Blues if You Want (And Can Afford Them)

“For the record, I did not sleep with Bill Matthews. Which is not to say that I didn’t have my chances…”

My two breakfast companions in the Red Mill at the Vermont Studio Center, the famous poet, Stanley Plumly, the less famous novelist and my dear friend, Christine Lehner, erupted into raucous laughter. It was not the sort of thing they expected to hear over bowls of granola from VSC’s Grants and Publicity Manager.

“That would put you in the minority of women he was friends with,” Stan Plumly said, chuckling and smoothing back a strand of snow-white hair. His hair was amazing. Thick as the mane on a Shetland pony, white as bleached bones, it looked as if it had been blow-dried that morning. I considered complimenting him on it, and then thought he might take it the wrong way.

“To say we were friends would be pushing it,” I said. “I met him at Breadloaf in the eighties. Bill was a Visiting Writer, very much the big man on campus, dispensing wisdom and ministering to a gaggle of female groupies. He read an essay about Bellagio, not the resort in Vegas but the artist’s retreat funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which, in the first century, A.D., was inhabited by Pliny the Younger.

I approached Matthews afterward and told him how much I admired his essay, explained how my first husband, Leonard Feldstein, had applied to Bellagio and been turned down, how the rejection was hard, because Len adored Lake Como and would have thrilled to the princely routines—elegant meals, scintillating conversation, walks along ancient cobbled paths—that Matthews so winningly described.

“I was younger and prettier then,” I continued, to which Plumly interjected something sweetly complimentary to the effect that I hadn’t lost my charm, “and Bill and I ended up hanging out together. He got me into Treman Cottage, that house on the Breadloaf campus that you cannot enter unless you are a fellow or above…something I didn’t know until I arrived, which appalled me, though not enough to boycott it, which I should have done if I had had any integrity…”

“O.K., O.K., spare us the lecture,” Christine said, “and cut to the chase. How did you almost end up in Bill Matthews’ bed?”

“Well, we had spent most of the night drinking martinis in front of the fireplace at Treman, and Bill offered to walk me back to my dorm, which was just down the dirt road. It was a warm, moonlit night and you could see the Big and Little Dipper and Orion and a bunch of other constellations that he could name and I couldn’t. We started talking about our lives; he was between wives and I was between husbands, and next thing I know we were going at it in the hallway outside my room and he was murmuring into my hair, 'We could really get this thing right this time…'

“It was the sort of line he must have used dozens of times with other women, but I remember thinking, This famous poet wants ME!”

“And then,” Christine interjected. "Que Pasa?”

“I don’t know, I guess my guardian angel was looking out for me because, after kissing him back, and I will say this for him, drunk as he was, he was a good kisser. Anyway, sirens went off in my brain and something screamed, ‘Stop! This guy is gonna break your heart.'”

“So that’s it?” Christine asked.

“Not exactly. We kept in touch over the next few months. He moved to a tiny place on the Upper West Side that he later wrote about in BLUES IF YOU WANT. I moved from Illinois to D.C. to go to graduate school.

“He was a great letter writer—this was well before e-mail. He always wrote back within a few days and his sentences were eloquent and polished. I remember he once said that a writer is someone who loves sentences, and you could see that that was true for him, that he loved sentences.

“We met again here at Vermont Studio Center in the fall of 1993. We had lunch at a little restaurant in a nearly village that backed onto a river. It was mid-November and we were the only people in the restaurant and Bill was turning on his usual wit and charm, flirting with the waitress, with the owner, with me. I don’t know how many times he had been married and divorced; how many affairs he’d had, but I was still dazzled by him…

“Four years later, I was scanning the obits in The New York Times and read that he’d dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 55.”

“Getting ready to go to the opera,” Plumly said, shaking his head. Plumly explained that Matthews had begun, at his doctor’s urging, to cut back on his drinking and smoking, but it was too little too late.

We were quiet for a while, sifting through our raisins and sunflower seeds, each lost in our reveries on why we were here instead of not here, musing wordlessly upon the strange bedfellows of art and death. I thought of Bill’s eloquence, the lines that I remembered either from his poems or from his conversation—one that has always haunted me about how “the work of the body becomes the body of work.’

Years later, I was walking to my mailbox in front of the ramshackle Victorian house that I’d just moved into after my divorce from my second husband, and came upon a letter from Bill’s son, Sebastian, on Vermont Studio Center stationary, asking me to donate money for a room in the new Maverick Writers' Studios building that was to be named in honor of Bill. It was a long and heartfelt plea, a writer son’s eloquent tribute to his eloquent dad.

Had I but world enough and funds, I mused, had I been as famous as Bill—president of the Poetry Society, tenured professor at CUNY, a regular at Breadloaf and Bellagio, I would have been delighted to dig deep into my checkbook, but I had not reached even a modicum of his acclaim. I was poor and underemployed, with little disposable cash. Across my mind, like a plane of light in an Italian quattrocentro painting, fell a line from one of Bill’s poems from TIME AND MONEY about "how the rich are marrying each other.”

