The Blue Candles of Chanukah

Wandering through Whole Foods in mid-December, dodging displays of gingerbread house kits and boxes of Clementines, obsessing over the disquieting reality that I had not begun my Christmas shopping, or sent cards or baked cookies, let alone put up a wreath or tree (I wasn’t a total Scrooge, as I had baked a fruit cake and hung a few ceramic Santas from the windows, as well as gotten out the red tablecloth with white angels that had belonged to my mother-in-law, she who made ten varieties of Christmas cookies every year and generally knocked herself out until she was comatose on Christmas morning), in this pre-Christmas funk, I noticed a small Menorah in the window beyond the checkout. Peering closer, I saw, Oh Hosanna in the Highest, that its candles were blue!

It was the first night of Chanukah, but having celebrated Christmas all my life, I was not mindful of Chanukah. (Christian Scientists don’t celebrate Christmas, or Easter, since they believe Jesus is as immutable as Jupiter and can neither be born, crucified, nor resurrected, but such theological hair-splitting wasn’t my mother’s style and so we put up a tree and hung our stockings like most other folks in our New England town). True, my best friend was Jewish, and she was always singing the praises of latkes and Chanukah gelt. I had admired the large silver Menorah on the dining table at her home (polished to a flawless shine by her mother), and sometimes envied that she got presents every night for eight nights, while Christmas lasted only one day…even so, I couldn’t have answered one serious question about her holiday.

Why, for instance, did Chanukah last eight nights instead of twelve, like the twelve days of Christmas, which we performed at our school every December? (One year, we got to wear starched pinafores, carry shiny pails and parade about among the eight-maids-a-milking; another year, we wore red tights and cavorted with the boys as the ten lords-a-leaping. But neither of us ever got to be Queen. That honor went to Cathy Dykeman, who was also Jewish, but this didn’t diminish her delight at appearing in a white pouffy dress fit for a Tudor princess and perching smugly beside her king, fifth-grade heartthrob Andy MacGruer.) In seventh grade, my best buddy, who always made the high honor roll and who was so smart she could dissect fetal frogs with her eyes closed, tried to teach me a few basic facts about Chanukah. She explained that it commemorated the victory of the Maccabeans over the Greek-Syrians. The Maccabees eventually became as oppressive as the Syrians, and so “The Festival of Lights,” focused more upon the miracle of the oil, which burned for eight nights after the temple was rededicated. Chanukah predates Christmas by 164 years; in fact, if there had been no Judas Maccabee there would be no Jesus.

The information stayed in my hippocampus about as long as a burning Chanukah candle (one half-hour, for all you ignoramus Christmas mavens). Christmas was just so much simpler. A baby. A stable. Shepherds watching their flocks by night. Wise men carrying gold, frankincense, and myrrh. I had no idea what frankincense and myrrh were, but I liked the sounds of the words and I figured the stuff was pretty fantastic, the equivalent for me of opening the biggest present under the tree and finding, nestled in layers of creamy tissue paper, a Chatty Cathy doll. There was the nagging problem of Jesus’ mother and her supposed virginity, but in the dark, unenlightened 1960s, no one thought kids needed to know about bleeding hymens. I could put the problem of Jesus’ conception aside, and simply stare blissfully at the doll-like, painted creatures inside the little wooden crèche that my mother put out on the hall table, and leave the metaphysics to the Redeemer’s Dad.

I am ashamed to admit that my goyisha incuriosity about Chanukah continued into adulthood. Yes, my first husband was a Jew, and he was as smart as my best buddy, possibly smarter, but he wasn’t about to instruct me in the history of the dreidel; he didn’t even own a Menorah, for Heaven’s sakes. For one thing, he had grown up in a non-observant family in Philadelphia which was neither fish nor fowl, which is to say they lit a Menorah AND put up a Christmas tree, much to the head-shaking of their Jewish neighbors. Even more shocking: this grandson of a pious, long-bearded Jew who had escaped the pogroms in Russia and who had studied the Talmud every day while his wife ran a dry goods store in the slums of Philadelphia, this Jew, Leonard Feldstein, my husband, was a baptized Catholic! What’s more, and I guess this goes with the territory, he got high on everything Christmas, from drinking eggnog to hanging mistletoe to listening to all fifty-two movements of Handel’s Messiah.

Len’s conversion to Catholicism, which puzzled, if not outraged, many of his Jewish friends, did not occur on my marital watch, or I would surely have put a stop to it. Leonard Feldstein became a Catholic two years before I met him, when he was between wives, between girlfriends and generally so low that he even flirted with suicide. (My blue hours of middle life are a stroll through the Bronx Zoo compared to his unhappiness.) He was rescued by the Jesuits of Fordham University, with whom he spent long, drunken evenings speculating about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. These wily Fathers, most of them raging alcoholics, convinced him not only that Christianity was superior to Judaism, but that he should save his soul straight away by getting baptized. Len once confided that the Jewish view of death with no afterlife was depressing, and that the promise of heaven was more appealing. Moreover, he felt that some of the greatest artists of Western civilization—from Dante to El Greco to Bach—were inspired by the iconographies of Catholicism.

My second husband also happens to be a Catholic, albeit of the lapsed variety, and he too, loves Christmas, but he comes by his passion more honestly, as it were, since his mother, my mother-in-law, she of the knock-yourself-out-brand of Christmasdom to which I must always fall short, made a religion of Christmas. Not only did she bake all those Gingerbread Men, Rum Balls, and Russian Tea Cookies, she also hauled out an attic full of Christmas lights, decorations and flashing knicky-knackies, most of which still survive in their original tissue paper and lie in wait for my husband to unpack for another round of Christmas merriment.

All of which is prelude and prolegomena to the Christmas tableaux of me, your sorry blogger, wandering among the bright aisles of Whole Foods five hours after sundown on Chanukah’s first night, whispering Alleluia to the blue candles of that toy-sized Menorah.

