Knowing When to Stop Read online

  From collection of the author.

  Knowing

  When

  to Stop

  A MEMOIR

  NED ROREM

  TO MARIE ARANA-WARD AND GEORGES BORCHARDT,

  whose idea it was.

  TO MICHAEL KORDA AND CHUCK ADAMS

  for their faith.

  TO BARBARA HARKINS AND BRUCE MACOMBER

  for their painstaking diligence in typing and copy editing.

  LAST AND MOST,

  to my dearest friend, JIM HOLMES,

  for his eleventh-hour deletions and suggestions,

  and for his decades of patience.

  Contents

  Part One

  Prologue: Last Things First

  1. Baby Pictures

  2. Looking Forward to the Past (1924–29)

  3. Preadolescence (1930–36)

  4. Mother’s Diary

  5. Interlude

  6. Ned’s Diary (I)

  7. Dance of the Adolescents

  8. U-High—Part I

  9. U-High—Part II

  10. U-High—Part III

  11. Northwestern 1940–41

  12. Mexico 1941

  13. Northwestern 1941–42

  14. Philadelphia 1943

  Part Two

  15. Virgil

  16. Martha

  17. Ned’s Diary (II)

  18. Aaron

  19. Juilliard and Tanglewood

  20. Paul • Sam • Marc

  21. Ned’s Diary (III)

  22. Bill, Howard, Kraft, Nell, and Others in the Theater

  23. Ned’s Diary (IV)

  24. Envoi

  Part Three

  25. 1949: Harp Street and Saint-Germain • Nadia and José • Poulenc and Guy

  26. Morocco • Paris • Morocco

  27. What Truman Capote Means to Me

  28. 1950: Morocco • Italy • France • Morocco

  29. 1950: Italy • Morocco • France • Morocco

  30. Remembering Green

  31. 1951: The First Three Months

  32. Marie-Laure in Hyères

  33. Marie-Laure in Paris

  Epilogue

  Photo Gallery

  Index

  About the Author

  In a dim corner of my room

  For longer than my fancy thinks

  A beautiful and silent sphinx

  Has watched me through the shifting gloom.

  —Oscar Wilde

  From collection of the author.

  Prologue:

  Last Things First

  At death, you break up:

  the bits that were you

  start speeding away

  from each other for ever

  with no one to see …

  —Philip Larkin

  I was working at the piano when the Cadbury doctor phoned to say that Gladys Rorem had “expired” at the dinner table an hour earlier. It was 6:20, a warm Sunday, and from the kitchen floated the aroma of those two yams I’d just put in the oven. Going into JH’s room I burst into tears. The moment seems already far away, as this paragraph will soon seem far away, yet indelible as a pistol shot.

  By coincidence Rosemary was here in New York for the weekend visiting her son Paul. No point making the two-hour trek to Jersey tonight. Father would be asleep (he was not to be told about Mother until we arrived), the nursing home might be closed, and anyway the body was even now being transferred to the funeral parlor in Merchantville. So Rosemary, with Paul and his infant daughter, came over and spent the night in their sleeping bags on our living room floor, and next morning, 11 April 1988, we all drove down in a rented car.

  How many scores of times have we made this trip since Mother and Father withdrew to their Quaker-founded retirement home on Route 38 near Cherry Hill! How many times—with JH always at the wheel—have I silently played the pointless compulsive game of reading road signs backward: Park Exit becomes Tixe Krap, Merge becomes Egrem, and (my favorite) Speed Limit becomes Timil Deeps, like some sacred Hindu tarn. That first visit six years ago seemed like this morning (at Cadbury time does not pass), Father stoic, Mother resistant. The director, a Mr. Yarnell, only twenty-nine, likable and colorless in tortoise-shell glasses and immaculate chinos, had showed me and JH the premises—potted ferns throughout the vast halls and stairways, communal dining room seating 150, a pretty good library, bourgeois one-room apartments with wall-to-wall rugs—and confided, when I remarked on his youth, that “the board feels the personnel should be young. It gives the guests [he meant the inmates, who pay a fortune] a sense of still belonging to a vital world.” Within eighteen months Yarnell himself was dead. (When the platform collapsed beneath the multitude of spectators at the beheading of Beatrice Cenci, those spectators perished ahead of the woman they had come to see die.) Meanwhile the “guests,” blurry or keen—and I got to know dozens by sight, sometimes by greeting—in their nonagenarian glory, persisted in treading this tragic and silly planet. There’s no right time for death, at least not for survivors, and the longer death’s delayed the less seemly. (Sharp Turns becomes Snrut Prahs, McDonald’s becomes s’dlanoDcM.) Already I missed Mother as though she were my child, yet who could claim as unjust her vanishing into the scheme of things? She was ninety-one.