I wasn’t rich, and yet I was rich in remembrance of Bill. Sebastian asked me to give what I could, and so I did, and here it is, my gift to the tall, long-limbed seducer who loved sentences.
All posts copyright© 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Blue Laws

Until some three years ago, I spent nearly every night of my one, precious life in either a mildly or not-so-mildly inebriated state. It was as if the glass of wine, always at my side as I made dinner, shucking corn or slicing tomatoes, were a sort of lover, ever ready to overlook my flaws—how I left too many gossamer hairs upon the shorn cobs, how I never made Apple Brown Betty, how I failed in ways large and small as a wife and mother. The five, ten, or fifteen ounces of Pinot Grigio or Chardonnay (I rarely drank red, even though it was meant to be healthier) was always ready to whisper endearments in my ears, to tell me I was merveilleuse, extraordinaire, magnifique, to fill up my silences with sweet-talk.

I never got the shakes when I went without a drink, but I did experience a kind of silent-screaming panic. I remember going down to visit my ninety-something father-in-law in Richmond, Virginia, who had long since stopped any regular imbibing of alcohol, as it seriously messed with his head, to say nothing of his sense of balance, and panicking because he didn’t have a corkscrew. There were silver-and-nickel-plated knives and forks, plastic spoons, crumpled napkins, multiple packets of Sweet N’ Low…but not one corkscrew in all the wax-paper-lined kitchen drawers that I ransacked.

Going door-to-door in his suburban neighborhood, I rang bells, rapped on windows, like some mad-dog Jehovah’s Witness. I didn’t want to chat about the holidays, didn’t want to talk about whether my father-in-law was still driving or going to the Y. All I wanted was the silver gizmo that might unleash the firewater from its bottle and deliver me, at least for the next hour, of self-loathing and despair.

“Everything in moderation,” advised the Roman philosopher Petronius, “including moderation.” But we Americans, unlike our older, wiser European counterparts, despise moderation. We are all sinners in the hands of an angry god, in need of thundering preachers to keep us from drinking ourselves into a stupor every day of the week, which is what our illustrious ancestors loved to do, from the folks who stepped off the Mayflower right up through Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Our founding fathers began their drinking in the morning with hard cider and continued right on through the day with beer, wine, and spirits. The early colonists were forced to institute “blue laws” which put all kinds of restrictions on the consumption of alcohol, banning the purchasing of beer or wine before noon on Sunday, something that remains on the books in most states today, which always shocks me when I try to purchase a bottle of white before noon at my local Whole Foods.

Why blue laws are called blue laws is shrouded in mystery. One theory goes that it was because of the color of the books in which the laws were first printed; another that it was the chosen shade of the stockings of those pesky ladies who tried to better mankind by lobbying for repressive laws.

What we do know is that blue laws didn’t succeed in curbing the early American’s passion for drink, a passion that his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren took up with equal ardour until an entire temperance movement sprung up, which finally succeeded in 1919 in writing an amendment to the constitution to ban the sale of alcohol in every state in the union, as well as in parts of Canada. And of course even this most ultimate of blue laws didn’t do much to stop drinking, which continued in speakeasies all over the country and which was trucked across Canada and into the United States, entire fortunes including Joseph P. Kennedy’s being made on the illegal profits of bootlegging.

My first cousin, Lisa, died at 45 of acute alcohol poisoning, unable to face a single day, let alone the rest of her life, without the rivers of vodka that she poured down her throat. Her funeral, held on a sunny April morning in a gray granite church in Penetanguishene, Ontario, Canada, overlooking the agate waters of Georgian Bay, where she had passed many a drunken afternoon lounging on the decks of friends’ boats, was one of the saddest events I have ever witnessed. Her eighty-three-year-old mother, wheeled in on a stretcher from the local nursing home, wept with a copious and terrible abandon. Afterward, the mourners gathered in the dark smoke-filled Canadian Legion. Her friends cried, smoked cigarettes and knocked back shots of tequila.

It was enough to turn me into a teetotaler. But like Edwin Arlington Robinson’s legendary malcontent Miniver Cheevy, I had simply accumulated one more story to despair about, one more reason to have another drink.

Lao Tzu says that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And so it was with my drinking: I made one small and subtle change in my alcohol consumption, which, though I could not have predicted it, changed my behavior conclusively. Three years ago, I joined a writing group in Northampton, which met every Wednesday night from 6-9:30 p.m. A hearty dinner of pasta and oven-baked squash was served at 6; drinks were strictly of the seltzer and juice variety; coffee pots were always full.

But this wasn’t a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, though several members were recovering alcoholics. After dinner, we had a moment of silence, then retreated to various parts of the house to spend an hour with our laptops, returning after an hour to read and receive comments.

Even if you were Miniver Cheevy himself “sighing for what was not, and dreaming of Thebes and Camelot,” you were not allowed to say: “That was nothing like Euripides.” Instead, you had to be positive; you had to find the firewater phrase, perhaps even just the single word that bootlegged your consciousness, that lit up your heart.

The adventure did something to you, made you feel full and unaccountably happy. All these strangers scribbling down the bones of their lives, speaking of divorce, loneliness, heart disease, alcoholism and Alzheimer’s, and you had nothing to do but listen, you wanted to listen, and for the first time in many decades, you didn’t think about how you couldn’t get through a night without a drink, you thought only about stories and similes and how amazing that people could spend an hour drinking deep of themselves and coming up with such treasures.

When you returned home well before midnight, you were too loaded with words to do anything but climb into bed. And so it was that you passed one night without alcohol and you slept a deep, dream-drunk sleep and when you woke, you thought, “piece of cake to go without a drink,” and if you could pass one alcohol-free day, surely you could pass another and another, and before you knew it, you had had five, ten, fifteen alcohol-free days, which you tracked with blue stars on your calendar. After a year, you counted up 150 days of stars.

