Nocturne at Midnight

Six days after Deborah Digges jumped to her death in western Massachusetts, I drove to the coast of southern Maine to celebrate my dad’s ninetieth birthday. This juxtaposition of tragedy and triumph is common in midlife, framing our days with a collage of contrasts, making us sometimes as indifferent as the ploughman in Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus, who pays no attention to the boy who has tumbled from the sky.

Not that my dad would be terribly broken up by the suicide of a 59-year-old poet he’d never heard of; you don’t reach your ninth decade in this vale of tears by being overly sentimental, a weepy Caspar Milquetoast. And yet Dad has not been a stranger to dark moods over his long life; as a child, I remember him playing, over and over, on a saucer-sized vinyl record on his turntable, the mournful ballad by Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is? Then let’s keep dancing…” This ditty exasperated me in the same way that “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” by Bob Dylan exasperated him, but I would never have dreamed of telling him so. (He felt no compunction about demanding that I turn off “that garbage by Bobby Die-lan,” whose last name Dad knew perfectly well how to pronounce but said wrong just to annoy me.) A few years later, when the television series M*A*S*H was all the rage, he listened obsessively to its theme song, “Suicide is Painless; it brings on many changes…”

And then there were the hardcover books that piled up on the slender end table in his study—THE SAVAGE GOD: A STUDY OF SUICIDE, by A. Alvarez; MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, which recounted Victor Frank’s survival in a concentration camp; and THE DENIAL OF DEATH by Ernest Becker. Whenever Dad was teaching his Dale Carnegie class, attending a meeting of the Lion’s Club, or traveling to New York on business, I parked myself on his red leather sofa in his book-lined study, usually with a box of Freihofer’s Chocolate Chip cookies and a tumbler of milk by my side, and read until my head ached.

So much misery for a fat, friendless teenager to gorge herself on. There was Sylvia Plath, survivor of multiple suicide attempts, and dead at 30 from the gas of an oven she’d turned on herself in a London flat in 1963. There were the Jews, gassed not by choice but by coercion, rounded up and stripped naked in Dachau, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. The Austrian-Jewish psychiatrist Victor Frankl, who had spent five years in four different labor camps, including Auchwitz, had lost his father, mother, brother, and wife in the Holocaust. Victor Frankl had stayed alive by summoning up the figure of his beloved wife, who had been shipped off to another camp, talking to her while fending off hunger, beatings and forced marches. Other survivors had recited poetry, scrawled drawings on bits of toilet paper, sung arias from operas they remembered. People, observed Frankl, could endure anything as long as they could still love, could stay connected to some person or idea greater than themselves. According to Ernest Becker, every human being needed a causa sui project (four years of Latin at Miss Hall’s School was finally proving useful) to help him forget that he was a “god who shits,” a great big pile of nothingness.

I didn’t have a clue what my own causa sui project was, but sometimes it seemed that Dad had one. Late at night, after coming home from his many meetings and long after my mother, sister and I had gone to bed, Dad would sit alone at the grand piano in the living room, playing Chopin. Dad was no Artur Rubinstein; he had taken up the piano as an adult, beginning around the same time I did, in the middle 1960s. (Years later, he would explain that his parents had not let him play as a child, insisting that the piano was for girls and forcing him to play the trumpet, which he gave up as soon as he was allowed to.) Dad and I had the same teacher, a woman named Betty Maby (this was her real name, which I accepted without irony as a child but which now seems darkly comic, if she were a character in a theatre of the absurd). Mrs. Maby had been a concert pianist in her youth, but was reduced in middle life to instructing children (still mostly girls, as my grandparents had observed a generation ago) in dumbed-down versions of Sheep May Safely Graze. (The first time I ever saw an antimacassar was in Mrs. Maby’s darkened living room in Lee, where freshly laundered squares of crocheted ivory and white lace stood guard over the backs and arms of sofas and armchairs.)

