OVER THE WALL

Carol doesn’t know that President Obama won reëlection last Tuesday, carrying Ohio and Pennsylvania and Colorado, and compiling more than three hundred electoral votes. She doesn’t know anything about Hurricane Sandy. She doesn’t know that the San Francisco Giants won the World Series, in a sweep over the Tigers. More important, perhaps, she doesn’t know that her granddaughter Clara is really enjoying her first weeks of nursery school and is beginning to make progress with her slight speech impediment. Carol died early last April, and almost the first thing that she wasn’t aware of is that our son, John Henry, who is Clara’s father, after saying goodbye to her about ten hours before her death, which was clearly coming, flew home to Portland, Oregon. Later that same night, perhaps after she’d gone, he had a dream, which he wrote about briefly and beautifully in an e-mail to the family. In the dream, she is hovering close to him, and they are on 110th Street, close to the Harlem Meer, at the northeast corner of Central Park. The Park is bursting with spring blossoms. She is walking a dog that might be our fox terrier Andy. Then she falls behind John Henry. He turns to find her, and she has become an almost black shape and appears to be covered with feathers or black-and-dark-gray Post-its. She and the dog lift off the ground and go fluttering past him, and disappear over the low wall of the Park.

What the dead don’t know piles up, though we don’t notice it at first. They don’t know how we’re getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don’t know that we don’t want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don’t want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind. But they’re in a hurry, too, or so it seems. Because nothing is happening with them, they are flying away, over that wall, while we are still chained and handcuffed to the weather and the iPhone, to the hurricane and the election and to the couple that’s recently moved in downstairs, in Apartment 2-S, with a young daughter and a new baby girl, and we’re flying off in the opposite direction at a million miles an hour. It would take many days now, just to fill Carol in.

Carol and Roger Angell, Brooklin, 1966 (Credit 37.1)

There’s a Kenneth Koch poem, “Proverb,” that begins “Les morts vont vite, the dead go fast, the next day absent!”

Later, it continues:

The second after a moth’s death there are one or two hundred other moths

The month after Einstein’s death the earth is inundated with new theories

Biographies are written to cover up the speed with which we go:

No more presence in the bedroom or waiting in the hall

Greeting to say hello with mixed emotions.

Yes, but let’s stay with Carol a little longer. She was seventeen years, nine months, and seventeen days younger than me (we had a different plan about dying), but now that gap is widening. Soon our marriage will look outlandish or scandalous, because of the age difference. I’m getting old, but I’m told almost every day that I’m keeping up, doing O.K. What Carol doesn’t know by now is shocking, let’s face it, and I think even her best friends must find themselves thinking about her with a certain new softness or sweetness, as if she were a bit backward. Carol, try to keep up a little, can’t you?

All right, I take that back, and I also feel bad about those moths getting in here. Carol had a serious moth and bat phobia, dating back to childhood. She was a teacher at the Brearley School, an eminent New York academy for girls, and one day one of her students got an urgent telephone call from her in algebra class. “I need you down here right away,” Carol said.

“But, Mrs. Angell, I’m in math class,” the girl said.

“Never mind that,” Carol said. “There’s a moth in my room, and I need you to come down and remove it right now.”

Anecdotes sweep away time, and are there to cheer us up, but just as often they work the other way, I’m finding out. Let’s get to my unstartling theory, which is that it may not be just years that make you old or young but where you stand on the treadmill. Shakespeare possessed an astounding knowledge of history and of his own times, it’s agreed, but missed out on Newton and Napoleon and the Oreo sandwich. Dickens joined the conversations of his day about Darwin, but stayed mum about Freud and Cézanne and Verdun. Lincoln never understood Auden. Verdi just missed Louis Armstrong, leaving the room before the first run-through of “Mahogany Hall Stomp.” Donald Barthelme’s fiction was known for its flashing and ironic references to contemporary names and styles of thought; he died in 1989, however, at the age of fifty-eight, and under the regulations was forbidden ever to mention Michele Bachmann or the Geico lizard. Carol knew Donald well, and loved his writing. She was also a fan of John Donne, an even more sternly handicapped genius, and one evening got us into an extended conversation—I remember almost every word of it—about his poem “Aire and Angells” (note the spelling), which she was unravelling with an eleventh grader.

What do these people have in common: William Shawn, Nancy Stableford, Bill Rigney, Joseph Brodsky?

Well, for one thing, I knew them all, though Brodsky, the poet and Nobel Laureate, only passingly or socially: he was a fabulous conversationalist. Shawn was my boss, the decades-long editor of The New Yorker; Nancy Stableford was my older sister and a biology teacher; and Bill Rigney—a onetime major-league infielder and then a manager of the Angels, Twins, and Giants—my best friend in baseball. Each of them was a grownup, and, in their different ways, vibrantly intelligent. What else did they have in common? Why, all of them died before September 11, 2001, which is to say that all of them, in company with many hundreds of my bygone and deceased schoolmates and office friends and relatives and summer acquaintances, and their parents and my parents, had no inkling of the world we live in today. I think of them often—my seniors, my innocents, my babies—and envy them, and believe that many others my age have had this passing thought as well, and have from time to time felt a flow of protective love for them, and even a bit of pride that we can stand in for them, or stand up for them, that rational and more hopeful old gang of ours, and so put up with this dismal flow of violence and schlock and complicated distant or very near events that makes up our daily and hourly menu.