And so it was that you learned to pass your own blue laws, learned to drink occasionally and moderately…and even though the shadows of a winter afternoon approaching five o’clock still make you yearn for the deliverance that only a glass of maple-colored wine brings, you know you can go without.

All posts copyright© 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Paying Attention to Peacock Blue

“I live to dream,” begins the first sentence of an unpublished novel that I wrote years ago. The novel is about a young woman who lives in New York and seeks in sleep a vibrancy she cannot find in life. Her name is Beth, a single syllable that disappears into itself as soon as it is uttered. She sleepwalks through her days, working as some assistant in publishing, though the details of what she actually does are vague. On page 88, she gives up her job—where she finds the funds to do so is not explained--and travels to Paris, where she meets, at the base of the Winged Victory in the Louvre, an older professor, on sabbatical from an American university. He is headed for the Greek island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea, and persuades her to join him. Not long after they have settled into his cliffside rooms with spectacular views of the active volcano, Beth discovers that he is suffering from a fatal disease.

The story, only loosely autobiographical, was my fictional attempt to prepare for the overwhelming likelihood that my beloved, much older husband would predecease me. When several agents and publishers rejected it, claiming that the character and her dilemmas were not fleshed out sufficiently, I put the novel aside, saving all the rejection letters.

The novel and its narrator were drifting, pollen-like, through my consciousness recently on a warm, May evening in New York. My friend, Christine, and I were walking around the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York. We were headed to a bookstore off Broadway to hear a friend read from his new book of short stories, and had arrived early to inspect the peacocks--one of which was rumored to be all white--in the Cathedral Garden of St. John the Divine.

The peacock-peeping was orchestrated entirely by Christine, who is forever questing after exotic phenomena, especially anything ecclesiastical. When we traveled to north Wales together seven years ago, staying with our mutual friend, Lilla, in the Vale of Clywd, just down the road from where Gerald Manley Hopkins had written, “The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God,” we spent many an afternoon tracking down holy wells, tramping through muddy paths in a sea of farmers’s rain-soaked fields, our boots growing brown with sheep dung.

The holy wells were invariably disappointing, small, rock-strewn dips and indentations with only the faintest trickling of actual water. Unlike Christine, I lacked the imagination to time-travel back to the Middle Ages, when life was simpler and earthly quirks more miraculous. My reaction to these vulva-like holes in the ground was that of a bored teenager’s, as in, “So? Are we done?”

I kept my reservations to myself, trudging gamely along and focusing on the afternoon treat we had promised ourselves: the cream tea at the village pub in Tremerchion. Christine was following her bliss, clicking away at her digital camera, and explaining that there were more holy wells in Wales than in any other part of Great Britain.

But this May evening as we were searching for the white peacock, I somehow had the feeling—maybe it was simply because we had scored a parking spot on Broadway—that some epiphany was already winging its way toward us.

Something was stirring at the Cathedral: a whole block of parking spots were sealed off with sawhorses, and everywhere there were fleets of limos and cells of workers dressed in black-and-white catering uniforms. Whatever it was—a concert, a benefit, a surprise visit from the Dalai Lama--we had the sensation, which comes often in New York in the cocktail hours before dusk, that we were at the epicenter of everything magical.

We turned off Amsterdam Avenue and pressed deeper into the garden, putting the secular world behind us, and giving ourselves up to the rhododendrons, irises and bleeding hearts. But where were the peacocks? Surely on a summer night like this, they wouldn’t be sequestered in their cages in one of the Cathedral’s garages, where they waited out the cold, New York winters.

Then Christine grabbed my arm and said, “Look!” And there on the terrace of one of the faux-medieval stone buildings that belonged to the Cathedral School, we spied it: a peacock with its train fanned out in full, as still as if it were posing for its portrait. We crept closer, our footsteps mincing, our voices whispering. But the creature paid no attention to us; he didn’t so much as flutter one of his many-eyed feathers.

I don’t know how long we stood there: two, five, ten minutes, but it felt longer, the way time stretches out and becomes eternal when one is fully in the moment. “I have never been this close to a peacock,” I whispered.

“Me neither,” Christine whispered.

“Look at all those eyes on its feathers.”

“I read somewhere that the more eyespots on its train, the more attractive he is to the female,” she said.

“Well, this guy is definitely the Johnny Depp of peacocks.”

“Look at the tiny crown on its head,” she said. “Look at the iridescent blue of its neck.”

“Peacock blue. Now I finally get what that means.”

Then, as if sensing that it was the object of our awe, the bird did a full 360-degree turn, showing us its fluffy, ivory-colored backside (imagine the end of a very elegant dust-mop).

“Look,” I said, “it’s shaking its booty.”

“There must be a peahen nearby,” she said.

We checked the time on our cell phones and realized that we’d have to hurry if we were going to get to the reading by seven. We passed one of the young caterers, half-hidden by a flowering cherry tree, and taking a cigarette break. We asked her what was going on at the Cathedral that night and she said it was a benefit for St. Luke’s Hospital. Then Christine asked about the white peacock. Had anything happened to it? Oh no, it’s around, the young woman said, already bored with our questions and releasing a scarf of smoke.

We thanked her and hurried away, and then we saw the creature strolling slowly along the stone paths among the hostas and ferns, carrying the tail of its ivory train behind it, a sort of avian version of Pippa Middleton at the recent royal wedding. But extraordinary as the bird was—I had seen only three or four peacocks in my life, and none had been white—it couldn’t compare to the one in full-dress regalia on the terrace.

