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FIFTY

Labor Day has come and gone along with New Orleans where I spent that long-ago winter when I did not go to Ceylon. Labor Day 1950 was when Howard and I met but since I have never understood when Labor Day itself is apt to be proclaimed I’d forgot our anniversary until the last one a few weeks before he died. He was pleasantly surprised. We had been together fifty-three years. He confessed that he thought he was just passing through my life and was surprised as the decades began to stack up and we were still together. But then it is easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part and impossible, I have observed, when it does. Each had a sex life apart from the other: all else including our sovereign, Time, was shared. I’ve just been reading a book of conversations with the Bird whom I used to see at Memorial Hospital visiting Frank Merlo who was dying of lung cancer. On a less perilous floor Howard was having a benign tumor of the thyroid removed. The Bird was very much school of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: I shall but love thee better after death. That is the romantic disposition. He forgot at the end that he and Frank had been separated for some time before his death. The final row had involved Frank throwing a roast leg of lamb at the Bird who had providentially ducked.

I note that I began this memoir with a natural disaster, the earthquakes and tsunami in Southeast Asia, and now I draw to a conclusion with the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico where a racist ruling class abandoned the African American inhabitants of the Gulf and did not do so well either by whites without money. Money is now a Great Wall of China separating American rich from poor, a division that is beginning to seem as eternal as the Great Wall itself.