Dad was Betty Maby’s only adult student—he got to call her by her first name—and she was patient with him, his lack of rhythm and pitch, his middle-aged, arthritic fingers which were as clunky and intractable as corkscrews. But what he lacked in timing, tone and finger dexterity, he more than made up for in will. He even agreed to play in her spring and autumn student recitals in the antimacassar-ridden living room in Lee, performing at the end after all the children had finished, massacring simplified arrangements of Fur Elise and Air on a G String, despite the tranquillizers he took to still his shaking fingers. But no one but me, his daughter in a frilly dress shrinking into a sea of doilies in the back, seemed mortified by his performance. All the parents complimented him afterward over punch and cookies, confiding that they admired his courage.

When Dad played alone, with no one listening, he was at ease. There were two pieces by Chopin—the short Prelude in E Minor, which was fairly easy, and the Nocturne Opus 9 in E Flat Major which was more advanced--that he practiced over and over again, swaying on the piano bench as he leaned into and away from the keys, an expressiveness that Betty Maby, who insisted on an erect, still posture at all times, never permitted her younger charges. Dad rarely got through either piece without a mistake. The Nocturne, in particular, included several trills that were challenging for even the most experienced of players. But he played on, repeating the troublesome measures where he faltered, often waking me from the guest room above the back stairs where I had retreated to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep. When the house would momentarily grow quiet, I would turn over groggily in my bed, relieved that he was calling it a night. But he had just stopped to turn on the metronome or crack his fingers back into shape. Within minutes, the mournful chords would roll out all over again.

Dad played the piano for forty years. He played long after I gave it up, through his separation and divorce, purchasing an upright Spinet when he moved into a two-bedroom bachelor’s cottage on Lake Onota. He continued to perform in Betty Maby’s student recitals in Lee, his longtime companion, Janet, and his elderly mother in the audience, though his mother confided to me, her granddaughter, that she really didn’t see why he kept at the darned thing, and why, for Pete’s sakes, couldn’t Betty get him to stop POUNDING on the keys. After his mother’s death in 1982, he purchased a second-hand Baldwin that had been used in summer concerts at Tanglewood and moved it into his mother’s living room, now his living room, in a sunny corner overlooking the back gardens. When Betty Maby retired and moved to Florida, Dad found a new teacher, who urged him to tackle more modern composers such as Scott Joplin and George Gershwin.

At Thanksgiving gatherings, which had become festive noisy affairs of a large blended family, Dad would preside over impromptu musicales, where the theme song from the Titanic, the Ashokan Farewell, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, and Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie’s would be picked out by various grandchildren and step-grandchildren. At the end of each performance, regardless of whether it was heartbreakingly beautiful or simply heartbreaking, Dad would clap and shout, “Encore! Encore!” When the other performers begged him to take his place at the piano bench, he obliged with a halting but lively rendition of Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer.

Dad moved his piano to the two-bedroom condo he shares with Janet on the grounds of their assisted living facility in Maine, but he rarely plays much anymore. Instead, he reads The New York Times, walks on the beach, watches television, and does crossword puzzles. Last winter he broke his hip while walking on the ice, and while he has made a remarkable recovery, he has become more cautious, less driven by the need to fill every moment with purposeful activity, more content to sit of a warm afternoon on his terrace and nap.

He’s ninety. He’s entitled to sleep in the sun. But I would give anything to hear him play that Chopin Nocturne again.

Leaving Blue Hills Road: The Suicide of Deborah Digges

“The suicide doesn’t go alone, he takes everybody with him,” wrote the novelist William Maxwell. When prizewinning poet and Tufts University professor Deborah Digges jumped from the upper bleachers of McGuirk Alumni Stadium at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst on April 10th, she took hundreds, perhaps thousands, with her: her children, brothers, sisters, ex-husbands, friends, students, colleagues, neighbors, and readers. She took the young women of Temple University’s Lacrosse Team who were practicing at the stadium that afternoon: they were the ones who called the police after finding her on the ground, badly injured, at the end of their practice. And she took me, a fellow writer and resident of the Pioneer Valley, who cannot pass McGuirk Stadium on Rocky Hill Road without grieving for her.