So why are Chanukah candles blue? Or mostly blue with hints of white and silver? No special reason, according to Chabad.org. Chanukah candles can actually be any color, but most are blue-and-white to distinguish them from the reds and greens of Christmas (there are very few blue staples of Christmas, save for “Blue Christmas,” crooned by Elvis Presley). Blue and white also summon up the colors of the Israeli flag. And blue, according to one online Jewish scholar, has a hallowed significance, as it was the designated color of the fringes of the Tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl. The book of Numbers specifies that there must be at least one blue thread, or techelet, woven into the fringes of the tallit; in this manner, each man, when he prays, will be king. Blue was so rare and expensive in ancient times that the Greeks and the Romans didn’t even have words for it. The blue of tekeleth, which is dark with hints of purple, was procured from sea snails. The snail’s hand had to be drilled and the dye extracted from its pulsing innards; 8500 snails had to be dismembered to produce one gram of blue dye.

Which makes the creation of frankincense and myrrh, which involves extracting the resin from a boswellia and commiphora tree, respectively, seem like a dreidel game. But I digress. Here’s to you, dear multicultural reader: Merry Chanukah! Happy Christmas! Bright Solstice! Joyful Kwanzaa!

The Serendipity of Blue

Depression, psychologists tell us, is not merely a neurological impairment; it is also a cognitive deficiency, a stubborn insistence upon seeing the glass as half-empty rather than half-full. The sun rarely shines in the dust-bunny-ridden halls of the melancholic mind; the depressive goes about his business mechanically, grumpily, a veritable Scrooge, begrudging others their joy, asserting with the preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes, (without doubt the bleakest book in the Bible, so depressing that it should have its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) that “there is nothing new under the sun.”

Imagine, then, my shock, my delight, my childlike wonder, when I read about the accidental discovery of a new shade of blue! Full disclosure here: having been raised as a Scientist (i.e. Christian Scientist), my acquaintance with chemistry, and indeed all forms of lower case science, is minimal. I can safely assure my reader that I am not smarter than a fifth grader when it comes to matters scientific. So I had to reread the article in the Science section of the New York Times at least five times before it stuck in my feeble hippocampus: in the course of an experiment in the chemistry lab at Oregon State University, which had to do with testing the properties of manganese oxides to determine whether they were both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic at the same time (you get a gold star if you know the difference), a graduate student happened to remove one of the pieces of manganese from a furnace—heated to a temperature so hot (2000 degrees Fahrenheit) it would scald the devil himself—and discovered that the material had turned bright blue. The student (not mentioned by name and not likely to get credit in the scientific journals) summoned his professor, and both were struck dumb as Paul on the road to Damascus: Lo and behold, the universe had made a whole new shade of blue!

But wait, it gets better: This new manganese blue was a better, safer, and more durable blue. Ever since the early Egyptians developed the first synthetic blue by grinding copper shavings with sand and potassium, the color has been difficult to create. Indeed blue was so rare in ancient times that the Greeks did not have a word for it. (Homer never refers to the sea as blue, only as “wine-dark.”) The Celts and Germans used woad, an herb of the mustard family, to create blue (and indeed the word blue is Germanic in origin); Indian peoples, since Neolithic times, have dyed with indigo; but both these blues tend to fade with time. The semi-precious stones of lapis lazuli, mined from mountains in the Far East, were often ground down to create a blue paste used in fine arts painting, but this brighter blue is costly. Cobalt blue, developed in France in the 1800s, was often carcinogenic. And Prussian blue, developed about the same time in Germany, releases the deadly chemical of cyanide. But this new manganese blue—featuring ions patterned in a trigonal bipyramidal coordination worthy of a Cubist painting—releases no evil carcinogens and will not fade with time. The new improved blue is expected to turn up in everything from inkjet printers to house paints.

And to think that the entire business was an accident, just as so many of the great scientific discoveries were accidents: Isaac Newton grasping the theory of gravity after being struck on the head by a falling apple; Henri Becquerel discovering X-rays after leaving his equipment in a drawer and noticing that a uranium rock had imprinted itself upon a photographic plate without being exposed to sunlight; Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin after failing to clean up his work area before going on vacation and noticing, when he returned, that a culture plate containing bacteria had developed a layer of mold which killed the bacteria around it.

Such serendipity is almost enough to make you believe in the prime mover, the author of all holy books, the maker of the periodic table himself.

Of course, if She exists, She’s got to be wearing blue!

Blue Bloods

They weighed upon my girlhood like medieval chain mail. They came bearing birth dates and death dates, their genealogical trees spreading through my consciousness like the roots of Blue Spruces, their family crests seared into my imagination like sealing wax, their Latinate mottos befuddling me, even in translation: Sapere Aude, Dare to be Wise; Sapit Qui Deo Sapit, He who is Wise is Wise through God. My mother talked about them obsessively, about the great, great grandfather or the great, great, great uncle as if she were talking about the neighbors; indeed, they were more vivid to her than the neighbors, who had the bad form to live in ranch houses instead of castles, who lacked the pedigree to gallop back into the twelfth century, to dine with a certain grand ghost named Sir Andrew Wyse, originally of landed gentry from Devon, who had crossed over to Ireland and subdued the native Celts, for which Henry II rewarded him with a title and 2500 acres. According to my mother, Sir Andrew could ride his horse twenty-five miles, twenty-five miles she would repeat, as if I were hard of hearing, in any direction.

When my mother talked about her ancestors (and she always called them, “my” ancestors, to distinguish them from the dead white folks on my father’s side, whom she considered slightly beneath her, since none were titled), her face lit up and her pupils blazed, as if she were starring in her own son et lumiere show. Her audience, it should be said, was primarily my sister and me, since everyone else upon whom she plied her tales died a bubonic plague-like death of crushing boredom. Mom could fly through the years faster than the flipping pages of calendars in black-and-white movies. Sometimes she began at the end: with her mother’s father, John Francis Henry Wyse, who was born in 1860 and grew up on a plantation called Deer Park outside of Baltimore, and then parried back to his father, Henry Francis Wyse, her great grandfather, who kept slaves at Deer Park but freed them some ten years before the Civil War, riding further back to Sir Thomas Wyse, an eldest son who had remained at the family seat, St. John’s Manor, outside of Waterford rather than seek his fortunes in America. Sir Thomas, who required cash to maintain St. John’s Manor in the style to which it had become accustomed, won the hand of Laetitia Bonaparte, Napoleon’s niece (which meant, my mother crowed, that we were related to Napoleon!). Laetitia Bonaparte, though she brought a handsome dowry, proved to be “bad news” for Sir Thomas. After giving birth to two sons, Napoleon Alfred and William Charles Wyse, she “ran around’” with other men, finally fleeing rainy Waterford for the continent, and bearing three more illegitimate children before she divorced Sir Thomas and married Count Ratazzi, leading my mother to concede that there were “counts and no-counts” among our relations.

