Culture Watch

Reunion notes

The first event for Smith College’s thirty-year class was cocktails in the sculpture garden, where I was meeting my wife. I was late arriving and, hearing the crowd noise, I climbed the steps briskly, and then stopped short at the top. Who were these people? Impossible to have made a mistake about the place; I’d been here often. My wife was a reunion committee functionary—an errand could have kept her—but where were the others? Muff, Alice, Bee, Brooksie . . . girls known for decades and seen on and off at other occasions— weddings of offspring, out-of-town parties. Randy and Button? Jean? Nance? A voice among the strangers—a whitehaired woman—called out my name and after a second I caught on. The whitehaired woman was Janice, my wife’s roommate, an old pal, redheaded Janice with the backhand cross-court smash, a Down Easty Chekhovian girl, clarinetist whose own voice was chalumeau range, organizer of a marching band, teacher of math, mother of beautiful daughters. Janice was wearing a white wig? No, it was simply that she, like oneself and several of the others, had grown a bit older suddenly. (The others, as it chanced, were standing nearby, unrecognized only because of my dimness.)

Sometimes change happens all at once, with no warning. The wryest girl in the world becomes “a white-haired woman,” and your eyes play tricks and games. At the top of the stairs at that moment, these thoughts didn’t seem at all commonplace or cliché-ridden to me. They braced my head like the first garbled words of an assassination bulletin.

A good reunion experience, like (sorry to seem brutal) a “good war,” simplifies the being. You drink. You meet and enjoy a classmate previously dodged. You notice a hitherto unnoticed blemish or beauty in a longtime friend. But there’s only one feelingsadness, an enveloping mist—and, instead of subtle revelation or illumination, merely one thought: Years pass. The result is escape from self. Whenever in the past few hours I’ve heard, in my own conversation or another’s, the sound of personal preoccupation, personal registering of differences between Jim and Jill, I’ve been close to honest embarrassment. Reunion isn’t about “individuals,” it’s about time. Once into the under-rhythm, the deepest current, of a mid-life class assemblage, it doesn’t matter whose hair has turned, who is weathering “it” best. None shall weather it, let be.

“Cynnie, they still have the same piano in Albright House. Really. Remember? That wonderful old piano where we all played our one song?”

Something hasn’t changed: what gratification, what a wonder!

Times beyond numbering I’ve attended concerts or fraternity house gigs of undergraduate singing groups, male and female, during which they’ve performed for their peers. I’ve also been present often when these groups have sung for their elders at class suppers or evening parties. The performance gap is as between night and day. Once the youngsters grasp that Age is their audience they act youth with a fury, project like “coeds” and “college boys” in a Thirties State U. flick. Arms round each other’s shoulders, gyrating in wicked moves, showing ever so many glistening teeth, smiling wildly, clapping backs, they do a vibrancy number that’s madly unrestrained. Home with their peers they’d be laughed off the stage for ham or lack of cool, but we alums cheer them passionately. The young women who entertained us just now at Class Supper sang with holy abandon. I knew what they were saying: We know what you want us to be so here it is. “Oh what fun to he young!” Brava and Blessings, was my thought. Who could stand it if they behaved otherwise?

Rueful Janice on the history of a wrinkle: “Senior high, how I remember . . . This crazy old biddy, the principal, called me in, led me into her office, got out a mirror and made me look at myself. My God, I was terrified, what had I done? She sat me down and said, ‘Janice, look at me, look at this line.’ showing me my own forehead. ‘Look at that line and think about it. What’s that going to be someday? What’s going to come of that line? Whatever you’re doing or thinking, stop it now. You’ll just be a mass of wrinkles!' Was she crazy? Was I crazy? This little wrinkle of mine? I’d never even thought of it before and now I had a wrinkle to think about.

“So, continued . . . Last week I was at a garage sale and I bought a fluorescent light mirror with a thousand controls, different kinds of light. Don t ask me why. Night. Day. Home. Office. It seems I look best in Office.” Janice shakes her head at herself. “Once it was the old bid who was loony. Anyway . . .” She brightens. “I stood there and kept moving back and forth, tiny adjustments, the switch turned to Office, and finally I found the place. The place. Ben. Turn it to Office and stand in this one particular spot and bend a littie to the left like so, and guess what?”

Janice grins her Chekhovian grin and shrugs at herself.

“My wrinkle is gone and I’m just as I was. Tah-taaaaah.”

When folks are suffused with soft feeling, sympathy, solidarity, when they’re in a place that represents human hope, pride, best selves, they’re fearfully vulnerable to fantasy. I remember that five years ago the songleader—a woman who had been attached to the Saigon embassy—led us through an old embassy favorite. The music was “Rock of Ages” and the lyric began:

We are win-ning

In Viet-nam.

