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 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.
All posts copyright© 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Blue Dancer: Remembering Jena Marcovicci

A man I once loved is no longer in the world. His name was Jena Marcovicci, and he was taken out three years ago, but because we had long been out of touch, I found out about his passing only last month at a dinner party.

Jena died in his sleep at the age of 62. He had suffered from heart disease, which had killed his father decades before, and although Jena’s doctors had advised him to undergo a simple procedure involving the implantation of stents, he had put it off, troubled not only at the prospect of the operation but also at the post-op medley of drugs he would need to take for the rest of his life.

According to the man who told the story--we were meeting for the first time, but my shock over Jena’s death jettisoned small talk--Jena had often said, If it’s my time, it’s my time. Jena had long believed life was a dance, and if the Big Guy in the Sky suddenly cut the music off when you least expected it, so be it. That didn’t mean you couldn’t live passionately; if you were Jena, you lived more passionately, your mission to go faster, like one of those Slavic dancers upping the ante the lower he gets to the ground.

I don’t remember much about how or when Jena and I met—only that he wasn’t Jena Marcovicci then, he was Gene Marsten, and his dark hair was cropped close to his skull and he didn’t look anything like Jesus. We met on a tennis court in the city of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where we both grew up. It would not have been at the Pittsfield Country Club because his family didn’t belong (his father owned a small ski shop in town) but at the crumbling concrete courts with the smudgy baselines at Pontoosuc Lake where he often taught.

I wouldn’t have been taking a lesson because I had already stopped playing tournaments. (See “Acing the Blues,” for an account of my fifteen minutes of junior tennis stardom.) I was probably playing with my dad, who was disappointed that I had given the game up, disappointed, too, that I had packed on thirty pounds and started getting C’s at school and was running around with a druggie crowd.

But my forehand was still formidable, and if I was honest with myself, I missed playing. Gene was giving a lesson on the next court. He probably asked if I wanted to hit—he liked helping kids who showed some talent, and he was good-hearted and probably did it for nothing.

I loved playing with Gene Marsten. There was no way I could return his serve or even get back one of his smacking cross-court forehands—he had recently been a qualifier at the French Open—but, like a lion who feels no need to raise himself to full height when not engaged in hunting, Gene rarely strutted his championship stuff. We just rallied; we didn’t even play points, and he urged me to keep the ball going for as long as I could. His voice was whispery soft—the opposite of a bullying coach. He said I didn’t need to kill the ball, didn’t have to punish my opponent or myself—playing was not about winning or losing, being up or down, it was about staying light and focused and ready on your feet, being one with the moment, one with the ball, hitting the sweet spot.

The rudiments of this philosophy—a bit of Ram Dass, a soupcon of Jean-Paul Sartre, a pinch of Dame Julian of Norwich--would become the basis for the course Jena would teach every summer at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. I never took “The Dance of Tennis,” but Gene’s soft voice and existential sureness touched something in me.

I was 16 then, a not very distinguished 11th grader at Miss Hall’s School. The year was 1970. Naked Buddhist Monks were setting fire to themselves in Saigon and Lieutenant James Calley was blowing away Vietnamese villagers in My Lai and the Beatles were bawling songs with weird lyrics like “Why don’t we do it in the road?” My parents weren’t speaking to each other, and my mom almost never got out of bed, except late at night when she prowled the kitchen and we ate Friendly’s ice cream together, though I never told her anything about anything.

If a 25-year-old woman rumbled into our driveway on a summer night in a battered station wagon, beeping her horn for my 16-year-old son, I’d tell her to get the hell out of the state. But it was a different time back then—the country was at war, the generations were at war, kids were dropping acid, joining the Weather Underground and blowing themselves up in Greenwich Village.

My parents probably figured I could do a lot worse than ride shotgun with former tennis star and current Ph.D. student Gene Marsten. Gene looked more like a Marine than a hippie. He didn’t take LSD or smoke marijuana; he didn’t drink beer, or smoke cigarettes. He didn’t even eat meat.