My father had no use for ancestors: his view was that if you went far enough back we were all related, all family trees branching out from the original monkeys in trees. Dad’s favorite sport was teasing Mom about the Wyses: one of his standard routines, which he resorted to whenever there was a pause in dinner table conversation, was to insist that the Wyses were connected to the potato chip dynasty. And even though my mother had a sense of humor about Laetitia Bonaparte’s libido, she was dead serious about the Wyses having nothing to do with Earl Wise of the Wise Delicatessen in Berwick, Pennsylvania who had bagged and sold his own potato chips in 1921. My ancestors were W-y-s-e not W-i-s-e, she painstakingly explained, spelling out both versions like a first grade teacher each time the subject came up.

“Your mother is straight out of a Jane Austen novel,” a friend once joked, and of course it was true. Snobbish to the point of caricature, my mother, who hung a framed portrait of the Wyse family coat of arms beside the hall mirror, truly believed that she had blue blood in her veins, and that it gave her permission to lord it over everyone around her.

According to Robert Lacy, author of the entertaining tome, Aristocrats, the Spanish were the ones who came up with the bizarre idea that some mortals have blue blood rather than red running through their veins. Some years after the Moorish occupation of Spain in the 9^th Century, certain families, especially in the Castille region, refused to intermarry with their dark-skinned conquerors. (Moors, by the way, did not have a good rep in Europe, as evidenced by the portrait of swarthy, hot-blooded Othello in Shakespeare’s play.) As the Spanish successfully pushed the Moors out of the Iberian peninsula, the term "sangre azul,” was applied to all Spanish aristocrats, whose skin allegedly revealed slightly bluer blood vessels than ordinary people, especially in the veins of the arm and hand. What’s curious about “sangre azul,” Lacy observes, is that while aristocrats’ light skin could be attributed to their avoiding peasant-type work in the fields, as well as possibly the disease of argyria, which came from ingesting trace amounts of silver in eating utensils, “sangre azul,” had nothing to do with breeding, since all Spanish people, themselves descended from marauding Visigoths, intermarried with their Moorish cousins, especially if you went far enough back in history.

Curiously enough, blue blood did not enter the English language until 1834, at which time the European aristocracy was already on the wane, the use of titles having been banned by the United States Constitution in 1787 and the titled themselves falling to the guillotine at the dizzyingly bloody rate of sixty an hour during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.

(By the way, the entry for blue blood in my online dictionary reveals that the only living creatures that can boast of truly possessing an oxygenated form of blood containing hemocyanin are horseshoe crabs, who, at 400 million years old, were around long before the Visigoths.)

The United States has a love-hate relationship with blue bloods. Although we profess to eschew all things aristocratic, we nevertheless have created organizations like the Mayflower Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution, which encourage all kinds of snobbery, racism, and elitism (my mother belonged to neither, as ‘her’ ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower, though she claimed that she could have joined the DAR). The DAR famously banned internationally renowned soprano Marian Anderson from singing to an integrated audience in Constitutional Hall in 1939. Fifty years after the DAR dissed Anderson, Barack Hussein Obama addressed thousands of blacks and whites gathered on the mall on a cold January morning (including this humble blogger and her family), speaking in his ringing baritone of the dream of equality in which everyone, regardless of their origins or skin color, has a chance at the American dream. Obama, mindful of history and its symbols, held one of his first business meetings among the gold-gilt French Empire chairs in the Blue Room of the White House. Obama thus put the blue-blooded Bush dynasty to bed (remember the late Governor Ann Richards’ joke about Bush pere that “he was born with a silver foot in his mouth”?).

I often wonder what my mother would have made of Barack Obama. When she was a girl growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the 1930s, her family had employed a black cook named Orilla, whom my mother adored in the simple way many white children adored their black ‘mammies.’ But such affection had boundaries; she would no more have considered fraternizing with Orilla’s children than she would move to Brazil to take tea with Amazonian pygmies. There were no blacks in my mother’s class at Smith College; no blacks at the country club where we played tennis; or at the Church of Christ, Scientist, where we recited the Scientific Statement of Being; no blacks anywhere in our New England city, save in a ghetto of run-down triple-decker houses with mangy dogs and uncut lawns.

But like all ancestor mavens, my mother worshipped at the temples of success and power. In the end, she would have been impressed by the Obama’s Harvard credentials, literary acumen, princely demeanor, as well as his Nobel Prize. I suspect that she would attributed Obama’s rise not to his white mother, Ann Dunham, from Wichita, Kansas (whom she would have considered poor white trash) but to his black African father, Barack Obama, Sr., a Luo from Nyang’omo Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya; a prince in Africa was hardly the same as a lord in Britannia, but nothing else, in her lexicon, could account for his meteoric rise to power.

“Success is counted sweetest,” Emily Dickinson once observed, “by those who n’er succeed.” As I have grown into middle age, I see my mother’s ancestor worship in a different light, not only as comedy, but also as tragedy. All those knights and lords of the manor that weighed upon me as a child gave my mother, an insecure girl from the Middle West whose family could barely scrape together the tuition for Smith College, a certain gravitas, a sense of identity and purpose. Because she feared that her own little light would never be powerful enough to shine its brightness through the world, she depended upon the luminosity of the dead to shine for her.

“There’s an old Irish saying about ancestors,” one of my boyfriends had informed my mother one Christmas dinner years ago when she was droning on about the Wyses.