Nobody cried stop!

This afternoon, at a panel discussion entitled “The Prime of Life,” the hymn of joy was addressed to ourselves. A Yale psychologist, the college president, and a Harvard assistant professor dwelt on mid-life career openings for the over-fifty-year-old woman who hadn’t been in the labor market before. And once again, way up on a reunion high, supported by panelists—“Water’s fine" — belief and conversion came easy. A dozen hopeful, uplifted faces . . . (One member of the class who went back to school recently, earned a Ph.D. in history, and hasn’t found employment after two years of looking, seemed not to be in the room.) Is the labor market parched for a flood of intelligent, noncompetitive, business-inexperienced fifty-year-olds? Give us a modest midlife option. Alma Mater. Don’t set us up for pratfalls.

Scandal. A’46 husband, said to be an army officer of star rank, has slept overnight with his reuning wife in a dormitory room—forbidden by the rules. The class has been formally chided, many are furious, and there’s a shift of attitude toward blessed youth. (“Why, these girls have men in their rooms every night of their lives if they want and they’re not even married, much less fifty! We can’t have husbands?”)

Departures. Our houseguests (reunion couples bunked in with us instead of fighting the system like the general in the dorm) seem melancholy, and there’s cause. At breakfast we talk about a Cape weekend soon, six of us, eight?— but what are the probabilities? We’re feeling, I think, the accidental quality of connection. Randy and Merry . . . Robert and Janice . . . Our children wouldn’t recognize each other in a crowd. We were close once, our lives substantial to each other, and then accident took over, flung us arbitrarily into measureless separations or else, astonishingly, into apartments next door to each other, and even the proximities vaguely lacked substance.

Also, my dream. I’d had a dream, coming, no doubt, from Janice’s wrinkle story. In my dream they were showing slides of the class in a wide white room, our group together at a table, and the light dimmed and brightened-Office? Day? Kodachromes of us on the boathouse deck, on porches, anywhere . . . pictures of Rally Days, Mountain Days, earlier reunions. There went my older daughter marching as Class Baby. When the light brightened with a new slide our table held only strangers; when the light went down the aged faces disappeared and everyone sitting nearby was fresh and new as in youth in the half-dark, no more wear, ruin, disappointment, no lost husbands or wives, no defeats or wounds. We were bound tight in recollected joy.

“It was such fun.“ “I was so glad to see Jean.” “But now really, let’s not forget the Cape. Really.“ “August.” “August.” “We’re counting on it.”

Really.

Two clowns

Lou Jacobs, a playfully gruff, strongshouldered man in his seventies, is premier clown with the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey’s circus, which just finished a run at Hartford, Connecticut, Troy, New York, other points northeast. (His is the clown’s face on circus billboards; his favorite costume is a multilayered red plaid wool suit that looks as though it would have fit Moby Dick; among his key props is a motorized bathtub.) A circus man for half a century, Lou and his wife, a former trapeze artist, have reared a circus family (two daughters are well launched as aerialists) and appear to have in mind an extended circus future for themselves. The other night we spent an hour with the family backstage before the show, talking circus politics, watching some recent graduates of the Ringling Bros. Clown College (Sarasota, Florida) practicing tumbling and juggling, inspecting tigers, and being introduced to two rather oddly arranged white dogs, understudies to the venerable Knucklehead, premier circus dog.

Who Knucklehead?

She’s a cuddly, equable white mutt that circus buffs may remember in various roles as Pink Elephant, Flying Lion, and Rabbit. (In this last number she is seen as a hunting dog, companion to Lou Jacobs, sportsman, as he goes forth to bag supper with rifle: subsequently she becomes beast of prey, a white rabbit who rolls over persuasively stonedead when the hunter takes aim and fires.) As Lou noted with quizzical satisfaction, introducing us to this doggy star, Knucklehead has trod the tanbark with him for a decade; the presence of the two canine understudies reflects not only a sense of her fragility but a prejudice of her master’s against premature retirement.

A break for circus audiences, this prejudice. As always, the B & B had some splendid turns. A high-wire duo from Colombia was dazzling, and the animal man brought off a dancing extravaganza, with horses, Bengal tigers, and elephants, that looked flawless to me. But missed or rocky pyramids marred some gymnast acts, and the groups appeared tired (the accountants dictate two and three performances a day during a run of this sort). And the Bicentennial production numbers—Paul Revere, ringmaster-tenors, lady aerialists hanging by their teeth from the clappers of Liberty Bells, God Bless America—stank. In a word, Knucklehead, a dog with considerable purity of style, was necessary. Our party savored her delicate figure eights in and out between her master’s heedless, floppy-shod feet, as well as her effortless ascents from the ground into the crook of his arm, borne aloft at his hearty chuckling summons as though by love, not springy limbs.