Gene was the first person I ever met who kept journals, kept them not because he wanted to be Walt Whitman, but because he loved words, loved blue pens and black pens and white pages, with lines and without, bound and unbound, and was so inebriated with the joy and mystery and puzzlement of living that he had to write, get it all down before it vanished, like Puff the Magic Dragon.

One afternoon, before we said goodbye for the summer and he headed to Florida to teach tennis and then to California for a semester at Pepperdine, he presented me with a gift. When I imagine this scene, I picture it on the tailgate of his dented blue Buick station wagon littered with old tennis balls and broken-stringed racquets. The present, taped up in a brown paper bag, was as big as a photo album and weighed as much as racquet bag. It was a black, hardbound journal, with 192 blank pages.

“I started keeping journals when I was younger than you," Gene said. "Get into the habit of making an entry every day. Let writing be a friend to you, keeping you company, helping you pay attention. One day you’ll look back and think, ‘Wow, did I really write that?' One day you’ll be amazed at how much you’ve grown.”

The next summer, Gene went to Hungary and came back Jena. The summer after that he grew his hair to his shoulders and decided to give up talking. He bought a chalkboard and draped it around his neck and wrote messages while conducting his tennis lessons. I was already miffed that I could not call him Gene, but the silent vow seemed too weird for words, and I said so.

We were seated across from one another in an orange creamsicle-colored booth at Friendly’s, and the square chalkboard was leaning against Jena on the seat like a sullen child. Jena reached for the piece of chalk dangling from its string, and wrote, “Only you can know your own path, Beck. I will let you go if that’s what you want.”

Then he smiled at me, as self-possessed as Gandhi. We agreed to part. There were no words, no tears, just the tenderest of embraces, our arms wrapping about one another as delicately as raindrops falling on apple blossoms.

Over the next decades, I occasionally saw Jena on the tennis court when I returned to Pittsfield, but mostly I heard about him from friends of friends, the six degrees of separation that linked our unlinked lives. Jena had started teaching at Omega by then, and he had a gig doing sports psychology sessions at Canyon Ranch. He also ran a tennis program for underprivileged kids in L.A. and Miami, something he had started years ago. And he still played competitively, was ranked in the top five in the under sixties in New England.

After my son was born and when he got old enough to play in tournaments, I fantasized that one day I would run into Jena again and we’d hit and maybe he’d give my boy some tips about how to play in the zone. I thought that Jena and I were both still young, our paths still unspooling before us, different but connecting coordinates along the tantric trajectory of our lives.

One warm November morning, I sat in a neighborhood café near my house with a decomposing manila envelope. In black, magic-markered letters it read, “Letters from Gene, and other memorabilia.” It came from a packing box in a storage area, among old tax returns and marked-up college texts belonging to my dead mother.

I had brought the envelope to the café because the country of the past can be as gloomy as a mortuary at midnight, and I wanted to be among bright lights and people sipping skinny lattes. The letters from Gene, all before he became Jena, were nestled among old photographs; there were about thirty, all on folded, graying notebook paper, filled from one side of the page to the other with lively blue-penned print (the f’s and g’s flowing down like happy children into the next line), the hanging shreds from where he had ripped out the pages still visible.

“Dearest Beck,” most of them began, and they included details of afternoons in university libraries, encounters with bums in L.A., as well as random philosophic pronouncements: “it seems so logical that to be really free one should possess little. And then it comes down to basic goals—peace with oneself.”

The letters weren’t literary—the man who told me about Jena’s death explained that he had been dyslexic, which had never been diagnosed or treated and which explained why Jena's two self-published books on tennis never found much of an audience. But Jena’s words, which included advice to me (whom he called his "pig-tailed princess") about how life would get better, were filled with a passionate intensity. “'You must learn to love the questions,'” Jena advised me, quoting Rilke, whose LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET I would carry around like a Bible for most of my twenties.