“What’s that, dearie?” she had inquired sweetly. Sean Shesgreen, whose people were lawyers from Letterkenny, couldn’t hold a candle to the Wyses of Waterford, but my mother was impressed by Sean’s table manners (“he’s a gentleman and a scholar,” she had enthused) as well as the fact that he was largely self-made, having arrived in Chicago in the 1960s with not much more than $100 and a suit. She had brought out all the family silver to entice him to marry me. (I was then in my middle thirties, widowed and without issue.)

“Ancestors are like potatoes,” he said merrily, “the best thing about them is under the ground.”
My mother, who was not without a sense of humor, laughed heartily, complimented Sean on his Irish wit, which reminded her of her grandfather’s, then returned to the story of how St. John’s Manor had been given to the Wyses by Henry VIII when he dissolved the monasteries.

I didn’t marry Sean Shesgreen, but that’s another story, and it has nothing to do with blue bloods.
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In Brooke Astor's Blue Room

Toward the end of the six-month trial, which kept tabloids screaming with headlines like “Diss Astor,” and “Bad Heir Day,” the jury asked to review photos of the blue room. The blue room was not the grandest in Brooke Astor’s ten-room duplex apartment on Park Avenue —that prize belonged to the oxblood-lacquered library, designed by Albert Hadley and featuring red velvet Louis XV chairs and over 3,000 first editions in Moroccan leather—but the blue room was where Brooke Russell Kuser Marshall Astor had spent her last years. A small sitting room adjacent to her bedroom, it contained a fleur de lis rug, a blue and pink chintz couch, blue sateen armchairs and matching drapes. The blue room was where Mrs. Astor received the occasional visitor, and ate dinner alone (dressed in fancy frocks and diamonds) on a folding tray in front of the television. Mrs. Astor, who suffered from Alzheimer’s in her latter years and could not recognize close friends, signed several codicils to her will in the blue room, surrendering control of the bulk of her 185 million dollar Astor fortune--once slated for New York City charities-to her only child, Anthony Marshall, and his third wife, Charlene.

If the walls of all the blue rooms that Mrs. Astor inhabited over her life could speak, they would tell stories so violent they would knock the million-dollar, gilt-framed paintings off the walls. Begin with the conception of Anthony Dryden Marshall, christened Anthony Dryden Kuser, which occurred in the middle of the roaring twenties in a bedroom done up in gray-blue velvet with matching armchairs, drapes, and velvet headboards. Dryden Kuser, Anthony’s father, heir to his financier father’s millions as well as his mother’s fortune from the Prudential Life Insurance Company, was drunk, as he had been most nights of his marriage. He was also in a foul humor after losing at cards. His twenty-one-year-old wife was asleep, and he woke her, demanding sex. When she murmured that he was drunk and she was half asleep, he persisted, forcing himself upon her, taking what he regarded as rightfully his.

In the era of the Teapot Dome Scandal, where rich men got richer in the Blue Room of the White House, no one talked about marital rape or domestic abuse. When Brooke Kuser discovered she was pregnant, she was shocked, as well as angry: “Having not participated very willingly in this future event, I was perturbed,” she wrote with well-bred euphemism in her 1980 autobiography, Footprints. Six months later, Dryden Kuser got drunk again, fought with his wife, probably about money (in one afternoon on the golf course, he lost $36,000) or his affairs with other women. Dryden Kuser was accustomed to getting his own way. That night he got so enraged, he knocked his wife down and broke her jaw. Brooke’s father urged her to get out of the marriage, but she stayed for the sake of her son.

Anthony Dryden Kuser grew up in rooms decorated in every color of the rainbow—rooms in red, green, violet and blue, filled with marble fireplaces, floor-to-ceiling drapes, Louis XVI chairs and 19th century Chinese wall paintings, grew up with Shetland ponies and Pekinese dogs and French nannies, had everything a child could possibly want except his mother’s love. Even after Dryden Kuser divorced his wife to marry another woman, giving Brooke custody of her son as well as a handsome alimony, she handed her little boy off to nannies at every opportunity. When she remarried stockbroker Buddy Marshall, she and her new husband took off on a months-long European honeymoon, leaving Tony behind to be cared for by nannies. When Buddy Marshall thought that Tony Marshall’s longtime French governess, whom the boy adored, was spoiling him, Brooke fired her. At the age of ten, when Buddy observed that Tony needed toughening up, Brooke sent her only child to boarding school, where he was friendless, and beset with nightmares. As Tony put it in a self-published, thinly fictionalized novel, Dash, “As the infant developed into childhood he was regarded in both physique as well as in manner as a hereditary mistake.”

When I imagine the childhood of Tony Kuser, I think of Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy. In this classic 1770 painting, a slim teenaged boy with a face so sensitive, pale and refined it might belong to a girl, stares out from the huge, elongated mostly blue canvas with a melancholy vacancy. His elegant, cavalier clothes—ermine-plumed hat, blue satin britches, matching waistcoat, lacy ruffled shirt, silk stockings, leather shoes tied with blue ribbons—tell us that he is not accustomed to any play or work in which he might soil himself. His arm crooked confidently at the waist suggests that he will become master of the landscape he dominates--pastoral, estate-like countryside with a gentle brook in the distance. Yet, beneath the patrician pose, there is a tentativeness and vulnerability, as if he doesn’t have a clue why he has come into the world, much less how he will make his way in it. (Ironically, research into Gainsborough’s masterpiece revealed that its subject, Jonathan Buttall, son of a rich ironmonger, proved woefully inadequate to the task of making a living, filing for bankruptcy in 1796. The Blue Boy changed hands several times, leaving Great Britain in 1922, purchased for a record $728,000 by California railroad magnate Henry Huntington, inspiring Cole Porter, who socialized with Brooke and Buddy Marshall, to write a song about its fate called, “Blue Boy’s Blues.”)

