The Year of Magical Thinking

12

The day on which Quintana and I flew east on the Cessna that refueled in the cornfield in Kansas was April 30, 2004. During May and June and the half of July that she spent at the Rusk Institute there was very little I could do for her. I could go down to East Thirty-fourth Street to see her in the late afternoons, and most afternoons I did, but she was in therapy from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon and exhausted by six-thirty or seven. She was medically stable. She could eat, the feeding tube was still in place but no longer necessary. She was beginning to regain movement in her right leg and arm. She was regaining the mobility in her right eye that she needed to read. On weekend days when she did not have therapy Gerry would take her to lunch and a movie in the neighborhood. He would eat dinner with her. Friends would join them for picnic lunches. For as long as she was at Rusk I could water the plants on her windowsill, I could find the marginally different sneakers her therapist had decreed, I could sit with her in the greenhouse off the Rusk lobby watching the koi in the pond, but once she left Rusk I would no longer be able to do even that. She was reaching a point at which she would need once again to be, if she was to recover, on her own.

I determined to spend the summer reaching the same point.

I did not yet have the concentration to work but I could straighten my house, I could get on top of things, I could deal with my unopened mail.

That I was only now beginning the process of mourning did not occur to me.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day. I had passed an entire season during which the only words I allowed myself to truly hear were recorded: Wel-come to U-C–L-A.

I began.

Among the letters and books and magazines that had arrived while I was in Los Angeles was a thick volume called Lives of ’54, prepared for what was by then the imminent fiftieth reunion of John’s class at Princeton. I looked up John’s entry. It read: “William Faulkner once said that a writer’s obituary should read, ‘He wrote books, then he died.’ This is not an obit (at least as of 19 September 2002) and I am still writing books. So I’ll stick with Faulkner.”

I told myself: this was not an obit.

At least as of 19 September 2002.

I closed Lives of ’54. A few weeks later I opened it again, and leafed through the other entries. One was from Donald H. (“Rummy”) Rumsfeld, who noted: “After Princeton, the years seem like a blur, but the days seem more like rapid fire.” I thought about this. Another, a three-page reflection by Lancelot L. (“Lon”) Farrar, Jr., began: “Arguably our best-shared Princeton memory was Adlai Stevenson’s address to the senior banquet.”

I also thought about this.

I had been married to a member of the Class of ’54 for forty years and he had never mentioned Adlai Stevenson’s address to the senior banquet. I tried to think of anything at all he had mentioned about Princeton. He had many times mentioned the misguided entitlement he heard in the words “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” the slogan Princeton had adopted from a speech by Woodrow Wilson. Other than that I could think of nothing except his saying a few days after our wedding (why did he say it? how had it come up?) that he had thought the Nassoons absurd. In fact, because he knew it amused me, he would sometimes impersonate the Nassoons in performance: the studied plunge of one hand into a pocket, the swirling of the ice cubes in the imaginary glass, the chin thrust into profile, the slight satisfied smile.

As I remember you—

We stood there together on a high windy slope — Our faces to the weather and our hearts full of hope—

For forty years this song had figured in a private joke between us and I could not remember its name, let alone the rest of its lyrics. Finding the lyrics became a matter of some urgency. I could find only a single reference on the Internet, in an obituary from the Princeton Alumni Weekly:

John MacFadyen ’46 *49: John MacFadyen died February 18, 2000, in Damariscotta, Maine, near the village of Head Tide, where he and his wife, Mary-Esther, made their home. The cause of death was pneumonia, but his health failed for some years, particularly after his wife’s death in 1977. John came to Princeton from Duluth in the ‘accelerated’ summer of 1942. Gifted in music and arts, he contributed songs to Triangle, including, “As I Remember You,” long a Nassoons favorite. John was the life of any party with a piano. Remembered was his rendition of “Shine, Little Glow Worm,” played upside down from under the piano. After U.S. Army service in Japan, he returned to Princeton for a master’s of fine arts in architecture. In the New York firm Harrison & Abramowitz, he designed a main United Nations building. John received the Rome Prize in architecture, and, newly wed to Mary-Esther Edge, spent 1952–53 at Rome’s American Academy. His private architectural practice, noted especially for the design of the Wolf Trap Center for the Arts outside Washington, was interrupted by his service, during the 1960s, under Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, as executive director of the first state arts council. The class joins his children, Camilla, Luke, William, and John and three grandchildren in mourning the loss of one of our most unforgettable members.

“As I Remember You,” long a Nassoons favorite.

But how about the death of Mary-Esther?

And how long ago was it when the life of any party last played “Shine, Little Glow Worm” upside down from under the piano?

What would I give to be able to discuss this with John?

What would I give to be able to discuss anything at all with John? What would I give to be able to say one small thing that made him happy? What would that one small thing be? If I had said it in time would it have worked?

A night or two before he died John asked me if I was aware how many characters died in the novel he had just sent to press, Nothing Lost. He had been sitting in his office making a list of them. I added one he had overlooked. Some months after he died I picked up a legal pad on his desk to make a note. On the legal pad, in very faint pencil, his handwriting, was the list. It read:

Teresa Kean

Parlance

Emmett McClure

Jack Broderick

Maurice Dodd

Four people in car

Charlie Buckles

Percy — electric chair (Percy Darrow)

Walden McClure

Why was the pencil so faint, I wondered.