I have a file on my laptop that I sometimes open when I’m feeling overwhelmed with what Virgil called “lacrimae rerum-- the tears of human things.” The file contains a list of gratitude quotes, and one goes like this: “Somebody saw something in you once—and that is partly why you’re where you are today. Find a way to thank them.” Thank you, Jena.
All posts copyright© 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Telegenic Blue and Arthur Ashe

When Arthur Ashe won the US Open at Forest Hills in 1968, the courts were made of clay and the players dressed in white. Only one other African-American, Althea Gibson, had risen so high in this white-dominated sport. A continent away, apartheid was law in South Africa. When Arthur Ashe applied for a visa to play in the South African Open in Johannesburg, he was turned down because of his skin color.

Decades after Ashe's death from AIDS, the courts are telegenic blue, players dress in multi colors, and African-American children dream of becoming the next Venus Williams or James Blake. Middle-aged white ladies who learned to serve at clubs that excluded African-Americans volunteer at Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day.

Now in its fifteenth year, Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day draws some 30,000 young fans who flock to the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Queens, New York. Sponsored by a corporate entity (this year it was Hess) in partnership with the United States Tennis Association, the event is free, and requires the volunteer services of 550 adults.

I am proud to report that I was one of those volunteers, having applied to the United States Tennis Association many months in advance as well as attended a mandatory meeting in the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, where I picked up my logo-emblazoned white cap and matching shirt.

So how do you insure that all 550 volunteers show up very early on a Saturday morning in their designated locations in a remote corner of Queens? You hold out the carrot of a meal card, worth $12.50 (which doesn’t get much, as one veteran AAKD volunteer sourly pointed out), and dispensed no later than 8:30 a.m.

There is nothing like the threat of missing a free lunch to light a fire under one’s middle-aged butt. After getting hopelessly lost in Queens, this AAKD volunteer found herself racing from remote parking area “G” to a shuttle bus to the South Gate, upon which she hurried through the security check-in to present herself, considerably out of breath, at the East Gate check-in table at 8:25.

On Court 7, Laura Puryear, a young woman in a safari-style hat from Oklahoma, was mobilizing our group of volunteers to the six mini-courts set up within the blue and white squares. Laura explained that all children would be given hand-ball-sized racquets, divided up into groups of four or five, and assigned to each mini-court, where volunteers would place two children on one side of the set, and two on the opposite side. The volunteer would then hand each child a large, foam-filled tennis ball from a hopper of similarly sized foam balls and instruct him or her to start rallying. As soon as one child made an error, he or she would step out and the next player would rotate in.

“It’s really a form of controlled chaos,” Laura joked. By ten o’clock, kids were jumping up and down as they waited in line behind the chain link fence, ready to prove to the world (or at least to their parents, who stood by with digital cameras) that they were Serena-and-Roger-wannabees. Some children had brought their own racquets, and some had the practiced strokes of longtime players. There was one six-year-old African-American boy with a metallic blue bandana and a wicked backhand who boasted that he had been playing since the age of two.

By noon, between the heat, the shrieks, the standing on achy feet, the disputes about what was in or out (with so many mini-courts, we were instructed to take a relaxed approach to line-calls), this volunteer was pooped. Laura suggested that I retrieve balls on the opposite side of the court, where there was less bedlam as well as some shade.

I did as I was told, and fell into conversation with two retirees from Long Island City. Neither played tennis—their grown-up kids had once been swimmers--but the couple were volunteer junkies. “We’ve done Ronald McDonald, United Way, you name it,” the husband said, to which the wife pointed out that studies showed that volunteering is good for you, and helps you live longer.

At 12:45, it was time to pack up the nets, racquets, and balls. Laura thanked each of us with a hearty high-five, and pronounced us free agents: we could have lunch, wander into Ashe stadium, or hang out among the outer courts, where various US Open qualifying matches would soon begin.