Or maybe it was simply that all our attention had been concentrated to a fine point, captured in one of those multitudinous eyes on the creature’s train. Perhaps we were worn out with seeing, the way one feels after spending an afternoon looking at masterworks in a museum.

At the reading, my mind kept wandering to my novel, resting in a white typewriter-paper box among the manila envelopes of sympathy cards I had kept after my first husband’s death, one of which had been written by the man who was now giving the reading. (“It’s impossible to imagine,” he had written, “that so much life force is no longer in the world.”) And then it suddenly occurred to me what the novel’s failings were: its narrator had not been paying close enough attention to her life, and because of this it was hard for a reader to pay attention to her, to care about her.

It wasn’t Beth’s fault; it took effort, focus and energy to pay attention. Perhaps, if “absolute attention is prayer,” as Simone Weil once observed, it even took a measure of religious faith. In any case, the work of paying attention was harder if you suffered from depression, as my narrator surely did, as I had when I had written the novel, though I had not been able to own the experience.

At fifty-six, going on fifty-seven, was it too late to start paying attention? Perhaps, but then I remembered that old African fable about the best time to plant a tree: “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago,” the fable goes, “The next best time is now.”

The Blue House of Marc Chagall

Polyhedral, the tumble-down logs running vertical, horizontal, higgle-piggledy, the blue house looms as large as a temple, filling the right foreground of the painting. In the distance is a fantasy village of minarets and castles, the ancient city of Vitebsk where Marc Chagall, who came into the world as Moishe Shagal, grew up.

The windows in the house are open, containing the same freakish mix of rectangles, trapezoids, and squares. The door is ajar; there is a figure just inside, half-hidden, crouched over something, perhaps a cooking pot. On the threshold other half-bent figures hover, cast in lumpy shadows upon the mustard-colored ground. The scene, whispering of poverty and privation, evokes Chagall’s own childhood as the eldest of seven surviving children, his father struggling to eke out 20 roubles a month hawking herring, his mother selling dry goods from the family's home. It is a world in which Jewish children are not allowed to attend Russian schools or universities, a time when Jewish boys might be conscripted into the Czar’s army or killed in a pogrom. And yet the scene is without menace, as if the boy Moishe Shagal were stationing himself in that house and saying, Even though life is hard, there is radiance and magic, and that radiance and magic can never be stolen from me.

“La Maison Bleue,” was painted outside in a single sitting in the summer of 1917. Chagall and his wife Bella Rosenfeld had escaped from the tumult of St. Petersburg, recently renamed Petrograd, to the countryside around Vitesbsk. Months earlier, after a minister from Kerensky’s provisional government had resigned, Chagall had written to his father: “the country is heading for a general slaughter, famine, the collapse of the front, where half the soldiers will perish…mobs will roam the countryside with rifles…I will not live to see it, and I hope neither will you…”

But Moishe Shagal, or Mark Zakharovich Shagalov as he was known to Russian officials, would live to escape not just the Bolshevist Revolution of October 1917, the burning of Vitebsk, the depressions of Europe, but also the rounding up of Jews in Vichy France, the gas chambers of Dachau and Auschwitz and Treblinka.

I remember the first time I saw a Chagall painting—in the Museum of Modern Art as a student at Sarah Lawrence College, back in the middle seventies. I was young and earnest then, and had long conversations with my then-boyfriend, George, about the meaning of Chagall’s work. There were several Chagalls hanging among Monet’s Water Lillies and Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans, but the work that captivated me was called, “I and the Village.” Why is the cow’s head transposed to look like a woman’s face, I wondered. Why is a female figure milking the cow inside the cow’s head? Why is the couple in the distance upside-down? Why do noses look like moons and moons like noses? “I and the Village,” seemed to be rendered in another language, and I wanted to translate it, find the hidden correlate between symbol and sense, metaphor and meaning.

Time passed, bringing the usual up-endings. I left the home I shared with George and began a life with Len, whose imagination and life experience seemed as crowded and surrealistic as a Chagall canvas. Born a Jew but recently baptized a Catholic, Len held degrees in medicine and philosophy. He had been analyzed by Eric Fromm, and was working on a multi-volume study in philosophy which would unify the languages of art and science. I believed that he was the glass through which I would finally see the universe clearly.

I followed him through all the museums of New York, and some years later, when he was awarded a teaching post at the University of Leuven in Belgium, through the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Art in Bruxelles, the Louvre and the Centres Pompidou in Paris, through the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

We bought EuroRail passes and rode trains from one European capital to another, tracking down Chagalls, Breughals, Memlings, Della Robbias and Michelangelos. We played games of chess speeding through the Ardennes, through fields of lavender in the south of France, through vineyards outside Siena and Gubbio. In Vienna, we visited the homes of Ludwig van Beethoven, and in Munich, we took a suburban train thirty minutes from the city center to a village called Dachau.

Dachau. One of the most heinous of all the concentration camps and yet it had been so scrubbed and sanitized that it had become harmless, historically inconsequential. It reminded me of one of the civilian conservation camps created by Roosevelt in the 1930s. There were rows of new pine-planked bunks and neatly piled army regulation blankets and bare, pillowcase-less lozenges with gray-and-white-striped ticking. Prison uniforms hung upon hooks. There were tin cups, plates, knives and forks. Everything was suffused with an outdoorsy, summer-campy air, as if the Germans had merely been treating the Jews to a crash course in rural education.

