Eulogies
Posted by Holly at February 10th, 2007
Before I came to living out happiness I described myself as a happy person whose life’s circumstances kept getting in the way of living out that happiness. Not that I was in a funk; I wasn’t. It was just that my life centered more around what I had lost than what I had. I wrote about loss all the time and I saw it as what I thought was a current that ran under what everybody wrote no matter the form. I saw loss in irony, humor, romance, history. I saw it in struggles that prompted self-help books and in political analysis, if not obviously, then obliquely in terms of what we had given up or might lose. It was my touchstone. I didn’t know how to live without loss being a present companion. One consequence was the dimension it brought to my writing and how I refracted people close to me … especially when I lost them. They were as full to me in their absence as in their presence and I might not have gotten that quality if I weren’t experiencing the sense of loss so acutely. In any case, here are four portraits drawn out of loss.
I
Last Crumbs
My grandmother ate every roll in the basket the waiter set down on the table. She grabbed them and made it clear that no one else was to have anything from this basket. We knew this was odd, bizarre, frightening really because we felt as out of control as she was acting. We had no name, yet, for her fate. Whatever the cause, I wasn’t prepared for my elegant and beautiful grandmother to look so angry to be so focused on herself that there were practically no limits on what she said or did. Harder, even, was the fact that she was enough herself that it was impossible to see her as vacant; something of her was still in there, somewhere; just not enough to deal with her in a rational manner.
It’s funny how the little things have residency in my soul; flashes of moments with my family that sum up whole experiences. Watching my grandmother scarf down rolls I also see her sitting in a silk wrap at the room service table wheeled into the room my grandparents stayed in for two months of every year = February and May = in Atlantic City when it was still a Victorian resort. Wasn’t I the luckiest little girl in the world to get to go with them for part of each trip and live the life of a veritable Eloise at the Plaza! On those mornings I was there, I was always torn between room service breakfast with my grandmother and the dining room version with my grandfather. He rose early, dressed in his suit, with vest and tie even though he was on vacation, and descended to the dining room for his sumptuous breakfast of kippered herring, Philadelphia scrapple and whole wheat toast. My grandmother was more the Polish princess who required time to join the day.
Her breakfast table had toast and little pots of jam in sturdy hotel china, a little burner underneath the table to keep foods warm on their way up from the kitchen. Her breakfast view seemed, to my little girl eyes, the entire Atlantic Ocean in the one window frame. Wave after wave crashed and fell in on itself, settling down to a speeding single layer as it slid into the beach. Seagulls flew everywhere punctuating their flights with that high alto cawing sound that I love to this day.
My grandmother took a long time to have her breakfast, drink her tea, savor the smell of the salt air and listen to the sea sounds. She wasn’t ever a great thinker but she was full of considerate advice and helpful hints, some of which she constructed during those long mornings. I would see her scribbling notes on hotel stationery; notes that might later appear on my pillow containing something she just needed to tell me about how to do something or how to behave.
Although I saw her get angry from time to time, I would not call her an angry woman. The mind is an unusual place, to say the least. In her last stage of life, my grandmother was angry at everything including the wind. Was this some hidden plot point in her personality or did the frustration of her increasing decline just make her so angry she could spit?
Does the ending of life when it is drawn out and difficult, when life is nibbled away by some little known disease of them mind, wipe out all that came before? Is this the reason we have the ability to hold pictures and sounds in our minds to keep our hold on something that may slip suddenly through our fingers? Are they the pictures of those left behind or do the leave takers have them also and know precisely what it is they are losing?
I think that would make me angry, too.
II
My Prince
I like a woman to wear fine clothes. God knows why that line from a man I once dated popped into my head sitting in the café in Monaco. Unless it was that the color of the light on the buildings was the same early morning pale yellow as the suit I had on the night he said that… and it was a fine day. As usual, I am sitting at the little café I like so much with the tan and green wicker chairs, small tables and deep, dark lifeblood espresso. The Palace is a presence above me; a place I’ve never been because I’ve heard they actually sell postcards inside. I order my double espresso. God, I wish I still smoked.
All these stays = Monaco, Nice, London, York, even Paris = impossibly perfect Paris = are tinged now. The places are beautiful. I know people everywhere so I feel part of the place, not a visitor. I go to cocktails or late lunches with interesting people, walk backstreets tourists don’t find. This day I am waiting for a friend who writes a popular series of novels for teenage girls. We’re going to drive somewhere, anywhere.