  Convening at Cadbury where niece Charity, having come over from Philly, joined us, we picked up Father, had lunch, then drove, the seven of us, plus JH’s white bichon Sonny, to Brown’s Funeral Home in nearby Merchantville, Father speaking with difficulty because of his recent little stroke, but not otherwise confused, not yet: “Don’t worry too much about my morale. Mother died for me three years ago.” The establishment was cheery, shady, familial, even luxurious. Mr. Brown had a style of rehearsed congeniality as we discussed costs, cremation details, obit notices. Soon we removed en masse to an adjacent room to “view” the deceased.

  There on a bier lies mother, spouse, granny, great-grandmother, the strangest hour of my life. Gazing down at the so-familiar features, “arranged” by the croque-mort, Mother is a house no longer inhabited; she is there, with Father and me and Rosemary, but not there. Vanished from the universe. Pathetic creature, wee, marbleized, still, icy—is this the body from which my sinful hulk emerged sixty-four years ago? Is there in fact a body? The winding-sheet’s taut and without contour. Has the undertaker either not troubled (why should he?) to adjust limbs and torso, or simply severed the head and placed it calmly at the top of the sheet? (This doesn’t occur to me until later, like a remembrance of the heads in Réflexions sur la guillotine, which Camus insisted can actually think for more than a minute after the jugular is sliced.) Through the window on this golden afternoon sparrows chirp their birdy messages while building their first nests of the season, unconcerned about our peopleish things. Down the street the tinkle of an ice cream wagon, also the first of the season, identical to the ones fifty-five years earlier that we heard, sitting with our erections, in Miss John’s algebra class, which I twice flunked.

  I cry. Charity cries. Father cries and utters, “She’s had a rough few years.” Thank heaven for Mrs. Peacock, we all think tacitly. Mrs. Peacock, a mere eighty-four, is the wise and cultured lady Father befriended at Cadbury a couple years ago when Mother’s state turned vegetal. Where there’s life there’s hope. Father enunciates hesitantly now, loses track, but won’t dissolve, at least not because of Mother.

  Suddenly I’m another person. Through it all I am able to stand aside. I feel guilty about this, but not very, and watch me being sorrowful. Is there even a thrilling twinge of respectable glamour at being finally an orphan, or anyhow a half-orphan, like everyone else?

  In all my years scarcely a day has passed when I’ve not thought of Mother, wherever in the world I wa
s. For the next week I thought of her still more, of course, mostly with wistfulness, sometimes with giddiness. Funny how one can know a person so long yet suddenly discover that some essential knowledge is missing. For instance, did she believe in God? She did believe in poetry, and maybe that’s the same thing. So at the memorial the following Saturday, at Friends Monthly Meeting in Philadelphia, I read aloud these verses which Mother knew by heart and often quoted:

  Good-bye my fancy—I had a word to say,

  But ’tis not quite the time—The best of any man’s word or say,

  Is when its proper place arrives—and for its meaning,

  I keep mine till the last.

