“And what do you do, Ms. Baez, when you stop traveling and go home, and your life is back to normal?”
Well, there really is no normal, and the things that I do change: study Aikido, take photos, take a dance course, get back into cooking, illustrate a songbook, take on a human rights project—write a book. But there are some friends who have remained constant, who are still living nearby, and whom you should meet.
Old Earl, the convict who befriended David in prison and who finally got out on parole and managed, with our help, to stay out. He drove Gabe to and from school for twelve years, fed the dogs, and did chores around the house and yard. He is now working as a foster grandfather with the severely retarded and handicapped. Earl’s twenty-one years in prison left his heart and lungs in bad repair, and I’ve seen him laid out on the table in the coronary care unit, plugged into a hundred different machines, tubes down his nose, teeth out, cheeks sunken—and two days later, flirting with the nurses in the same unit, improvising songs about how good it is to be alive. He said he’d seen the pearly gates, talked to the angels, shaken his fist at Sister Mary Mathilda, the old nun who whipped him when he was in the orphanage, and told them all he was not ready to join them yet.
Christine, the Catholic British nanny, cook, helper, general factotum, was in the Signal Corps in World War II. She helped me raise Gabe and run the house after Gail left to go to nursing school. I met her in Carmel in 1961 where she was caring for a dying woman in Pebble Beach. I had come to sing for the patient, and the experience had been grueling. Afterward Christine offered me a cup of tea, Constant Comment, to be exact, and we were friends ever after. She worked here at the house until Gabe left for boarding school. When Gabe came home from his first day at a new school as a fifth grader, in his white shorts and T-shirt and a brow of fury, he was clutching a yellow jumprope with red handles and announced that “The fuckers want me to do a hundred of these! I can’t even do one!” He threw the jumprope in the corner and himself on the rug and proceeded to have a tantrum. Christine breezed past, motioning me not to pay any attention, and later, when Gabe was spent and flopping, scowling, on the couch, she popped into the room and picked up the jumprope. “Oh my! A skipping rope! It’s been yeahs since I tried one of these. May I have a go?” she said cheerily, letting the rope settle in a nice loop. As Gabe was nodding consent, she proceeded to skip right there in the living room, exclaiming gleefully at every hop. A half-hour later I heard a hesitant but persistent thumping, punctuated with swear words, out on the veranda, and a few minutes later a rosy Gabe appeared for dinner. “I did twenty-five,” he announced.
She and I still call each other on Sunday nights to discuss the miserable status of culture in the United States, the glories, in contrast, of Masterpiece Theater, plus any new and brilliant ideas for finding me the “right” man, which we have both conceded is an impossible task.
Jeanne lives fifteen minutes away. Over the last fifteen years she has acted as my personal financial manager, tour manager, director of Humanitas, aide, guide, advisor on just about everything, and compassionate friend. At the moment she is struggling to make some sense out of my financial affairs. In some ways Jeanne knows me, as the expression goes, better than I know myself. We laugh about ending up in wheelchairs on the same front porch, only she doesn’t really think it’s very funny because she’d rather end up in a wheelchair on a wonderful husband’s front porch. We pull each other up out of our mid-life depressions, bolster each others’ spirits, go out to dinner, go to the movies, and wonder what it would be like in the world without each other, knowing that we will probably not find out until one of us keels over dead.
Mom lives twenty minutes away. We chat on the phone often during the week. She brings me ginger ale and pretzels when I’m ill, and calls me when something wonderful is on public television, like a child violinist performing Brahms, or an English mystery unfolding. And she puts a coat over her nightgown and drives over in the night when I need comfort and strength.
Libby is a schoolteacher who helped me find the new school for Gabe. She, too, is always there for a cup of tea, a diet cookie, a morale boost, the 4 a.m. phone call, and some wise words about childrearing.
Ira works at Kepler’s Bookstore where I visit him when I need to hear his caustic opinions on world affairs. Ira still gives me the truest perspective of what is really going on in the world, and is a constant reminder of what nonviolence is supposed to mean in the face of the terrible inhumanity that surrounds us. He doesn’t hold out much hope for the salvation or even survival of the human race, and I tend to agree with him. Unlike Ginetta, he doesn’t give a good goddam about leaving diplomatic doors open. He says what he thinks and doesn’t worry about being on anybody’s popularity list. But somehow, after thirty years, he is still on mine.
Ginetta and I meet frequently. We both miss Europe. Once she admitted to me that she was feeling down. When I asked her what I might bring her, she said sweets. So I took her two almond croissants, a pear popover, and two kiwi and cherry custard tarts. We sat and gorged and laughed and soon she was her old self, hatching up plans for me. “Let’s see. Why you don’t geeve a fundraiser with Pavarotti at Lincoln Center?” . . .
Gail, after a six-year sojourn with an Indian guru, came to her senses and is continuing her work as a nurse. She is especially talented in working with the dying, the very ill, and ill children. She works all wards, including cystic fibrosis, which she has done for many years. She is also the most talented person at helping me with my lingering phobias. Because of her practical nurses training, her own multitude of neuroses, and her knowledge of me and how I function, she can calm me back to sanity with a combination of compassion, common sense, medical know-how, and hypnosis.