Few cars do drive along this tine street so it catches my attention when one does appear at the top, to my left. I watch it approach, a Mercedes, but only because one would look, not because I am curious about who is in it. So it is doubly shocking as it passes me and I see P. In a flash I remember that it can’t be P. My heart is pounding in my ears and suddenly the pale yellow light is so bright I can barely see because it is now refracted through the wetness in my eyes. In the same split second my brain registers the little flags flying on the front and back of the car. It is the Prince. Until that moment, I never realized how alike they looked.
My friend picks me up and we drive out of Monaco along the same road where Princess Grace was killed.
III
Twins, Separated By Parents
Allan’s death is a cruel gash in the face of our too short kinship. Allie and I really became cousins late in life. I have no memory of him from the long ago Passover Seder dinners at our grandmother’s, although I can pick out and recall something of everyone other cousin from one year or another. It was as if we came upon each other at a time when there was no artificial distraction and we could observe, decide and choose to embrace the deep friendship and family link that held us together, as I describe it, like twins separated by parents, gender and nine years.
Of all my family, the three dearest to me = and everyone knows this = are my son, my father and my cousin twin. There are many reasons and, from my selfish point of view, one important shared characteristic that they love me and accept me as I am. In Allan’s case, this was a miracle for which I am grateful.
I have seen and heard Allan assess, sum up and judge and then decide to accept or tolerate to the extent of his own preset limits the particular subject of his scrutiny. From the moment of our greeting whenever we got together = that rib=ripping hug of his = I knew where I stood with Allan and he knew what I could take of his wisdom … often better than I did.
He was never shy with his judgments; once, when Allan and Susan were prowling around the Pacific Northwest they stayed with me and he never let me forget the empty state of my refrigerator. Another time, in the Oregon beachfront home where my parents and I spent a week with Allan and Susan, Allan was pointblank honest in agreeing that some of my charming little foibles would drive him nuts if we lived together. And then acknowledged that the reverse was also true. I learned the phrase reload and shoot from Allan’s wife.
All that aside, Allan’s expectation that people have the capability to excel drew the best = and now and then the worst = from the people around him. When I was with him last, just before I had to leave for the airport, Allan pulled out a letter from a student of his and asked me to read it. This was new, Allan wanting to reveal how adored he was. I told him he would never get a letter like that from me because that would mean, on some level, I was accepting the ineluctable end of this part of our story.
On that same last visit I noticed, for the first time, that Allan’s hands looked just like my Dad’s. Allan and Susan realized it, too. It was a poignant gift to me to look at those familiar shapes and curves. When his dying was over and we all gathered at his farewell at sea on a beautiful day in San Francisco, I stood on the dock watching the boat float in its moorings and was struck by the sight of a familiar line, the angle at which a head was held and realized it was Allan’s son, the continuation of my precious link. So I looked at the rail and, sure enough, I saw = or think I saw or hoped I saw = the shape of my Dad’s hand and that of my treasured cousin twin’s.
As the boat slipped away on a mission to release Allan’s atoms inside that gorgeous day, I thought of the beginning of my favorite Alfred Lord Tennyson poem, Morte d’Artur:
“And so all day long the noise of battle rolled,
Until King Arthur’s court, man by man,
Had fallen in lioness about their lord,
King Arthur.”
IV
A Most Important Woman
Nancy is, still, the most important woman in my life. The place she occupied = for more than two thirds of my life = runs wide and deep and, it’s a funny thing, but every moment with her contained the totality of our relationship. Seeing her in 2006, as I did in January, or talking to her on the phone as I did a scant few weeks before she died, carried the trace memory of that first day she walked into my Speech I class in 1962. As I have thought about that moment, I know I had no particular expectation and I’m not even sure I knew her name before she announced it. I did know there was something captivating, graceful and feminine as she glided in on those impossibly high heels.
It was the physical and the vocal presence one had to notice first simply because Nancy was so beautiful with a honeyed voice, modulations of which we all came to recognize in our four years under her wing. If I look back now at the assignments and the instruction, the gentle way in which she coaxed performance out of us whether we were reading a short, terse poem or a monologue from Tennessee Williams, I know I have so much more for which to be grateful than just the right and proper management of voice and speech.