  As it happens, I had been setting this to music when the phone so fatally rang, and Whitman’s words became the start of an oratorio performed two years hence in Chicago. Others present: the six Marshall kids, some older Quakers unknown to me, business colleagues of Father’s and Father himself, patriarchal in a wheelchair. Everyone spoke and got choked up, except Rosemary and Paul. Young nephew Per Marshall’s guitar song and move-with-the-flow spiel seemed more about himself than Mother, whose very existence was consecrated to what Father called her “militant pacifism.” The best way to eliminate wars is not to wage them, said she, cutting the Gordian knot. JH spoke about “Mrs. Rorem” as one who was a fighter in all ways except physical, and who with independence and originality moved against the flow in her notions and comportment; the world paid no heed, so she willed herself to die, unfulfilled and alone. He added that she was the sole person to comprehend him in his time of crisis, years ago. Mary read the Twenty-third Psalm (in a trite translation), and Bob Sigmond spoke of “Gladys’s wit” and her love of walking. Cookies served. After an hour, Father, needing to go to the bathroom, wheeled himself off, like Lear, and the meeting ended.

  Her mind was like a window shade slowly lowered against the world. Hair combed straight back, like Garbo’s in Mata Hari, eyes big as eagle eggs, tobacco colored, wistful, uncomprehending, strapped in bed.

  I never heard them quarrel, or even disagree, yet each was strong-minded. There was a rift, at least once, when Rosemary was… But I’ll come to that.…

  She hated the flag for what it had done to her kid brother, killed in the Great War. But it was her flag, too—she had a right to hate it, like patriotism, or anything not one world.

  She was only the second dead person I’d ever seen.

  JH’s first exposure to Mother, circa 1967, when she said to her friend Marion, who admitted to finding solace in prayer: “Oh Marion, you don’t!”

  She never clearly explained to me, as a child, why I couldn’t marry her when I grew up.

  My sister’s swains found Mother sexy.

  Mourning should last four seasons, plus maybe a fifth season of grace, but no more. If time could flow backward and we could revive the dead, would we … be bored?

  In a dream I was told that there is a bridge to death—that even in the most hideous executions, during that nonmoment between being and not being, we soar over a limitless field of silver daisies in a yellow light so dazzling it is no longer light.

  She bore Father’s weight.

  Etcetera.

  The foregoing paragraphs are from notes made at the time of the memorial, on 16 April 1988.

  Five months later, on 19 September, Father died.

  To be in the subway for the tenth time this week or in a taxi whirling you through Central Park on the first gentle day of spring; to be sitting with a parent who is lonely and sad or at a party laughing with someone you’ve just met but aren’t listening to; to be loitering in the bakery or chatting with your life’s mate; and suddenly to feel a shiver down your spine, for you realize yet again that you’re absolutely alone in the world.

  In Nantucket the whole summer, I didn’t visit Father. From my diary:

  1 July 1988. Regular calls to & from Rosemary in Philadelphia who makes a daily schlepp to Father at Cadbury. He’s worse, incontinent, wears diapers, slurred speech, doesn’t always make sense or recognize her, cries a lot. What’s worse is that the aides are rude, scold him when he falls, imperiously treat him like an ornery burden (Father: the innovative and rational economist!). The catch is that although they don’t have time to dress Father at a fixed hour each morning so that Mrs. Peacock can wheel him about, we are not allowed to hire someone to dress him because that infringes on the nurses’ code. Meanwhile, those nurses are rude too to Mrs. Peacock, considering her an interferer. Mrs. Peacock has singlehandedly organized all musical activity in the institution, with her octogenarian choir and her piano playing at religious functions. She’s apparently the sole female at Cadbury less interested in blue hair dye and Bingo than in classical music. But beyond adoring Father, she has her own problems. Her daughter, struck with a virulent cancer, has nonetheless just completed a book on women in music.

  4 July. Father whimpers a lot, although I never saw him do so in the old days. Does he mourn his wife, about whom he never talks, or simply the weight of years—the unretrievable past? Mrs. Peacock and Rosemary decipher references to his father. It seems logical (unbroken chain, etcetera) how clearly I can recall Grandfather Rorem in all his accented gruffness on the Iowa farm in the late twenties.

  8 July. Christopher Marshall phones from Philly. He’s returning to Maine and wants to strew Mother’s ashes in the Hudson en route. I said no. Both of Rosemary’s eldest are getting intimations of mortality, and all six had been deeply close to Granny, as they call her. But JH feels we should wait, mingle Mother’s ashes with Father’s, have a larger community ceremony, perhaps at Cadbury. Then RR calls, wondering what I’d told Christopher. She also says that various Quakers had been impressed by JH’s remarks at the memorial on 16 April—that everyone else (like me, all teary) had talked about how unhappy we were, while JH spoke of Mother’s qualities. But he did so, he himself claims, to counteract young Per’s formulaic bromides.