Tony Marshall, who turned up in an elegant blue suit and tie on most days of his trial, did not go bankrupt; but he never won the blue ribbon of his mother’s love, especially in later life. At 18, he legally changed his surname to Marshall, but when Buddy Marshall died and Brooke married Vincent Astor, Brooke Astor curtailed relations with her grown son, explaining in Footprints: “ Vincent was jealous of Tony.” Tony was going through his first divorce, and Brooke felt guilty about rejecting her son at a time when he clearly needed her, but as she explained in Footprints, “I needed to concentrate on Vincent.” Brooke tried to make it up to her son by donating $100,000 to the reelection campaign of Richard Nixon, which helped secure Tony an ambassadorship to Madagascar, but she privately complained to friends that Tony was a n’er-do-well. She resented that she had to hire him herself, some years later, to manage the Astor millions. When Tony divorced his second wife to marry penniless Charlene Gilbert, Mrs. Astor was appalled. Not only was Charlene the ex-wife of an Episcopal priest, she also had “no class and no neck.”

Tony Marshall’s son, Phillip, blamed Charlene for the ill treatment Brooke Astor received in her final years, which led Phillip to sue his father to win guardianship of his grandmother. “The Battle of the Blue Bloods,” with its tales of a dog-urine soaked couch in the blue room and the disappearance of a multi-million dollar Childe Hassam painting from the living room, was on the front pages of every newspaper in New York, including the decorous New York Times. When the case was over, Phillip Marshall wrested guardianship of his grandmother from his father, as well as inadvertently paved the way for the elder abuse unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office to charge the elder Marshall with sixteen counts of fraud.

So why do we care? Partly, it’s because we conflate beauty and truth, as well as beauty and goodness. We imagine that because the rich can create perfectly choreographed rooms with antiques and art work from every corner of the globe, because they can turn themselves into objects d’art with glittering Ceylon sapphires and the latest designer fashions, because they can dine off Blue Willow China and sleep in canopied beds, we imagine that they are better than we are, that they are gods. Money is power, and power is a kind of aphrodisiac, as Henry Kissinger, friend of Brooke Astor, once observed.

But money cannot buy love, and when the well-appointed life in the blue room goes wrong, the rich take each other to court, and the rest of us can’t get enough of their misery and dysfunction, because in the end, rich or poor, blue blood or not, we are the same, desperately seeking the serene blue depths of our mother’s love, desperately seeking, to paraphrase the words of recovering alcoholic writer Raymond Carver, “to call ourselves beloved.” (“And did you get what/ you wanted from this life, even so? / I did/And what did you want? /To call myself beloved, to feel myself/beloved on the earth.”)

In the People vs. Anthony Marshall, the jury of eight women and four men, "little people" as Leona Helmsley would have called them, who worked as caterers, consultants, and teachers, found Anthony Marshall guilty of grand larceny, fraud and embezzlement. At 85, in frail health, he will likely spend the rest of his life in jail. After the conviction, the jury repaired to the Blue Ribbon Bar in Greenwich Village, miles away from Brooke Astor’s blue sitting room on Park Avenue.

Into the Wild Blue Ocean

“There are two things you will never regret,” writer Mary Gordon once observed, “a swim in the ocean, and the birth of a baby.” I recite this like the rosary every time I consider plunging into salt or fresh water, every time I list the usual reasons why I shouldn’t—the water is too cold, the air colder, I’m too tired, too depressed, I don’t want to get wet, I look like a Henry Moore sculpture in a bathing suit. Sometimes I talk myself into a swim; sometimes I don’t. One simple fact remains constant: the older I get, the less inclined I am to embrace the labor of plunging into cold water, especially ocean water, with its breakers and riptides, its potential to fling me about like so much sea kelp.

On the second-to-last day of September, on Crescent Beach in Block Island with the wind blowing so hard that you had to shout to make yourself heard, I repeated this homily to my three friends, hoping to convince them to join me in what would likely be the last swim of the summer. My friends are writers as well as mothers (actually, all are grandmothers, but don’t tell anyone because it makes them seem ancient as the Mohegan clay cliffs). We met years ago in a writing group in Westchester, and have mostly stayed in touch, through moves, divorces, and remarriages.

We were spending five days on Block Island, courtesy of Mary-Ann’s agent, who had generously offered to let us use her vacation home with its many bedrooms, porches and gardens in Rodman’s Hollow. We had divided the day into sessions of writing, biking, hiking, and gossiping. A swim in Block Island Sound seemed just the thing to make already unforgettable day even more so, before we headed home to drink wine and watch the sunset.

But no argument would sway Sarah, our southern belle from Virginia, who ironically was the only one wearing her bathing suit beneath her biking clothes. Sarah said swimming was a good idea in theory but that she had dipped her toes in the water and it was just too (expletive) cold, that her scrawny limbs were turning blue at the mere thought of plunging into Block Island Sound. If we were at Cape Hatteras in August, or Bermuda in March, but we weren’t, we were in the Bermuda of the North, thirteen miles off the coast of Rhode Island a week into fall and nothing would make her get wet, no matter how blissed-out she might feel afterward.

So Sarah huddled against her backpack, promising to record the polar swim on her Nikon, while we three nutty New Englanders made our way to the Crescent Beach bathhouse, which was unfortunately closed for the season. Draping a towel over a railing on the outer deck, which provided only the flimsiest cover against the gazes of passersby, including an old geezer with a metal detector some twenty feet away, as well one fortyish fellow in a golfing hat, who later approached us and confessed to watching us swim, pointing out that the water couldn’t have been that cold because we didn’t even use a towel to dry off. (The truth was, which we didn’t share as there was no need to discourage his plans to go swimming, we had packed only one towel!)

But changing our suits, we were hardly aware of him or any other idling beachcomber, shouting into the gale that we wouldn’t have dreamt of doing such a thing twenty years ago, but that now we didn’t give a hoot. Or, as Mary-Ann put it, quoting from a slogan on a tee-shirt that she picked up in Old Saybrook, a slogan that became a kind of shorthand for our island idyll,“Frankly, Scallop, I don’t give a clam!”

It probably won’t surprise you that my bathing suit was blue—with tiny white polka dots that a saleslady assured me some ten years ago were meant to provide a visually slimming effect, enhanced by the old-lady skort that reached to mid-thigh. It was the sort of suit that my mother would have approved of, would have worn herself had she been inclined to swim in the ocean in September.