I had a second gig in Westchester doing dog-and-chicken sitting, and so after standing in a long line for a goat cheese salad from Stonyfield Farm, after watching a few of the women qualifiers warm up on Court 14, women with tree-trunk-like legs who screamed like Sharapova and made me feel a howl of regret that I was no longer so strong or so young, with such melancholy thoughts, I made my way to Parking lot “G.”

Then a young African-American man who was wearing the AAKD shirt and hat stopped me to ask about buses to Manhattan. He said he had to be back at the Grand Hyatt Hotel for a coaches’ meeting. I said I remembered something about buses at the East Gate, and pulled out my map.

We fell into conversation, where we were from, what we’d done for AAKD—he had been assigned to the “Beat the Pro” session on Court 17. His name was Kobe—his name was actually much longer but it was too hard for people to pronounce and everyone just called him Kobe. He was from Zambia, had been ranked in the top ten in the juniors and now taught tennis at a club in the Riverdale section of Manhattan. He loved the experience of being a volunteer at AAKD; he said it was important “to give back” as Arthur Ashe had done.

Kobe said his dream was to help kids in Africa learn how to play the game, that he had a scheme to send back used balls and tennis racquets to children in Zambia. We exchanged e-mail addresses and I said that I knew pros at Amherst College with whom I could connect him.

“Who knows,” I said, “Maybe my 16-year-old son and I will go to Zambia some day and work with you.”

“That would be awesome,” he said.

Then we shook hands and said goodbye, and I walked away, filled with love for life and tennis and New York. (Where else but in New York could such an encounter take place?) I thought of Arthur Ashe and the adversities he had overcome, beginning with struggling with racism in the South and ending with contracting AIDS from a blood transfusion in the North and how his life had not been about dejection and defeat but about triumph and generosity and goodness.

“From what we get,” Ashe once said, “we can make a living; from what we give, however, makes a life.”
All posts copyright© 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

The Glories of Azurite

My son is almost grown, which means that the opportunities for volunteering as a parent chaperone are fast disappearing. When my boy was in elementary school, and I was elected secretary of the PTA (not by choice, mind you, but only because no one else was willing to do it), it seemed that every other week I was being tapped to help out in the art class or take over the after-school French class. Back then, in the talc mines of motherhood, when I was complaining about all the minutes I had to take and the cupcakes I had to bake, I never imagined that I would pine for the long afternoons of herding noisy children through museums.

A friend once described me as a hopeless passeist, which means I’m in love with the past simply because it is past, and I can lose myself in a sentimental Proustian swoon over any and all of my yesterdays, however ordinary, simply because they are gone.

All of which is preface and prolegomena to the cameo of your humble blogger wandering like an English sheepdog behind a gaggle of eighteen ninth-graders as they cavorted along the paved walkways of Amherst College, preparing to lay siege to its rust-colored Natural History Museum. Their teacher, Mr. Weems, had warned that they were to be silent as fossils—in fact, if they spoke above a whisper in the corridors, they would never be allowed in the museum again (ill-behaved middle schoolers from another school were responsible for such draconian policy).

As our group shuffled into the high-ceilinged hall of dinosaurs, my son and his classmates were divided into groups, shepherded into elevators, and led to their designated floors. Each student was expected to stand before his or her chosen mineral, and produce a detailed ink drawing on his or her sketchpad.

There were three parent volunteers, including myself. (When we set off from the Hartsbrook school’s parking lot, we had only two but a last-minute cell phone call from the bus scared up Sarah, a harried mother of five who had completely forgotten about having signed on for her tour of duty.) Paul was assigned to patrol the first floor; Sarah was stationed on the second floor; while I became the chatelaine of the third floor, peering over the shoulders of four ninth-graders as they studied their quartz, garnet, topaz, and copper.