But what shocked me most was not to be found in any cordoned-off display or carefully recreated diorama or series of black-and-white photographs in the museum. As the morning rain and fog gave way to the palest flags of noontime sunshine, groups of German schoolchildren gathered at outdoor picnic tables and opened up thermoses full of tea and coffee, taking out sandwiches and munching on potato crisps.

“Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things I love.” The quote was from Marc Chagall and I stumbled across it many years after that day at Dachau. It was a wintry morning at the end of March 1985, just three months after Len’s passing, and I was a long way from accepting that I would never see him again. I couldn’t read newspapers or magazines; the goings-on of the world seemed trivial, made me vaguely angry. And yet there was an old man with merry eyes and a shock of white hair on the front page of "The New York Times," living and dying in a French village called Saint-Paul, leaving this world just three years shy of his hundredth birthday.

I turned the pages of the newspaper, inhaling the details of Moishe Shagal’s long life. Born in what is now Belarus, Chagall had lived in Paris, in Berlin, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in Manhattan, finally returning to France, the country that had given him his name and artistic start. Chagall had taken up new addresses, the obituary writer said, the way Picasso took up mistresses, drifting across continents and capitals, searching for a place to call home. The Stalinist government had repudiated him; the Nazis had called him degenerate; a handful of art critics in America had called him derivative. Still, he keep painting, stopping only for a few months after his first wife, Bella, died.

Twenty-six years after that end-of-March day in 1985, my dreams haunted by the fading faces of the dead, my footsteps as uncertain as the upside-down girl in "I and the Village," I turn on my laptop computer every morning to glimpse "La Maison Bleue" which covers my screen.

Its radiance fills me like prayer.
All posts copyright© 2011. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Wallis Blue

“Whatever happened to Wallis and Edward,” my son asked, “I mean after he had abdicated?” We had just celebrated our son’s seventeenth birthday by taking him to see the “The King’s Speech,” which is about the constitutional crisis in Great Britain attendant upon Edward VIII’s abdication and the accession of his younger brother, Bertie, who overcame a speech impediment to become George VI.

“Were they happy together? He gave up everything for her. Did he have regrets?”

I confessed that I was no Duke and Duchess of Windsor maven. I knew some gossipy details, most of which I’d gotten second-hand from my mother, who was a girl of eleven in 1936 and would have been much affected by what H.L. Mencken called “the biggest news story since the Resurrection.”

My mother never referred to Mrs. Simpson as the Duchess of Windsor but always by the heavy-baggage, tri-partite Wallis Warfield Simpson, her voice erupting in a spitting, dyspeptic rage, which somehow made me think of Adolph Hitler ranting about the Jews.

Wallis had many failings, according to my mother, the first of which was that she was not pretty. Why this could be construed as a fault, I never quite figured out. Given that my mother was pretty herself—she had been a model in New York before her marriage--you would think she would have had more compassion for those less blessed in the looks department. But in the shopworn Keatsian manner, my mother equated truth and beauty: Wallis Warfield Simpson’s mannish looks served as an embodiment of her inner ugliness and duplicity.

“She had the morals of an alley cat,” my mother said, explaining that Wallis was divorced not once, but TWICE. Long before Wallis had started carrying on an adulterous affair with the Prince of Wales, she had “stolen” second husband Ernest Simpson away from his first wife, not long after Wallis had divorced HER first husband.

“She was a gold digger,” my mother continued, explaining that Wallis was descended from an old Southern family that had fallen on hard times after the Civil War, and that she thought nothing of manipulating men to get what she wanted. But if she was so plain, what was her power? How did she get the most powerful man in the western world to fall in love with her?

There was no ready answer to this question, but it came up often at our dinner table when I was a child, with my father never failing to point out that Wallis must have been “some piece of work” in the bedroom, that she had supposedly picked up certain “techniques” in China in the 1920s, and that once she tried these tricks on poor Edward, he was a goner.

“Honestly, what drivel you talk!” my mother said, kicking him under the table and shooting him a look that could have boiled an egg.

My parents’ differing opinions about the Windsors spoke volumes about their own irreconcilable differences, which would lead, some years later, to their divorce. To my father, Edward’s giving up the throne “for the woman I love,” as Edward put it in the famous radio speech delivered on December 11, 1936 showed existential courage, proving that the heart abides by its own laws, and that these supercede duty to country and family.

Divorced once before he met my mother, my father didn’t see a problem with Mrs. Simpson's divorces; it simply meant that she had been “around the block,” that she wasn’t a virgin ("and no one," he said, "could lock her up for that"). Mrs. Simpson embodied the tough-minded heroine who gave convention the middle finger, who followed her heart.

Who were Wallis and Edward, or W.E., as they referred to themselves in their pre-abdication correspondence? Why did they evoke such passion from people who had never met them? Wallis was so famous that “Time” Magazine named her woman of the year for 1936, the first time the publication had ever given that honor to a woman. The Duchess of Windsor also had a color named after her, “Wallis Blue,” a pale tourmaline shade that matched her eyes and was coined by the Parisian couturier, Mainbocher, who designed her wedding dress.

Obsession with the Windsors continues, decades after they have been laid to rest side-by-side in Frogmore cemetery at Windsor Castle, Wallis’ stone still missing the HRH title that her royal in-laws stripped her of in 1937 (changing the English constitution to do so). Madonna is rumored to be making a movie about the lovers, claiming that both have been pilloried by history. English Heritage recently considered installing a blue plaque on the apartment building in the West End of London where Mrs. Simpson lived in the 1930s. The government-sponsored agency finally vetoed the plaque for Bryanston Court because of Mrs. Simpson’s alleged Nazi past.