Why would he use a pencil that barely left a mark.

When did he begin seeing himself as dead?

“It’s not black and white,” a young doctor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles had told me, in 1982, about the divide between life and death. We had been standing in an ICU at Cedars watching Nick and Lenny’s daughter Dominique, who had the night before been strangled to the point of death. Dominique was lying there in the ICU as if she were asleep but she would not recover. She was breathing only on life support.

Dominique had been the four-year-old at John’s and my wedding.

Dominique had been the cousin who supervised Quintana’s parties and took her shopping for prom dresses and stayed with her if we were out of town. Roses are red, violets are blue, read the card on a glass of flowers Quintana and Dominique left on the kitchen table for our return from one such trip. I wish you weren’t home and Dominique does too. Love, Happy Mother’s Day, D & Q.

I remember thinking that the doctor was wrong. For as long as Dominique lay in this ICU she was alive. She could not keep herself alive unaided but she was alive. That was white. When they turned off the life support there would be a matter of some minutes before her systems shut down and then she would be dead. That was black.

There were no faint traces about dead, no pencil marks.

Any faint traces, any pencil marks, were left “a night or two before he died,” or “a week or two before,” in any case decisively before he died.

There was a divide.

The abrupt finality of this divide was something about which I thought a great deal during the late spring and summer after I came home from UCLA. A close friend, Carolyn Lelyveld, died in May, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. Tony Dunne’s wife, Rosemary Breslin, died in June, at Columbia-Presbyterian. In each of those cases the phrase “after long illness” would have seemed to apply, trailing its misleading suggestion of release, relief, resolution. In each of those long illnesses the possibility of death had been in the picture, in Carolyn’s case for some months, in Rosemary’s since 1989, when she was thirty-two. Yet having seen the picture in no way deflected, when it came, the swift empty loss of the actual event. It was still black and white. Each of them had been in the last instant alive, and then dead. I realized that I had never believed in the words I had learned as a child in order to be confirmed as an Episcopalian: I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, amen.

I did not believe in the resurrection of the body.

Nor had Teresa Kean, Parlance, Emmett McClure, Jack Broderick, Maurice Dodd, the four people in the car, Charlie Buckles, Percy Darrow, or Walden McClure.

Nor had my Catholic husband.

I imagined this way of thinking to be clarifying, but in point of fact it was so muddled as to contradict even itself.

I did not believe in the resurrection of the body but I still believed that given the right circumstances he would come back.

He who left the faint traces before he died, the Number Three pencil.

One day it seemed important that I reread Alcestis. I had last read it at sixteen or seventeen, for a paper on Euripides, but recalled it as somehow relevant to this question of the “divide.” I remembered the Greeks in general but Alcestis in particular as good on the passage between life and death. They visualized it, they dramatized it, they made the dark water and the ferry into the mise-en-scène itself. I did reread Alcestis. What happens in the play is this: Admetus, the young king of Thessaly, has been condemned by Death to die. Apollo has interceded, gaining a promise from the Fates that Admetus, if he can find another mortal to die in his place, need not die immediately. Admetus approaches his friends and his parents, in vain. “I tell myself that we are a long time underground and that life is short, but sweet,” his father tells him after declining to take his place.

Only the wife of Admetus, the young queen, Alcestis, volunteers. There is much wailing about her approaching death, but no one steps in to save her. She dies, at length: “I see the two-oared boat, / I see the boat on the lake! / And Charon, / Ferryman of the Dead, / Calls to me, his hand on the oar…” Admetus is overcome by guilt and shame and self-pity: “Alas! How bitter to me is that ferrying of which you speak! O my unhappy one, how we suffer!” He behaves in every way badly. He blames his parents. He insists that Alcestis is suffering less than he. After some pages (and quite enough) of this, Alcestis, by means of a remarkably (even for 430 B.C.) clumsy deus ex machina, is allowed to come back. She does not speak, but this is explained, again clumsily, as temporary, self-correcting: “You may not hear her voice until she is purified from her consecration to the Lower Gods, and until the third dawn is risen.” If we rely on the text alone, the play ends happily.

This was not my memory of Alcestis, which suggests that I was already given, at sixteen or seventeen, to editing the text as I read it. The principal divergences between the text and my memory appear toward the end, when Alcestis returns from the dead. In my memory, the reason Alcestis does not speak is that she declines to speak. Admetus, as I remembered it, presses her, at which point, to his distress, since what she turns out to have on her mind are his revealed failings, she does speak. Admetus, alarmed, shuts off the prospect of hearing more by calling for celebration. Alcestis acquiesces, but remains remote, other. Alcestis is on the face of it back with her husband and children, again the young queen of Thessaly, but the ending (“my” ending) could not be construed as happy.

In some ways this is a better (more “worked out”) story, one that at least acknowledges that death “changes” the one who has died, but it opens up further questions about the divide. If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.