I was also taken with a new young clown with an original, sharply contrasting manner—a tall, pin-thin, sinuous, long-fingered creature whose person blended kindness and hauteur. Nothing oafish or gemütlich, no hoarse shouts at the kids in the front rows; this clown’s outfits were as mod-tight and sleek as Lou Jacobs’ are baggy and blown; elegance is clearly the new clown thing. In ceaseless, undulant motion round the ring, welcoming and bidding farewell to performers with extraordinary, silken élan, pointing, bowing, seamlessly courteous, patient, sacramental, never still, never hurried, he continuously invited your eyes away from himself toward some marvel that, after a minute, you realized was far less engrossing than his own fluid grace. We learned later that the performer’s name is Richard Mann, and that he’s “very intelligent,” married, and owns an Afghan. When he walks his dog, Dolly Jacobs (Lou’s younger daughter) added, his hair “streams out behind him and he’s a striking sight.” Not your traditional item, to repeat; not yesteryear’s clown, but piquant nevertheless.

We were almost the last out of the arena, crowds gone, streets empty, and by luck (no planning) we happened onto the famous great sight, huge shadowy bulks swaying forth from the mouth of the arena runway up onto the superhighway—mysterious, breathtaking. Leaving the sleeping city, the elephant procession reorganized the urban gray moonlight into something inexpressibly rich and strange.

The way you slide

TURTLE DIARY (Random House, $7.95) by Russell Hoban is a novel about a successful attempt by an unmarried couple, he a bookstore clerk, she an author of children’s books, to kidnap some green turtles who have overgrown their quarters in a London aquarium, transport them to the Cornwall coast, and liberate them into the sea. The pace and talk are rapid, the people are quirky-real, and fine imaginings of long turtle journeys abound:

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa. Ascension Island is only five miles long. Nobody knows how they find it. . . . I think of the turtles swimming steadily against the current all the way to Ascension. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water . . . swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun. . . .

I read the tale hand running, impressed to the end with the author’s wit and invention.

But I can’t pretend that I owe this pleasure to my alertness to unknown new fictional talents. Russell Hoban has been well known for years as an author not of novels for grown-ups but of admirable children’s books, a series about a young badger named Frances, and an especially memorable character study of a runaway beaver called Charlie the Tramp.

These books are unique, first, because the adults in their pages are usually humorous. precise of speech, and understandingly conversant with general life, and second, because the author confronts—not unfancifully but without kinky secret garden stuff—problems with which ordinary parents and children have to cope. (The problems include reluctance to accept one’s lot, too many sweets, disloyal friends, non-permissive grandparents, etc.) The lessons taught to Frances—for example, that a child’s best friend may cheat her—are widely applicable, and learning them under Russell Hoban’s tutelage entails no sacrifice of. say, one’s right to pay back a dirty deed in kind. This writer’s world is dense with small jokes and large appreciations, not alone with moral realities. How remarkable the sound of trickling that teases Charlie the runaway beaver at midnight, and gives him back his beaver self! How touching the moment when Charlie’s father looks at his truant son’s first serious nighttime labor and says, “Any tramp that can make a pond like that is going to be some beaver one of these days.“

I may actually have shouted aloud in glee—it was ten years ago or more in the rear of Scribners Fifth Avenue shop—on first reading Bread and Jam for Frances. The book is partly about Frances’ coolness toward eggs, and opens with a fine anti-apostrophe to this food:

Unfair to continue. Looking up the Frances books just now, I went upstairs through the sewing room to locked doors—a closed-up room and bath. Chilly inside, even with summer sun in the window. The early Hoban oeuvre was high on a closet shelf, hard by Bemelmans, Mixed Up Twins, Thidwick, White’s web, that lot. Turning pages, remembering, pleased anew by the closing lines wherein Frances advances from bread and jam to Good Food, I came face to face with my own wayward wishfulness. I saw, that is, the perversity of asking a writer for more children’s books when all the children to whom you might read them have flown. Better to say (as Russell Hoban said to himself?), Grow up, remember your pleasures, move along.

Two in one

In Raissa life isn’t happy. People nag their kids and fight with each other, says Italo Calvino, describing the place in Invisible Cities, his most recent (1974) work of fiction. Work often goes poorly and dishes are broken and there’s a general grim haze. Even so, the writer adds, the place is full of contradiction. Showing us how this can be, he constructs an extremely beautiful sentence which, for no reason I can name, describes the world exactly as it appears after a reunion, a circus performance, or the reading of a forgotten picture book of a daughter more or less gone for good. The sentence is meant to be read gaily, viz:

. . . yet . . . at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, ‘Darling, let me dip into it,’ to a young serving-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: ‘Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.'