Was the Duchess of Windsor really a Nazi? I don’t remember her politics coming up at our family dinners, but any Nazi association would certainly account for my mother’s antipathy to Mrs. Simpson. My mother had lost her first love, Harold, a Norwegian flyer, who was stationed in England during the war and who perished somewhere over the English Channel; she never shared any of the details with me, only that it happened during the summer of 1943, that she had been a girl of 18, that one day the tissue-thin blue airmail letters he had written to her stopped coming, that she had been so distraught she hadn’t been able to go east to college, and that she’d taken to her bed in the Middle West for months.

Perhaps, in some inexplicably convoluted manner, my mother attributed the senseless death of her beloved Harold to the shallowness and self-centeredness of people like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (In 1937, Wallis and Edward made a much-photographed trip to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Wallis was also rumored to be the mistress of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister to London, at the same time as she was seeing the King. Von Ribbentrop, who was later hanged at Nuremberg in 1946, supposedly sent Mrs. Simpson 17 carnations every day to express his gratitude for the seventeen times she had slept with him.)

“Answered prayers cause more tears than those than remain unanswered,” wrote St. Theresa of Avila, whom Truman Capote quoted in his last, unpublished novel. (Capote often partied with the Windsors when they came to New York in the nineteen sixties.) According to two biographies of Mrs. Simpson, Wallis did not want Edward to abdicate, and hoped to remain the King’s mistress while staying put in her marriage. “I intend,” she wrote to her aunt, “to keep them both.”

But the King’s slavish devotion to her (she called him “the Little Man” but his passion was hardly diminutive) proved as unstoppable as Hitler’s desire to annex all of Europe. “How can a woman be a whole empire to man?” she confided in bewilderment to her uncle. Years later, she said that it was not possible to “abdicate and eat it,” and that she would rather be “the mistress of a king, than the wife of the Governor-General of The Bahamas.” (Churchill had posted the Windsors to the Bahamas in hopes that they would not interfere with the war effort.)

“You can never be too rich or too thin,” the Duchess of Windsor is meant to have said, a maxim that she had stitched onto throw pillows in the living rooms of her homes in France and New York. Thanks to the largesse of Great Britain as well as the French government (the Windsors leased their Paris home in the Bois de Boulogne for decades for only a nominal fee), the Duke and Duchess were very rich. They spent their days shopping for the 100-plus dresses the Duchess purchased each year (when asked in an interview how he passed the time, the Duke confided that he had spent his morning helping the Duchess pick out a hat), with time out for the Duchess to have the tiny layer of fat on her tummy massaged, and the Duke to putter in his gardens.

There was a song that my father used to play on the phonograph in his study in the declining years of his marriage to my mother. The song was by Peggy Lee and it was a moody mix of melancholy and gaiety: “Is that all there is? Then let’s keep dancing…”

When I think of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, together and together and together in their rooms of Wallis blue, I think of that song.

Blue Christmas Past

“Cheer up! The worst is yet to come!” screams the blocky black letters on a refrigerator magnet that my sister gave me for Christmas six years ago. The jokey rescripting of Browning’s “Grow old along with me/the best is yet to be,” never failed to make me laugh, and yet its message was too bleak to face every time I fetched milk for my morning coffee.

Tucked away on an upper shelf beside other miscellaneous objects that can neither be given away nor used—a jumbo Santa mug, a beeswax angel candle--the four-inch-square magnet summons up, intense as Proust’s Madeline, my mother’s last Christmas.

My mother was 79 then, what gerontologists call the “young old” as opposed to the “old old.” Even though there was every reason to think she would see several more Christmases, she was overweight, suffering from high blood pressure as well as Type II Diabetes. She had also started to experience memory slips, calling me from the roadside motel near our Vermont home and asking how long she would be staying and when I would be picking her up for dinner, details we had gone over minutes before, when I had dropped her off.

Such confusion was more typical of my mother-in-law, who was also with us in that year, sleeping in the guest room because we couldn’t trust her to be on her own. My mother-in-law had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s four years ago and her short-term memory was shot. She would ask you whether the traffic was bad, and regardless of whether you said it was heavy or light, whether you described the ten-car pile-up that slowed cars for hours on the interstate or the ease with which you breezed through the tollbooths, she would ask you, ten minutes later, whether the traffic was bad.

Being with her made me feel as nutty as Alice deciphering the messages of the Cheshire Cat, and the only way I could bear it was to remind myself that my own mother still possessed all of her marbles, and that therefore I myself stood a good chance of looking at eighty with most of my cerebral parts still in good working order. To think otherwise was to enter a wintry-mix region where every thought shape-shifted into something paler than itself, where your mind steps grew heavy with snowfall, and you were Gretel without Hansel, deep in the forest, with no way home.

My ten-year-old son was thrilled to be hosting his two grandmothers—“I’ve got both my grandmothers for Christmas this year,” he announced to his friends, as if this constituted some sort of familial lunar eclipse. I tried to be of equally buoyant good cheer, helping my husband haul the Christmas tree on a sled from the tree farm down the road, a yuletide ritual that always made me feel like we had stepped out of a Norman Rockwell print, never mind that we could never agree on which tree to cut down. I bought up a storm of stocking stuffers and stayed up past midnight baking cutout reindeer cookies, holiday fruit bread and all manner of high-caloric treats that no one, save our blooming boy with his bean-sprouting limbs, had any business eating.