But here’s what made me sad: when she was my age, my mother was not inclined to swim in the ocean—not in September or any other month of the year, even though she lived within a few miles of several beaches on the Gulf of Mexico in southern Florida. In the summer months, when she headed north to her summer cottage in Canada on Georgian Bay, where she had spent nearly every summer of her life since she was a child of five, where, in fact, she had first learned to swim, she didn’t go into the water either. She always had her reasons: she had just had her hair done, she was getting over a cold, the water wasn’t warm enough (even though Lake Huron was considered the warmest of the Great Lakes, a fact which she always proudly cited to friends), she didn’t want anyone to see her in a bathing suit as she had recently put on a “few tons.”

“Did your mothers stop swimming when they got to be a certain age?” I had asked my friends earlier, as we made our way from the Greenway Trail down to Mansion Beach, scouting a spot in which we might take our swim.

“Yeah, even when we were kids going to the Connecticut shore every summer, my mother rarely went in the water, she always said she didn’t want to mess up her hair,” Mary-Ann said, explaining that her mother reported that your skin gets more sensitive as you get older, and that she had never been able to bear the cold even when she was younger.

“My mother swam a lot when she was young growing up in England,” Sarah remembered, “but now that I think of it, she hardly ever went in as she got older.” Sarah’s mother had been a smoker, and had died of emphysema at the age of 78.

“My mother doesn’t swim as much as she used to, but she still does a kilometer in the pool almost every day,” Christine offered brightly. Christine’s mother was the only one of our mothers who was still alive, and maybe, I theorized, there was a connection; maybe when you stop swimming, stop submitting yourself to the baptism of cold water, something shuts down and you start preparing to die.

“On the other hand,” I continued, “we can’t forget that it’s only been in the last hundred years that women have been encouraged to swim, or engage in any other sport, for that matter. There was no women’s swimming competition at the Olympics until 1912.”

“And when they did go in the water,” Mary-Ann said, “think of the bathing costumes they had to wear—bloomers, caps, trousers. Who would want to get wet wearing all that stuff?

When we reached Crescent Beach, we agreed that we were the lucky beneficiaries of feminism. If it hadn’t been for pioneers like Annette Kellerman, the woman who designed the first one-piece suit that she wore in attempting to swim the English Channel in 1905 (and was, in fact, arrested for wearing on a Boston beach two years later), and Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the entire English Channel in 1926, completing the feat in 14 hours and breaking all previous records, we might not be here today, plunging, in our one-piece Spandex suits, into Block Island Sound.

Then, with Sarah capturing our posteriors for posterity, we charged into the surf, whooping and hollering, repeating that it wasn’t all that cold, except when the wind scattered bits of cresting wave on our goose pimpled arms. We counted to ten, asked each other who was going to be first. In seconds, Mary-Ann, the oldest and gutsiest among us—and what you should know about Mary-Ann is that she has earned enough money from the ten books she was written to buy a condo on the Connecticut shore--dove into the surf. Christine was next. I was last, breaking out into a lusty, mangled French version of La Marseillaise—“Allons, enfants de la patria, le jour de gloire est arrive”--that would have given my high school French teacher a mini-stroke. (“Rebecca,” she used to say in a voice that let me know I was going straight to the guillotine, “You don’t roll your r’s.) But I digress: in a quieter moment between breakers, I explained that singing the French national anthem was what my first husband, Len, had done when he went swimming, and that belting out the rousing verses never failed to warm me.

“Three cheers for Len,” they cried. All these dear ladies, including Sarah on the beach, had known Len. All, if I asked them which I did more than once during our reunion on Block Island, could tell me one funny story about him that I had forgotten. Then Christine and Mary-Ann screamed out their own mangled versions of La Marseillaise, and it made my heart sing like a barking harbor seal. How many friends could I go back with twenty-five years and have it be as brief as the lull between one breaking wave and another?

Sarah, who shared the dozen pictures she had taken of us that evening after an Indian dinner of Mary-Ann’s lentil dahl, remarked that what was so amazing about watching us was that we went into the water as droopy-butt middle-aged ladies, but that once we got wet, we became girls again, our oldest, deepest selves suddenly laid bare, like sandbars at low tide.

“The experience of swimming is both sexual and spiritual,” observed Annette Kellerman, who continued swimming just a few weeks before she died in California at the age of 88, “The sensation of water flowing over the body is dynamic, erotic, enlivening, and yet it awakens, at every moment, our consciousness of the fragility of our breath.”

In Praise of Blue Hydrangeas

I have never been a gardener, resisting the easy equation of flowers and femaleness, and making it a matter of feminist pride never to learn about the myriad varieties of roses or the uses of baby’s breath or anything about the conditions under which climbing arbutuses climb. Thus, I could distinguish myself from generations of women who made gardens, and only gardens, their life’s work. Women like my grandmother, who belonged for decades to her local garden club and knew her pansies from her phlox, her rhododendrons from her hydrangeas but could not tell a Rainier Maria Rilke from a Jean-Paul Sartre. I was meant for higher things, or so I thought in my arrogant youth. It probably didn’t help that one of my father’s favorite jokes, which came up every spring faithful as a perennial, was the old saw about horticulture.

But in the silver-blue dark of middle life, I spy with my far-sighted eye many new things, including the splendor of blue hydrangeas. All blue flowers are lovely to look at—cornflowers, delphiniums, forget-me-nots, bachelor buttons, gentians--even though I often need help in identifying one from the other--but there is something about the lush, puffy extravagance of hydrangeas that never fails to stop me from whatever task I am hurrying to finish, and praise the goddess of all flowering things. I am told by my gardener friends—and, oddly enough, I have quite a few, a virtual bridal bouquet of smart, accomplished women with advanced degrees who are clearly not air-heads—that blue hydrangeas, unlike their pink or white sisters, require a high level of acidity in the soil, or they will not flower into that glorious deep blue. I’m also told that blue hydrangeas grow best in mild climates, which is why one sees them so much on Cape Cod and along Long Island Sound.

