure, or the outline of a figure—what is called an “optical illusion”—which is to say the idea—the memory—of a figure.

  Quickly I turn away. Run away into a “safe” part of the house.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIES

  February 27, 2008

  Raymond Smith, Founder and Editor of Literary Journal, Dies at 77

  Raymond J. Smith, a founder and the longtime editor of The Ontario Review, a noted literary journal, died on Feb. 18 in Princeton, N.J. He was 77 and lived in Princeton.

  The cause was complications of pneumonia, according to the Blackwell Memorial Home in Pennington, N.J.