Holidays can secrete more conflicts than dried-out evergreens can drop needles. But before I elucidate the dramas of this particular Christmas past, I should point out that if my mother were alive and reading this blog, she would object to my use of the word “blue.” Unlike the narrator of “Blue Christmas,” that bit of holiday treacle rendered by every pop singer from Elvis Presley to Bon Jovi and dogging the weary shopper like winter flu down the aisles of Target to Toys ‘R Us, my mother was not alone. Not that there hadn’t been other Christmases where she had slept late in her bungalow in Venice, Florida, her only companions an army of Poinsettia plants stationed on the front and back decks, but this year we were decking the halls and singing joy to the world.

But why I was being such a pill? Why wouldn’t I do what she asked? We were sitting in the car in the Grand Union parking lot, arguing like Jesus, Mary, and Joseph about whether I would pick up a bag of Fritos.

“You know you’re not supposed to eat that garbage. Do you want to end up blind and crippled like Betty?” Betty was my mother’s older sister who had spent seven years in a nursing home, having lost both eyes and her left foot to the ravages of diabetes.

“Don’t talk drivel. I’m hungry, for heaven’s sakes. I haven’t eaten since lunchtime.”

“How about if I get you something healthy, like trail mix.”

“I don’t want trail mix. I want Fritos. Here, I’ll give you el dinero.” She waved a ten-dollar bill in my face.

Mom had been a language major in college, and loved to pepper her speech with foreign words and expressions. I suppose she also thought that if she bribed and cajoled me, I would give in and do her bidding, which most of the time, as her younger, compliant daughter, I did.

“Gigi, I’ll get ‘em for you,” my son said, snatching the bill with a grin, upon which I told him to hand it over and mind his own business.

“What a good boy you are!” my mother cried. “But you need to stay with Gigi while your Mutter shops.”

“Mom, you forgot Gigi’s Fritos!” my son cried. Within seconds of my setting the plastic sac on the seat beside him, he had pulled out milk, seltzer, wine, everything but the evil snack.

“Yeah, well, they were all out,” I said.

“You’re pulling my leg,” my mother said, turning around to inspect the contents of the bag herself.

“I’m not. I looked up and down every aisle, and there were all out. Nada.” I started up the car and revved the motor as if I were preparing to compete at the Daytona Speedway.

“That’s a big fat lie,” my mother said.

“Tant pis!”

We called a Christmas truce to the Fritos battle, and the family segued through the remainder of Christmas Eve without incident. There was the cabbage-and-tofu dinner, pronounced a culinary success by all, including my mother-in-law, who had once made snide remarks about my cooking, something she had long forgotten. There was the ritual opening of one present each, as well as halting piano renditions of Silent Night and Joy to the World (played by your humble blogger), to which we sang lustily, if not tunefully.

Christmas day was the usual exhausting extravaganza with ripped paper and torn bows everywhere and my mother-in-law exclaiming, like a refrain in nursery ditty, “Santa was SO good to us this year,” and my mother doting over the gifts that would go straight back into their boxes, not to be opened up again. The Christmas Day dinner was as festive as its Christmas Eve predecessor. There were no broken wineglasses or chipped dishes, and nothing was spilled on my mother-in-law’s red tablecloth with its trumpet-wielding white angels….

Of course, there was the problem of my mother’s tendency to dominate any gathering with her long-winded ancestor narratives. (Sir Andrew Wyse, who had been best buds with Henry II, made his customary cameo appearance.) All of us, including my mother-in-law, had heard these stories before but we were too polite to say so. It was, after all, Christmas, and excess was the order of the occasion—in eating, drinking, and talking.

As the day crept on little reindeer hooves into evening, my mother showed no signs of letting up with her 12 centuries of ancestor tales. Finally, after my husband had repeatedly mouthed across the room, “You’ve got to get her to shut up,” I convinced her that we all had had too much Christmas and it was time to drive back to the motel.

Our son was asleep when I returned, and my husband was busy measuring out his mother’s nighttime regimen of pills, all prepackaged and labeled by the nursing home, to which we would return her the next day. I was looking forward to a leisurely bath, and he was looking forward to some quiet beside the wood stove. But as he took her by the arm and gently guided her up the stairs, it was evident she had other plans.

“Oh, no you don’t, Mister,” she said, in a loud and unnaturally vigorous voice,
“You’re my husband, and I’m not going to bed without you.”

“Mom, we’ve all had a long day, and it’s time for everyone to turn in.”

“Nosireee. I’m not going another step without you.”

Sundowning, affecting some forty percent of dementia sufferers, is that dreaded condition where the coming of late afternoon and darkness brings all manner of anxiety, agitation, and confusion. My mother-in-law suffered from Sundowning episodes in the nursing home—we had not witnessed them, but there had been several phone calls from the night nurses reporting that she had tried to escape, or had taken a swipe at another resident. Often, just hearing her son’s voice persuaded her to cease and desist, to go gently into that good night of bed.

Her son did becalm her that long-ago Christmas night, but it took close to an hour with my mother-in-law yelling that she wasn’t going upstairs and my husband reassuring her that it had been a long day and that we had had a good Christmas and that Santa had indeed been good to us. At one point, my son padded out in the hall to ask what was wrong and we reassured him that everything was fine and he should go back to bed.