My father’s mother has been dead for over twenty-five years, but sometimes I wish I could bring her back on an Indian summer afternoon like today, when a few lone hydrangeas are still in bloom but beginning their slow fade back to green, and ask her, “Did you have hydrangeas in your garden? And did you love them as much as I do?” Of course, she would scold me for being so dim-witted that I didn’t pay more attention as a child, didn’t notice them on all those summer afternoons when my sister and I were visiting, and we called through her big house, and she screamed, “Youhoo, I’m in the garden,” and we raced outside to the back porch, and onto the stone veranda and down the walk, edged on one side with boxwood hedges, and there she’d be, a grey-haired figure with sun-blotched cheeks, dressed in baggy Bermuda shorts and faded shirt, a sweat-stained khaki hat pulled low over her forehead to keep out the sun, crouched down over her sweet Williams.

“Of course I had hydrangeas,” she tells me, slowly uncoiling her arthritic limbs and wiping her dirt-encrusted fingers upon the coat tails of her shirt, her voice brisk and confident. “I had white ones and pink ones. I had blue ones in front of the guest cottage because there’s a perfect mix of sun and shade back there. You can turn pink ones into blue ones, if you add aluminum and coffee grounds to the soil. If you had spent more time helping me weed—you’ll remember that I did offer to pay you a dollar an hour—you might have picked up a thing or two about gardening and you wouldn’t be such a ninny now.”

“I was suffering from depression,” I confide, “and it tinged everything I felt and saw with a kind of watery grime so that I never really noticed anything, and the world was washed in a grainy, rain-soaked fog. It was like living in Belgium where you could go for weeks without seeing the sun. I remember reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea and identifying with that that sense of dread and panic that he was describing. It was what I felt all the time.”

“Well, I’ve never heard of this Jean-Paul whosiwhatsit, and I’ve never been to Belgium. I thought there was plenty to learn about my own country without running off to Europe.”

“Sartre was an existentialist. He lived in Paris, and he believed that God was dead, that you had to create your own reality.”

“What bunk! I thank my lucky stars I never went to college. What good did it do you?”

“Do you know that the first poem I ever wrote was about you? It ended with a question, which I wanted to ask you but never could: Where will you go when you’re gone?”

“Well, I never! Imagine anyone writing a poem about such a fool thing as that! Let me tell you something, death is nothing, don’t waste your time thinking about it.”

I tell her all the things I’ve learned from the Internet about blue hydrangeas. I have to explain the Internet, which is a challenge, because, when she was alive, she was always talking about the good old days, and how the modern world was bunk. (She often said she wished she hadn’t lived long enough to see Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, that people should stay on earth, where they belonged.) But when I explain that the information superhighway makes it possible to learn all kinds of things in an instant with the click of a mouse (I have to explain that a mouse is not something you catch in a trap), she perks up. I tell her about Wikipedia, and how you can look up Hydrangeas on it. I explain that there are 70-75 species of hydrangea, and that most come from China, Japan and Korea, and that the very first one was brought to England from a Chinese garden in 1739 by a Sir Joseph Banks. Of course, she has heard of Sir Joseph Banks; he was one of those brilliant, peripatetic Englishmen, an 18th century Charles Darwin, who traveled the globe and knew everyone and influenced everything, from the creation of Kew Gardens and the British Museum, to the colonizing of Australia. I tell her that Banks was apparently the model for a character in Mutiny on the Bounty.

We talk about all the poems that have been written about blue hydrangeas—about one by the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, called “Blaue Hortensie.” It was written in Paris in 1906, when she was a girl of 14 and a student at the Emma Willard School in Troy. I read it aloud, not in German, because my German is primitive and she never learned the language (though she boasts that her older brother, George, who went to Oxford, knew German ‘like the back of his hand’). I read it aloud, as she used to read “A Hollow Tree,” and “Winnie the Pooh” to my sister and me in the library after dinner in the evenings.

Rilke’s poem is about the beauty of dying blue hydrangeas, comparing them to “old, blue notepaper notes,” and to the faded grays and violets of a “washed out children’s apron.” Rilke talks about how everything passes so quickly, how the dying flowers remind us of “life’s short duration.” But in the end as one blue umbel blooms against the green, there is a sense of life renewing itself.

“Of course, because hydrangeas are perennials,” she says, “and they come back, year after year.”

Then we say goodbye, and I promise that next spring, I will grow my very first blue hydrangea.

Acing the Blues

The funeral home sits so close to Rally Point that when my teammate and I were driving there from Massachusetts, her global positioning system cheerily announced, as we passed the sumptuous blue-and-white striped awnings, that we had arrived at our destination. This foot-faulting technological glitch made us laugh, soothing our nerves as we lugged our racquet bags and water coolers into the club, ready to play our first match at the United States Tennis Association’s New England District Adult League Championships in Greenville, Rhode Island.

Tennis in America began in Rhode Island—in nearby Newport, where the United States Lawn Tennis Association held the first Men’s Singles Championships on grass courts at the Newport Casino in 1881 (the event was not open to women but ladies’ competitions were held at the Philadelphia Cricket Club in 1886). The Newport and Philadelphia championships added doubles competitions and evolved into the current U.S. Open at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Flushing Meadow, New York, played on DecoTurf II courts that were painted blue in 2005, in order to make the matches more telegenic.

Tennis, which was first played in the Middle Ages by monks during religious ceremonies and taken up by the French royal family in the 16^th century, gets its name from the French nobility’s habit of shouting, “Tenez,” or “Heads Up,” before starting the game. In the late 19^th century, tennis had overtaken croquet at the sport of choice for the leisured rich on both sides of the Atlantic. Lawn tennis courts, which could be grafted onto smooth croquet courts, appeared on estates owned by European barons and American robber barons alike, as well as on the grounds of watering holes and spas throughout Europe. Edith Jones Wharton learned to play tennis on her family’s private court at Pen Craig, one of the immense ‘cottages’ on Newport Sound. In 1876, a 14-year-old Edith Jones, writing to her governess, Anna Bahlmann, described the newfangled sport as “difficult, tiresome, destructive to pretty dresses and to the complexion, but nevertheless delightful.”