My charges were as silent as Tutankhamen’s tomb-mates (my son was presumably equally mum sketching calcite on the second floor), which meant I could relax and admire the sapphire hills of the Holyoke Range from the open offices of the Amherst College geology profs as well as marvel at the queerly named specimens of riebeckite, kyanite, glauconite, cavansite, and sodalite, all of which were displayed and identified in the large glass cases lining the walls. Who knew that there were so many rocks from places near and far with so many declensions of blue? Who knew that it was possible to feel, swanning up and down the hushed wooden floors, as clueless as a medieval peasant? Ah, to barge into the offices of one of those geology profs, and be instructed in the mysteries of plate tectonics!

And then I saw it—the stone that stilled all neuronal pitter-patter. It was at the end of the corridor in a massive tri-level display case across from the janitor’s office and catty corner to the women’s room. The rock was massive, big as the helmet of Pericles, and rivered and pockmarked with blues and greens. The identifying card explained that it was a combination of azurite and malachite, both of which are oxidized forms of copper. The rock hailed from Bisbee, Arizona, and its technical name was a medley of uppercase C’s and O’s and lower case 2s and 3s.

(In the next few days, I would research azurite, learning that it is also called Chessylite, after a mine in Lyons, France, as well as Blue Bice or simply Bice, which comes from the Old French word, Bis, for gray. Azurite derives from the Persian, lazhward, which is an area in the present-day Iranian desert known for its deposits of lapis lazuli, another deep blue stone with which azurite was often confused. Lapis lazuli, which is Latin and means stone of azure, derives from the metamorphic rock of lazurite. Coarse grains of azurite were commonly used by medieval and Renaissance painters; Vermeer and Raphael were both especially fond of azurite. Not as bright and blue as aquamarine, azurite was cheaper and more plentiful.)

“Gather me into the artifice of eternity,” William Butler Yeats once wrote in his poem, “Sailing to Byzantium.” That line had always mystified me. How could eternity be a constructed or even a reconstructed experience? But hovering in the circles of midday light beside the azurite, I suddenly got it. The rock, its blues and greens making prismatic patterns such as one sees when looking through a kaleidoscope, hardly looked like it was extracted from anyplace as humble as the Mule Mountains of Bisbee, Arizona, but as if its crystals were hammered into form by Hephaestus himself.

Then, as if refracting the arc of my son’s childhood, Mr. Weems appeared at my side to whisper that it was time to go. I led my charges to the elevator and down to the outdoor terrace for the obligatory headcount. The mood in the noonday sun was festive, and after all the gangly teenagers were accounted for, we marched back to the bus, the three parent chaperones piling into Paul’s van, with my son and one of his classmates, Sean, settling in the back seats.

On the return to school, we talked of things lapidary. Paul praised the diamonds from Brazil on the first floor, and I recalled the many specimens of quartz, including the purple amethyst. Who knew that the semi-precious stone was a type of quartz? Sean explained that quartz was actually very plentiful, covering 20 percent of the lithosphere.

What’s the lithosphere, I asked, feeling, once again, stupider than a baker, butcher, and candlestick maker. The fifteen-year-old patiently explained that it was another name for the outer surface of the earth’s crust. Oh, I said, thinking that there should be a word—sheeposphere?—for the region a parent enters when her son and his peers prove that they are smarter.

Then the talk segued to the high school prom, which was scheduled for Saturday night, who was taking whom, what the boys were planning to wear (the theme was under the ocean) and whether the services of parent chaperones would be needed. Sarah, with her five children, was an expert in the protocol of proms past, and explained that the entire faculty turned out to chaperone, and that parents’ services were not required, save for the dropping off and the picking up.

The following evening, when my boy, freshly shaven and dressed in his father’s tux, bounded out the door to be ferried by another parent to the prom, I felt a bit teary-eyed. But within the hour, I was back on Google, researching the history of azurite.

Some weeks later, I returned to the museum to wander lonely as a cloud through the empty corridors, riding the elevator to the third floor to visit what I have come to regard as my specimen of azurite, which was even lovelier the second time glimpsed, its rivulets of blues and greens sure to move future generations of schoolchildren and their parents.
All posts copyright© 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author