The worst, of course, did come: six months later, my mother became a Christmas tree ornament (the funeral home sent my sister and me a gold-plated star, complete with my mother’s name and birth and death dates). Five years after my mother’s passing, my mother-in-law was laid to rest in the Star-of-the-Sea Cemetery in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Is it possible that I am nostalgic for this blue Christmas of Fritos battles and Sundowning? I am, which proves that the human condition is stranger than anything Santa and his reindeer could scare up.

Royal Blue Beloved

You grow up with the fiction that you will never become your mother. Then one day, perhaps in a photograph taken in an unscripted moment at a family gathering, leaning close to a young niece as you help her unwrap a new Barbie doll, you spy it: her nose that she was so proud of, that she often made jokes about (“You’ve got a Roman nose—it’s roamin’ all over your face”) has become your nose. For years, you have insisted that yours was less beaky, more ski-jump shaped. Peering closer, holding your breath because the resemblance unnerves you, you notice other mirrorings: there is that same over-radiant grin that clamps down tight over darkened, crooked teeth, that same manic intensity that threatens to erupt from your skull.

Or maybe the moment of genetic truth creeps up more stealthily: a pickpocket in the Christmas season. You are in your local public library, killing time before you pick up your child from school and take him to the dentist, and the magazine you reach for is not the “New York Review of Books” with its analysis of the banking crisis of ’08 but the latest issue of “People”—the Royal Report--featuring the young woman with the shining, orthodontic-perfect teeth, the bed curtains of long, brown hair that descend to a royal blue dress. You grope the pages of the Royal Report. You flip open to more of that wrap dress with the rusching beneath the breasts (it’s by Issa), to that sapphire ring wreathed with diamonds climbing up that tapered fourth finger like an exquisite tropical beetle crawling up the slender branch of a bamboo tree.

You can’t stop yourself; you are a bulimic with a quart of mint chocolate-chip ice cream, you suck up every last detail: how Will popped the question in a mountaintop cabin in Kenya, how the wedding will be held in Westminster Abbey on St. Catherine’s Day in April (“Why April?” you wonder, idly quoting T.S. Eliot, ‘April is the cruelest month’), how Kate wishes she had known Diana, who wore that same sapphire ring thirty years ago when she was a fat-cheeked, nineteen-year-old former nanny.

You remember going through your mother’s things after her death, how you found half a bookcase full of royal-related tomes. There were biographies of Queen Elizabeth (I and II), of Victoria and Albert, Nicholas and Alexandra, Charles and Diana, oversized illustrated histories of the Royal House of Windsor, collectors' editions of “Life” and “People” magazines featuring the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the funeral and burial of Diana.

The pile of royal titles in your mother’s estate did not surprise you, since you yourself gave her many of these books, for birthday and Christmas gifts. But as you packed up the library in a crate for the local hospice shop, you considered that it was a little like giving chocolate to a diabetic…escaping into the castles of European royalty did not help her become the architect of her own life, the late-life artist she dreamed of becoming...if only she had time.

But how are you, who grew up mooning over Princess Anne in “Life” magazine, Princess Anne in velvet-collared hacking jacket and matching velvet cap bent over a chestnut thoroughbred, Princess Anne in yards of lace, wrapped around her strong-jawed Captain Mark Phillips, how are you different?

You can recall, the way others remember where they were when the Twin Towers fell, what you were doing on July 29, 1981 (deconstructing, with your first husband and another couple in a suburban New Jersey family room, that poignant moment when Diana mixed up Charles’ multiple middle names as she said her vows); whom you were with when you learned that the marriage had been doomed from the moment it began, with Charles in love with Camilla and teenaged Diana nothing but a prized filly to be groomed and whipped by the Windsors (you were between husbands then, and the demise of that fairy tale made you fear no romantic tie was safe); what you were doing on the hot end-of-August day when you learned Diana had met her end speeding through a Paris Tunnel with her lover, Dodi Fayed (having breakfast with your dad, his longtime companion, your second husband and three-year-old son); how you got up at dawn to watch the funeral in Westminster Abbey, how your husband snickered “Celebrity Death!” as you sat in your egg-stained terrycloth robe, weeping as Elton John sang “Candle in the Wind.”

You learn that Kate Middleton will become the first queen in the thousand-year reign of the British monarchy to have earned a college degree (with honors from St. Andrew’s University in Edinburgh, where she met her prince and studied art history), and you consider how your mother, so proud of her own Bachelor of Arts degree from Smith College, would love that detail, how she would say that women really have come a long way, that two hundred years ago our great-great-great grandmothers could not go to college or vote or own property.

You discover that a record television audience is expected to watch Kate & Will’s wedding in Westminster Abbey on St. Catherine’s Day on April 29, 2011, which the United Kingdom has already declared a national holiday. (You google Saint Catherine, and learn that she was born in Siena in 1347, the youngest of 25 children, that half her brothers and sisters died of the Black Death, that Catherine had a vision at aged six of Jesus Christ, that she refused marriage, fasting until she was granted her wish to become a nun--“Build a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee,” she is meant to have said--that she devoted herself to healing the sick and uniting the warring states of Italy, that her letters are considered some of the greatest works of Tuscan literature).

You pray for Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, that her life with Diana’s first-born son, who was only 15 when he walked behind his mother’s casket, will be joyful, a companionate marriage of equals, that it won’t end in betrayal and divorce, that Kate will teach other women, women like you who are secretly dazzled by her, to claim our extraordinary powers.
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