Not that I was focused on the history of tennis as I was playing the number two singles spot for the Aces Wild Tennis Team on court six. But I was thinking, during a long, sweat-soaked rally--indoor tennis in Rhode Island in mid-August can be punishingly hot--which ended when I whipped a cross-court forehand to a remote corner near the baseline where my opponent’s coltish 33-year-old legs would not take her, that there is nothing like tennis to free the mind from morbid thoughts of depression, failure, and death.

I have been playing tennis for most of my life—my mother, in the summer months when she wasn’t in bed with her mysterious colds, teaching me to play on hot, lazy afternoons at the Pittsfield Country Club, a sprawling, many-porched 19^th century mansion that Edith Wharton herself could have belonged to. I had a wooden racquet in those days, and the courts we played on were red clay, which turned everything—the service and base lines as well as our white Treetorn tennis balls, white tennis shoes, and white ankle socks with fuzzy pom poms at the heels--a rusted, dried-blood-colored pink. I had a two-fisted backhand (still do, though it was more of a lethal weapon in those days) in the manner of my heroine Chrissie Evert, who was already making a name for herself as a junior, and who would win the U.S. Open Women’s Singles in 1975, when it was played on Har-Tru clay courts at the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills.

When my mother was well enough not to be indifferent to the fortunes of her daughters, she used to brag about how good I was. She saved all the trophies I had won in tennis tournaments throughout New England, and displayed them in the living room of our home on West Street. When she moved to Florida, she took them with her, proudly displaying them in the all condos and bungalows she inhabited. The story she liked best was the time I was in the finals of a 14-and-under tournament in New Haven--it was at the New Haven Lawn Club, founded in 1891, in the posh East Rock section of the city—and the club pro started watching me and told my mother I was good, that I could be really good, and that if she wanted to develop my game, she should send me to California to work with Pancho Segura, who had been number one in the world in 1952 and who was now coaching promising juniors, including legend-to-be Jimmy Connors.

“I taught her how to play myself,” my mother boasted to the pro, which wasn’t strictly true as I also played with my dad, particularly when I got good enough to beat my mom. In addition, I took several summers’ full of group and private lessons from Dudley Bell, who all the kids called Dud, and who had the good humor and patience of Segoo himself as he drilled me for hours in the split step.

“I know she’s good,” my mother went on, “But she’s only 14. I’m not taking her out of school and sending her to California. Anything could happen to her. She could be sold into ‘white slavery.’”

The pro wisely chose to ignore this bit of melodramatic foolishness and proposed that my mother accompany me to southern California.

“And let my husband fend for himself?” my mother said. “Not on your life.”

Chrissie Evert probably would have begged her mother to send her out west to play tennis—although it’s a moot point as Evert grew up in Florida and was coached from an early age by her tennis pro dad--but I didn’t argue with my mother. When you’re 14, you pretty much do what you’re told, especially if you’re a girl. Then, when the United States Lawn Tennis Association’s New England division rankings came out the next year (the organization dropped the snooty-sounding ‘lawn’ from its moniker a few years later), I had my first identifiable-as-such crisis of confidence. The number one player in the 14-and-under girls’ division was a big, muscular girl from Westerly, Rhode Island, and I had lost to her 6-0, 6-1 in another tournament several weeks after New Haven, barely even winning that one game. I had achieved the number five spot, which was hardly anything to cry about, but I knew very well that I was miles away from being number one. Maybe all the talk about Segura and California was just that—talk. Even if my mother had been willing to send me, I wasn’t sure I had what it took to be the best.

Then I did something only a crazy teenager could justify: I gave up tennis. I gave up the very thing that gave my emerging life passion and purpose. My reasons were as silly as a toddler’s: if I couldn’t get what I wanted, i.e., the number one spot in my age group, then I wouldn’t play. As the years passed and I found increasingly unwholesome activities to fill up the hours that tennis had occupied—taking up with a series of druggie boyfriends, who would have sold me into white slavery in a heartbeat if given the chance—I developed new reasons to spurn tennis. Tennis was a rich girl’s game, the mindless diversion of Republicans and Nixonites and corporate drones. Never mind that a smart, soft-spoken black man named Arthur Ashe, who learned to play tennis on segregated public courts in Richmond, Virginia, was busy winning majors and breaking the color line and speaking out against racism and apartheid.

I took up competitive tennis again when the Williams sisters started to dominate the women’s tour. I was moved by their story—how they grew up in the projects of Los Angeles and hit hundreds of balls every afternoon from an old shopping cart, how their parents heaped positive encouragement upon them, telling them, from an early age, that they were destined for greatness. There was really no connection between me, a middle-aged, overweight mom trying to adjust to a second marriage and working off her post-baby weight while playing in a local 4.0 USTA League in northern Vermont…and Venus and Serena, their dread-locks encased in white beads, screaming as they hit their 120-mile-an-hour serves, reaching the finals of the U.S. Open at 17 and 19, respectively. Then again, maybe Venus and Serena’s success--thanks to Venus’ efforts, women pros are now, for the first time in tennis history, making as much as men--made me believe that there was something about the game that whispered of hope and transformation, even to an old duffer like me, who wanted to drop twenty pounds and get a break from feeling like such a loser.

The Aces Wild Tennis Team did not ace the Districts in Rhode Island. In fact, we beat only one other team (and they were from western Massachusetts, and we had already trounced them three months ago so it hardly seemed like a real win). Most of the players on the other teams were younger, fitter, and steadier. Though many of us lost in nail-bitingly-close third-set tiebreakers—on Day two, I was taken out by a much younger woman in a match that went on for nearly three hours--it wasn’t enough to send us to the next level of competition—the Sectionals in South Hadley, Massachusetts. But as we headed home past the blue-and-white awnings of the Anderson-Winfield funeral home, stopping for ice cream at the Newport creamery just beyond the town green (not to be confused with the Blue Hills Crematory, whose services were being offered through the funeral home), we talked about how, next year, we were going to start practicing earlier, organize more scrimmages, maybe even do some clinics with the Amherst College assistant tennis coach.

Next year, we vowed, wiping the soft-serve, anti-oxidant-rich blueberry ice cream from our sweaty fingers and high-fiving one another, we were going to do it, advance to Sectionals, and, maybe, with a little luck and a lot of PMA (positive mental attitude), even to Nationals.