Sunday, March 7th

A LONG HIATUS, for I have been in limbo due to a very bad cold (“the worst cold I ever had,” as my father used to say whenever he had a cold) just at a time when I had to make a very great effort and hence couldn’t rest. I had to go to Cambridge and take away everything of mine from 14 Wright Street, where Judy and I spent ten happy years before I moved to Nelson. I had left paintings, hundreds of books, and some furniture because I didn’t want to spoil that house as long as Judy lived there. Now her nephew (who had been renting it) has bought it and naturally wants to start fresh.

It is touching to see how little the neighborhood has changed. It is still the same folksy jumble of ugly three-decker apartments and small delightful houses, of which 14 Wright Street, a harness-maker’s shop one hundred years old, is one. Timmy Warren, Judy’s great-nephew, was there to meet me and so was Eleanor Blair, who, now eighty-two years old, had driven from Wellesley through the storm to come and help me. She knew it would be a hard day and it was entirely characteristic for her to make the effort—what a great friend she is! She set to at once, packing the small treasures in the corner cupboard which I am giving Anne Woodson and Barbara for their farm. Timmy had packed all the books, so that huge job I had dreaded had already been accomplished. The worst was finding masses of old photographs and some tiny objects … a small ashtray covered with butterflies that Vladimir Nabokov loved when he was a tenant of ours in another house where Judy and I lived. (I wish Judy had given it to him! It has been broken, and mended, and I threw it away.) The ghost of Tom Jones, our cat, appeared and reappeared in old snapshots … how vividly I remembered him lying in the window box, upside down, as I have described in The Fur Person!

While we sat in the little parlor having a glass of sherry before lunch, I found myself evoking his great-aunt for Timmy who, after all, hardly knew Judy before she became senile. As I talked, it all came back—our life together in that house and two others in Cambridge before it, for over twenty years, and I was happy to remind myself of the remarkable person she was, her dark eyes that sometimes reflected somber moods and always suggested a strong inner life, as was indeed true, for Judy was a birthright Quaker and, in a most unassuming way, a good example of what being a Quaker means. She carried a heavy teaching load as professor of English literature at Simmons College, corrected papers till late at night, and was off to school by seven in the morning. Nevertheless, she spent many summers of volunteer work for the Quakers, once working with the Japanese Americans we treated so badly during World War II, and, after we met, teaching English with recently emigrated Latvians. Her Quakerhood showed itself in little ways too in her moderation in daily living … she never had more than one drink, for example, one drink for sociability, and that was enough. But, above all, she was a real Quaker in her tolerance of and quiet grace before my extravagance of temperament, and that is partly why our relationship endured.

Judy was born rich in the safe gentle world of West Newton, but by the time she was nineteen, a freshman at Smith College, that world had cracked under her feet in terrible ways—her mother’s complete breakdown—she lived out the rest of her life in a sanatorium—and her father’s bankruptcy. Charles Matlack was a charming cultivated man who had inherited a fortune with not the slightest trace of business acumen with which to invest it, and the results were tragic. His eldest daughter had married very young, fortunately, but Judy and her younger sister were faced with not only the loss of their mother, but the necessity to earn a living at once. Judy managed to work her way through Smith with the help of scholarships and then embarked on a career of teaching, after a winter at Oxford University, thanks to the generosity of a friend.

Judy always had a genius for friendship, and I think it came partly from her marvelous capacity for really listening to other people. She shared with her friends in a rare way, and it was just this that had drawn me to her when we first met as fellow lodgers in Santa Fe.

We had a beautiful life together. In the winter she was away all day while I worked at writing and waited happily for her to come home for tea and a little walk before she went upstairs to read papers and prepare her classes. But in the summer more than once we took off for Europe … one memorable trip after World War II, when we drove down through the Dordogne to the South with two English friends, starved for sunlight and good food and France itself after the long hard years of war in London. And after I moved to Nelson we still spent all holidays together and Judy came to me for a month in the summer. So what is unknitting now, as she grows more and more absent, had been knitted together for many years, and is still the warp and woof, the deepest relationship I have known.