Nancy taught the world. When she gave you her notes at the end of a performed assignment, it was as if you were the only one in the room and what you gleaned from her might just be the most important lesson you would ever learn. The way in which she studied the world, reached conclusions and imparted them was, in itself, a lesson. She got to the core of an issue, explored it and was clear and eloquent in expressing what she knew to be truths. She was fair and honest, intolerant of injustice, deeply moved by the power of theatre art.
In some ways, the times dictated her lessons. We talked about this when I saw her last. There we were, two grown women having a luxurious tea in the lobby of the Garden City Hotel and talking about the day she brought Martin Luther King’s I Had A Dream speech to class. She thought then, she told me, and continued to think that it was so important for us to lose ourselves in the rhythm and cadence of the speech in order to let the words find a dwelling place in our souls. She knew then the place that speech would have in history and she knew the value of placing us in the same moment. We agreed that she had much to do with the quickening of our political responsiveness.
The time I knew her in college was extraordinary. All the passion of the sixties simmered beneath an exterior of 1950s traditions and manners on that jewel of a campus at Adelphi. The tumultuousness that characterized my generation made us challenge the existing dogma. I know perfectly well that Nancy chose to direct Tennessee Williams or Arthur Schnitzler for many other reasons but, it seems to me now, that when she directed our class it was because the plays expressed upheaval, emotion, reflection and she could help us make sense of our warrior thoughts and states by refracting them through the words of genius: evidence of her own genius, brilliance, crystal=clear thinking.
Still, she could give assignments I challenged as ridiculous. For years after I was graduated, whenever the opportunity arose, she would tell the story of how I argued with her in class over having to take a perfectly good three=act play, The Glass Menagerie in that case, and reduce it to a twenty minute presentation. She would tell people how annoyed she was with me for the challenge and then would laugh with me when I filled in that later in my life I realized it was one of the most important assignments I ever had to master and how much it taught me about getting to the heart of a matter.
I would never have known she was annoyed or furious, of course. Once, when she was telling me about something that had happened in the department and how angry she was, she said she had related the incident to Frank (her husband) and told him she was furious. We laughed together over his response: “Did anybody know?” She knew her manner was gentle but she also knew how to get her way. Nancy’s flirtatiousness had nothing to do with romance; rather, it was the way a woman of such substance who also happened to be beautiful would transact business in a time when women hadn’t yet achieved the position we do hold now.
My relationship with my teacher continued after I was graduated and, again, after I completed my teaching fellowship at Adelphi, during which she was my Master’s mentor. Then a spate of years went by in which we weren’t in touch. So much happened. I married, had a child, was widowed and sank into mourning that lasted for more than a decade. When my college bound son announced that he thought he would apply to Adelphi, I was astonished. There hadn’t been one thought or word about that possibility. When he was accepted into the theatre program = vastly different than when I was there, now housed in a beautiful and professionally equipped theatre light years away from the Quonset hut in which we had worked = my first thought was, frankly, that I would soon see Nancy again. The first opportunity was at the Alex Barnes auditions. I was naturally excited and anxious for my son but just as excited about seeing Nancy. She approached us, waiting there in the theatre lobby, and introduced herself. “I’m Nancy Miller,” she said. “And I’m Holly Minkoff,” I told her. It was the kind of reunion you see in movies and, thereafter that day, she introduced me to people as “One of our best…” My son was ultimately awarded the Alex Barnes scholarship, which his mother hadn’t been 25 years earlier, but now I had something better = Nancy’s public pronouncement that I had been good.
And it got better than that. Nancy and I had lunch shortly after Charlie began his tenure at Adelphi. We sat in the Ginger Man on West 64th Street in New York City for four hours and talked about everything. When finally we had to part that day and as I walked away from her, I realized that I was suddenly lighter, that my mourning had ended. Nancy was the first person I had spoken to, in all those years, besides my own family, who had known me before I was married. I knew her conversation that day had given me back my self.
That was thirteen years ago. We talked and saw each other often. The teacher=student relationship was always there but it deepened and we talked about our families in a different way. I had known Carina as a baby and now came to know her through a loving mother’s stories. I had known Frank, of course, and now came to appreciate the strength of the bond he and Nancy shared.
When I left New York, we made sure we talked even more and would see each other as often as we could when I came back to visit. From time to time we would send each other little presents. I still carry in my wallet the note that came with one she sent because she talked about puffs of fur that might be found on the fabric from Snowball, her kitty. She left out a word and it just seemed so sweet and silly because I could hear her laughing, picturing the kitty as she was writing that she didn’t realize she’d left out a word.