There is Claire, my dancing and joking buddy. She does drug counseling and crisis intervention. We have cappuccinos together when she’s taking a break between what she refers to as her “victims.” I think her high success rate with her “victims” must come from her ability to get them laughing.
I escape as often as possible to Carmel, to that superb community of people who adopted Michael and me more than twenty-five years ago. There is no more beautiful place on earth, nor more loving and stimulating and appealing friends.
My most important “old people” not thus far mentioned are Francis Heisler’s widow, Friedy, now in her eighties (more cups of tea and talk about Europe), and my beloved Mairi Foreman, now eighty-seven. The last time I saw her (she lives in Puerto Rico and has survived her husband by fifteen years), I said, “Why, Mairi! Do you realize we’ve known each other for twenty-five years?” and she replied, her beautiful Irish eyes dancing, “Really, darling? Is that all?”
The tiny but able staff at Humanitas absorbs and carries out every request I make, over and above putting out a newsletter and keeping up projects and programs in human rights, disarmament and nonviolent education. In the last few years I have called upon them to organize a march to protest the United States’ bombing of Libya (coordinating with other peace groups we gathered eight hundred people in one city and more than a thousand in another) and to write an open letter with me to South African newspapers in support of Bishop Tutu’s nonviolent actions, signed by Lech Walesa, Corazon Aqino, Kim Dea Jung, Maeread Corrigan, Adolpho Perez Esquiel and others. We managed to return Irina Grunina, a Russian dissident in exile, to Moscow for proper health care in time for the birth of her baby. We did so by sending an appeal from Coretta King, Rosalynn Carter, and myself to the authorities—and to the press. We continue to send off protests against the contra’s intervention in Nicaragua and human rights abuses everywhere. In 1986 we received an invitation for me to sing a concert in Reykjavik during “The Summit.” I said yes, left the details to the office, and ended up singing a televised concert called “The People’s Summit,” which showed live on Saturday evening and again on Sunday at the request of the Icelandic public.
I am proud of what Humanitas has accomplished since its inception in 1979; although I cannot always work closely with it on each and every project, it gives me great comfort to know that Humanitas is still constantly at work on the issues that are so important to me.
Today Gabe brought some friends home for lunch. They tumbled in the door, he and his best buddy and two eighties-looking high school girls: beautiful Julie with the extravagant cascading blond hair, winsome blue eyes, Julie Christie nose and perfect teeth, and her black leather jacket over a black T-shirt with heavy metal logo; and a new girl, Michelle, as dark as Julie is light, with short, punkish, moussed hair, brown with a reddish dye, heavy eye makeup, sparkling dangle earrings, shiny bracelets, and a devilish smile; handsome Gabe, with his foot-long hair in a ponytail and a three-week beard, black undershirt beneath his leather jacket; and his friend Arie, short and swift on his feet, a little outlaw who today brings me rare wild mushrooms and some honey from his father’s own bees. When I sit and joke with them I feel blessed. I love to be with Children of the Eighties, in all their sweetness, beauty, turmoil, and vulnerability. I hope that, long after Gabe is gone from this house, kids will still visit me.
There are my dancing and drinking buddies from the local Pioneer Saloon, a good ol’ bar built in 1880, with stained glass windows and a minuscule dance floor on which I learned the Texas swing. My able dance teachers and partners (whose girlfriends usually share them without a grumble) are: Rick, lean, lanky and blond, who wears a white cowboy hat; Jim, dark-whiskered and dangerous (not really), who wears a black one; Dennis, very short with a huge beard that fans out over his chest like a skirt, wearing no hat; and Big Al, a Vietnam veteran, who sports his black hat covered with sixties buttons, and a frozen logger beard. He was in Okinawa all the way back in 1963, has a front tooth missing, and lives in his truck. You’ll find us all there on a night when the California Cowboys are playing, stomping and ya-hooing and twirling each other into a steaming lather to the strains of a fiddle hoedown.
And I dream of my castle in Canisy, Normandy. Cher Ami is married now and lives a few towns away. The count is turning forty and his friends are throwing a grand party for him at the castle.
Two weeks from when I write this last little episode of my book, I am taking Gabe and getting on a plane. We will leave on a Thursday, using up all my bonus flying miles, and fly to Paris. I’m going to take the black velvet dress and the rhinestones (the ones from the fantasy, remember?) and the robe Pauline made me and some fur-lined boots, and Gabe will take a tuxedo. We’ll arrive in Canisy on Friday evening. There will be musicians playing in the Rose Room, like the first time I ever saw Canisy. By Saturday afternoon every bedroom will be filled, there will be fires in all the fireplaces, and the champagne and wine and Calvados will flow all night long. The party will not end until sometime Sunday, when Gabe and I will drive back to Paris and board a plane for home. When we stumble into our house fifteen hours later, Mom will have a fire going in the kitchen and perhaps a Brahms trio on the stereo. Gabe will fall into bed, and I will sit in front of the fire, dressed like a Spanish princess, telling Mom how the sun rose, piercing through the mist over the lake as I watched in absolute silence from the immense bedroom window, and how there was peace all around as the castle finally slept.