They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.

They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it. The voice on my answering machine is still John’s. The fact that it was his in the first place was arbitrary, having to do with who was around on the day the answering machine last needed programming, but if I needed to retape it now I would do so with a sense of betrayal. One day when I was talking on the telephone in his office I mindlessly turned the pages of the dictionary that he had always left open on the table by the desk. When I realized what I had done I was stricken: what word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking? By turning the pages had I lost the message? Or had the message been lost before I touched the dictionary? Had I refused to hear the message?

I tell you that I shall not live two days, Gawain said.

Later in the summer I received another book from Princeton. It was a first edition copy of True Confessions, in, as the booksellers say, “good condition, original dust jacket slightly frayed.” In fact it was John’s own copy: he had apparently sent it to a classmate who was organizing, for the fiftieth reunion of the Class of 1954, an exhibition of books written by class members. “It occupied the position of honor,” the classmate wrote to me, “since John was unquestionably the most distinguished writer in our class.”

I studied the original dust jacket, slightly frayed, on the copy of True Confessions.

I remembered the first time I saw this jacket, or a mock-up of this jacket. It had sat around our house for days, as proposed designs and type samples and jackets for new books always did, the idea being to gauge whether or not it would wear well, continue to please the eye.

I opened the book. I looked at the dedication. “For Dorothy Burns Dunne, Joan Didion, Quintana Roo Dunne,” the dedication read. “Generations.”

I had forgotten this dedication. I had not sufficiently appreciated it, a persistent theme by that stage of whatever I was going through.

I reread True Confessions. I found it darker than I had remembered it. I reread Harp. I found a different, less sunny, version of the summer we watched Tenko and went to dinner at Morton’s.

Something else had happened toward the end of that summer.

In August there had been a memorial service for an acquaintance (this was not in itself the “something else” that happened), a French tennis player in his sixties who had been killed in an accident. The memorial service had been on someone’s court in Beverly Hills. “I met my wife at the service,” John had written in Harp, “coming directly from a doctor’s appointment in Santa Monica, and as I sat there under the hot August sun, death was very much on my mind. I thought Anton had actually died under the best possible circumstances for him, a moment of terror as he realized the inevitable outcome of the accident, then an instant later the eternal dark.”

The service ended and the parking attendant brought my car. As we drove away, my wife said, “What did the doctor say?”

There had not been an appropriate moment to mention my visit to the doctor in Santa Monica. “He scared the shit out of me, babe.”

“What did he say?”

“He said I was a candidate for a catastrophic cardiac event.”

A few pages further in Harp, the writer, John, examines the veracity of this (his own) account. He notes a name changed, a certain dramatic restructuring, a minor time collapse. He asks himself: “Anything else?” This was the answer he gave: “When I told my wife he scared the shit out of me, I started to cry.”

Either I had not remembered this or I had determinedly chosen not to remember this.

I had not sufficiently appreciated it.

Was that what he experienced as he himself died? “A moment of terror as he realized the inevitable outcome of the accident, then an instant later the eternal dark”? In the sense that it happens one night and not another, the mechanism of a typical cardiac arrest could be construed as essentially accidental: a sudden spasm ruptures a deposit of plaque in a coronary artery, ischemia follows, and the heart, deprived of oxygen, enters ventricular fibrillation.

But how did he experience it?

The “moment of terror,” the “eternal dark”? Did he accurately intuit this when he was writing Harp? Did he, as we would say to each other to the point of whether something was accurately reported or perceived, “get it right”? What about the “eternal dark” part? Didn’t the survivors of near-death experiences always mention “the white light”? It occurs to me as I write that this “white light,” usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact precisely consistent with the oxygen deficit that occurs as blood flow to the brain decreases. “Everything went white,” those whose blood pressure has dropped say of the instant before they faint. “All the color drained out,” those bleeding internally report of the moment when blood loss goes critical.

The “something else” that happened toward the end of that summer, which must have been 1987, was the series of events that followed the appointment with the doctor in Santa Monica and the memorial service on the tennis court in Beverly Hills. A week or so later an angiogram was done. The angiogram showed a 90 percent occlusion of the left anterior descending artery, or LAD. It also showed a long 90 percent narrowing in the circumflex marginal artery, which was considered significant mainly because the circumflex marginal artery fed the same area of the heart as the occluded LAD. “We call it the widowmaker, pal,” John’s cardiologist in New York later said of the LAD. A week or two after the angiogram (it was by then September of that year, still summer in Los Angeles) an angioplasty was done. The results after two weeks, as demonstrated by an exercise echocardiogram, were said to be “spectacular.” Another exercise echo after six months confirmed this success. Thallium scans over the next few years and a subsequent angiogram in 1991 gave the same confirmation. I recall that John and I took different views of what had happened in 1987. As he saw it, he now had a death sentence, temporarily suspended. He often said, after the 1987 angioplasty, that he now knew how he was going to die. As I saw it, the timing had been providential, the intervention successful, the problem solved, the mechanism fixed. You no more know how you’re going to die than I do or anyone else does, I remember saying. I realize now that his was the more realistic view.