Clara and the baby downstairs in 2-S (her name is Quinn, I’ve learned) are scarcely aware of irony or bad news yet, but they’ll catch up and be O.K. with it very soon. Thinking about them the other day, I remembered a poem called “Conch,” written by my stepfather, E. B. White, back in the nineteen-forties. He wrote light verse, but took it seriously. Here it is:

Hold a baby to your ear

As you would a shell:

Sounds of centuries you hear

New centuries foretell.

Who can break a baby’s code?

And which is the older—

The listener or his small load?

The held or the holder?

Quite a lot of time has gone by since Carol died, and though I’ve forgotten many things about her, my fears about that are going away. There will always be enough of her for me to remember, and some of it, to my surprise, comes back with fresh force. I’ve been thinking about her hands, for instance, which are visible, of course, in the hundreds of photographs we have of her, often lightly touching someone else in a family setting. Her hands in repose were strikingly beautiful, their resting or down-angling familiar shape somehow expressing both confidence and a perfect ease that a great ballerina could envy. I go back to look at that again and again.

E. B. White—we called him Andy, and, yes, the dog is named for him—and Carol are close to each other now, in the Brooklin, Maine, Cemetery. His and my mother’s graves are side by side, under a tall oak tree that Andy planted there when my mother died, in 1977. Their gravestones are made of bluish-gray slate, but Carol’s and mine, though they have the same shape and old-fashioned narrow body, are in white Vermont marble. They carry the same lettering that Mother’s and Andy’s do: a suave contemporary style called Centaur that was recommended to us back then by an art-director friend of mine named Hank Brennan.

My decision to have my gravestone put in at the same time as Carol’s, in early August—it only lacks the final numbers—wasn’t easy, but has turned out to be comforting, not creepy. Brooklin is much too far away just now—I live in New York—but the notion that before long my familiar June trip back there will be for good is only keeping a promise.

I visited Carol’s grave every day during the rest of my summer stay, often in the early morning, when the oblong shadows of my mother’s and Andy’s markers nearly touched hers. There’s more family nearby: my brother Joel White’s gray granite marker (he died in 1997) and that of my daughter Callie, who died two years ago. The two of them had their ashes put into the sea at almost the identical place: an upper sector of Jericho Bay from which you can see the steep mountains of Mount Desert, to the east, and, in the other direction, the rise of Isle au Haut. Token cupfuls of their ashes were saved and went into the cemetery later. This is a currently popular option, but Carol and I passed it up. There are ten cemeteries in Brooklin, which is a lot for a population of eight hundred; many are family plots, half-hidden in fields or brush now, and the little Mount Eden Cemetery, on Naskeag Point, is probably the most beautiful. The Brooklin Cemetery is the largest, and lies right in the middle of town: across Route 175 from the Baptist Church and a couple of hundred yards down from the library and the Brooklin General Store, where the road bends.

My visits to Carol didn’t last long. I’d perk up the flowers in the vase we had there, and pick deadheads off a pot of yellow daisies; if there had been rain overnight, I’d pick up any pieces of the sea glass that had fallen and replace them on the gentle curve and small shoulders of her stone. We first thought of this tribute in the family on the day of her burial. Good sea glass is getting scarce, now that everybody has learned not to throw bottles overboard, but Carol’s collections were made long ago, plucked from a stone beach of ours on Eggemoggin Reach and an even better spot, just to the east, that belongs to a neighbor. There are dishes of sea glass in different sizes all over the house. Carol’s favorite pieces (and mine) were small pale mauves and those smoothly rounded gray shapes, probably from old milk bottles, worn to sensual smoothness by the actions of tide and time. In recent years, when she knew that children of friends were coming over to visit us, she’d sometimes grab a small handful and secretly seed the beach in places where she’d bring the kids later.

I often took Andy along on my visits—a violation of cemetery rules, I’m sure, but we almost never saw another soul, and in any case he only wanted to rocket about in the vacant fields, away from the graves and their flags and plantings. On our way home, I sometimes stopped in the oldest part of the cemetery, closest to the road, and left the dog in the car while I walked among the graves there. These are marble or granite headstones, for the most part, but all are worn to an almost identical whiteness. Some of the lettering has been blackened by lichen, and some washed almost to invisibility. These aren’t old graves, as New England cemeteries are measured—there’s nothing before 1800, I believe—but their stories are familiar. Many small stones are in remembrance of infants or children who died at an early age, often three or four in the same family; there are also names of young men or old captains lost at sea. There’s a low gray column bearing lowercase lines of verse in memory of a beloved wife who died in 1822, at the age of twenty-seven. Many of the names—Freethey, Eaton, Bridges, Allen—are still well represented in Brooklin today. What I noticed most, though—the same idea came over me every time—was that time had utterly taken away the histories and attachments and emotions that had once closely wrapped around these dead, leaving nothing but their families and names and dates. It was almost as if they were waiting to be born.

Personal History, November, 2012