  19 July. Father still gets invitations to offer paid advice here & there. Out of the question. He cannot locomote, his speech is undecipherable, and he sobs too much. Rosemary says: Let him simply be a legend from now on.

  Re Father’s sobbing: JH says he’s always been shocked at how we four Rorems are obsessed with ourselves. Such introspection was unseemly in his Kansas childhood. (He’s just clipped back the indoor hanging ivy in what he calls the Gertrude Stein cut, to make it sprout more evenly. JH is, I may as well explain now, James Holmes, my more-than-friend, with whom I have lived since 1967.)

  On the second Monday of September, as I’ve done each year since 1980, I resumed teaching at Curtis in Philadelphia. Arrived there from New York in the morning, and in late afternoon Rosemary picked me up at school and we drove to Jersey. My first visit since May, though Rosemary has been every day. When Father saw me his face lit up like a sunrise. “You’re a pacifist, aren’t you?” he whispered. Then he stopped trying to speak, his sad features forcing a smile from time to time, looking like his own father, Ole Jon. How does he survive without eating? He only vomits. Rosemary brushes his lips with lemon water, and he whispers “good.” When we leave he once more whispers: “I love you both so much.”

  20 September. Again at Curtis. Emergency call from Rosemary, the head nurse had phoned her. Again we drive to Cadbury, spend six hours there, a windless late afternoon in the gardens with acorns falling on our heads. We wait. A stroll to the E wing where Mother had lived and died. Familiar faces of some of the crazies. R says: “Yesterday he managed to say, ‘I thought I was dead.’” And we wait some more. Only last Thursday he received a medal, but did he know it? Mrs. Peacock’s fruit juice, etc. Her pastel gowns and rosewater. Mother left us five months ago. Their sexual relations continued into their eighties, Father once told me. His sorry little emaciated body now like a Dachau inmate.

  The gasping; the unseeing eyes. The breathing, quieter and quieter. The nurses, friendly now and efficient. The dark falling outside. Rachel & Mike & Sara & Mary bring lasagna. They leave, Mary
stays, also Charity. My mind wanders. I read The New Republic. I’m supposed to fly back to Nantucket tomorrow morning. What if we flung Father onto a flaming pyre? Would he awaken with a screech?

  I still don’t realize what Rosemary realizes—that it is happening. We touch him a great deal. Rosemary believes in the laying on of hands. Respiration still calmer. Slower. No odor. Thank God I stayed. Father’s eyes roll up into his head, just the whites show.

  With inevitable certainty, we all mysteriously know that there are just twenty more intakes of breath left in his lungs, then nineteen, then twelve, then six. Twitching of the mouth (like our cat Wallace’s rictus when he died), twice at the end, a minute apart. Was he already gone? A breeze at the window.

  “I think that’s it,” I say.

  Rosemary (to Father): “Well, you finally made it.”

  Tears all around.

  Charity: “Let’s pray.” Mary reads from Corinthians (again in a frightful translation, as at Mother’s memorial).

  Mr. Cornelius (Father’s ancient roommate who has been out of sight behind a screen all evening): “Who’s crying there?”

  The nurse confirmed that Father died at 8:50 p.m., was cordial, phoned Brown’s Funeral Home. They would be there within the hour for “the remains.”

  In the hall at nine the quiet bustle of evening continues as though nothing had changed. (Metaphor: a crashed car whose occupants are dead but whose dashboard radio continues to blare Petrushka.) We go for tea to Mrs. Peacock’s pleasant room and chat without morbidity. All the corny sentiment (I even believe in God for three seconds) seems necessary.

  Drive back into Philadelphia where I’ll spend the night at Rosemary’s, for tomorrow there’s a return visit to Brown’s. Phone JH in Nantucket to change my reservation to tomorrow night.

  So it’s over. Is that all there is? To exist for a few moments, rising from a void, then back to a void. The span is perhaps wondrous, but is it wondrous enough?

  • • •