I never met Deborah Digges, though I was once invited to a dinner party years ago in Washington, D.C. where she and her second husband, poet Stanley Plumley, were to have been among the guests. The hostess was another writer, a fellow graduate student in the M.F.A. program at George Mason University in Virginia. I declined her invitation because I was feeling sorry for myself over a failed love affair and in no mood to make literary niceties. Now I am sorry I didn’t go, because if I had shared a meal with Deborah Digges, I might now possess some insight, however shadowy, into why she killed herself.

It had been a spectacular day, that Good Friday before Easter, unseasonably warm and sunny, more like mid-June than mid-April, with forsythia and magnolia coming into bloom, daffodils and crocuses sprouting up along the roadsides. As my husband and I inched east in bumper-to-bumper traffic along Route 9 to pick up our son, who had been let out of school early and was playing tennis at Amherst College, we noticed cells of college kids on lawns playing horseshoes, drinking beer, waving as we passed. Every other patch of muddy green seemed to host such a gathering—the boys shirtless, the girls in bikinis, everyone high on sunshine and the holiday (Passover and Easter came back-to-back this year).

Everyone except Deborah Digges, the 59-year-old widow in the driver’s seat of her VW Jetta, leaving the 1950s yellow Cape where she lived alone with her dogs and cat, passing the green mailbox she had painted herself, perched on its filigreed, white-painted stick like the welcoming smile of an old friend. The mail had already come, and she was driving to the end of Blue Hills Road, no husband in the passenger seat (her third husband, Dr. Frank Lowe, a former dean of the veterinary schools of Tufts and Cornell Universities, had died of cancer six years ago); no child in the back seat (her younger son, Stephen, was now a successful photo-journalist in Kenya; his brother, Charles, also a journalist, lived in Oslo and St. Petersburg); no one except a once-beautiful, gray-haired woman alone, turning left onto Amity Street, driving toward eternity.

But you’re a famous poet, I tell her in this strange, posthumous conversation I have been conducting over the past weeks. You have a great job; students who adore you; good health and dental coverage; a decent 401K retirement fund. You publish regularly in The New Yorker. (I know tenured professors with several books under their belts who will never be published in The New Yorker.) You have written four books of poetry, and your last, The Trapeze, is considered a “masterwork,” according to your obituary in The New York Times. You’ve published two acclaimed memoirs. (Last week, I checked out The Stardust Lounge from the Jones Library in Amherst, and inhaled it in three days, crying at the end when the 18-year-old Stephen Digges, after six years of drug addiction and delinquency, is delivered by his mother to college in New York City where he waves goodbye and says, “Thanks for a great childhood, Mom.”)

What’s more, you’re not some selfish, careerist poet boasting about your latest grants and publications, your most recent appearances at literary conferences in posh locations. You’re a good person; while your son was going through his crazy-making adolescence, you adopted a homeless boy, Trevor Clunes, and helped him negotiate Amherst Regional High School, helped him get his graduate equivalency degree. According to your biography at the Tufts University web site, you also volunteer at the Dakin Animal Shelter in Leverett, and travel frequently to East Africa to work with children at the Tumaini Orphanage near Mount Kenya.

I know you are still grieving the loss of your beloved Frank, whom you wrote about so movingly in “Seersucker Suit,” which your New York Times obituary quoted in full. When I read the lines, “O, the great ghost ships of his shoes,” I imagine you standing in Frank’s closet, smelling his trousers and suits and belts and shoes. I, too, have stared at my dead husband’s clothes, knowing I ought to give them away, and yet wanting to leave them right where they are because maybe he might come back, go to work among the living again. I know that mourning doesn’t follow some set pattern laid down in the grief books, doesn’t necessarily attenuate with time.

Still, how could you do it? How could you leave behind your own ghostly shoes for others to grieve? How could you leave those pretty, sweaty, big-boned girls in their goggles and headbands and red-lettered jerseys, girls who were looking forward to pizza and a good night’s sleep at the Econolodge, looking forward to playing UMass on Saturday afternoon, how could you leave them with images of your broken, bloody body, the wailing sirens of the Amherst Ambulance rushing to Cooley-Dickinson Hospital? How could you leave me, a middle-aged woman in blue jeans whom you never met, riding my bike slowly, at dusk, past your home on Blue Hills Road, wondering stupidly how I might have saved you?