On the second day of Rosh Hashana, it will have been three months. It feels like years. We had been so primed to say goodbye at a moment's notice for so long that her death was an afterthought. Yet a cancerous death never feels like a death until it happens. You watch someone you love cry out in pain, you have to supervise her in all kinds of situations that compromise personal dignity. They are already halfway in the beyond, and yet as the body fights back they never seem more alive because a body only sheds itself under protest.
Bubbie is nearly the last of her generation to go, and everything she was, everything she represented, left the world so long ago that it feels amazing she was here until so recently. Hers was the last generation to hold vestiges of Victorian morality, to believe in class structures, to blush at cursing and dirty jokes, to be scandalized by pre-marital sex. When the Starr Report came out she was astonished by reports of Clinton masturbating in the Oval Office. What scandalized her was not that a President masturbated in the literal seat of power, but that an adult masturbated at all: "can you imagine..." as she incredulously regaled the incident to a Rosh Hashana table, "a grown man, masturbating?!?"
A lot of female friends and acquaintances absorbed tales of my beloved antiquarian with relished delight, seeing in her a kindred strong woman who made it to old age with the best always ahead of her. Bubbie had that effect on many, many women. But the truth is that however different her ethos might have been were she born 60 years later, Bubbie's entire worldview was antithetical to woke, progressive, or even feminist. When she read Between the World and Me for a bookclub, her response was "what does this ungrateful man have to be so angry about!?" She once was a friend of John Hope Franklin's wife, but in the face of Civil Rights she shrugged, believing it not her problem, especially since African Americans did not suffer as Jews did and Jews were the truly unchampioned. So even for her generation she was a conservative who believed against all the evidence that was her own life that a woman's responsibility was to have children and stay in the home. As a mother she depended on her parents as caregivers for her children, cooking, even housekeeping. They were all preventing her from a constant state of rage. She stayed at home through the 50s and 60s as almost every woman did, and such a life gave her no fulfillment. But it didn't change her worldview one bit. Like so many strong people, no personal experience was searing enough to retrench how she saw the world. She and her husband were close to the ultimate evidence that many intellectuals are born with a gene for extremism. And were they born in 1880 or 1980, they probably would have supported social justice as passionately as they believed in Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War.
And the truth was, for all Bubbie's intellectual interests, she wasn't quite brilliant, and freely seemed to accept such. Don't get me wrong, she was very very smart, and to the end friends would marvel at her capacity for nuance and eloquence, but compared to her son and son-in-law who speak something like seven languages apiece, her daughter who holds a whole library in a memory of steel, and her husband so mathematically brilliant he made discoveries for the defense department in multiple fields, her mind didn't allow her those accomplishments. After fifty years of sitting in three adult education classes every term, she never recounted most of what she learned or even discussed it. She had a literal hundred years to seriously study any subject at all, yet it never really occurred to her. She believed as fervently in learning and culture as anyone I ever met, but in her case, the belief may have been as much on faith as proof. Perhaps it was a question of confidence rather than depth of curiosity, but considering how confident she was otherwise, I doubt it. Her true genius, and genius it was, was for people. She practically adopted a new lifelong friend every week for thirty years and combed Baltimore for its smartest and most interesting eccentrics. And as they discoursed on all manner of high minded topics she would listen for years on end with that hundred watt smile she taught herself to always project after she realized people found her intimidating. In this, as everything else, she was truly not a woman of our century.
And yet, she was their role model, inspiration, hero; women, eccentrics, the elderly, and the intellectually curious - they all lionized her, and with the best of reasons. When Zaydie died in 1985, she had no idea what to do, yet that was the moment when she truly became herself: every classical concert in Baltimore and other genres besides, archeological digs, astronomical telescopes in fields, every exhibit, every movie - she often would buy one ticket and over the course of a day would sneak into three or four, every play and musical - no matter how big or small the star she would go backstage for autographs. She loved nothing more than to be 'in the arena,' and for thirty-plus years so successfully did she occupy it that she WAS the arena. And then there were all the trips abroad with Hilda. From the way she spoke of sex, Bubbie was almost certainly quite straight, yet after Zaydie died she grew inseparably close to another recent widow of similarly strong personality, and together they went to literally dozens of countries, went to multiple classes and concerts together every week and probably spoke on the phone most days. I can 99% guarantee their closeness was innocent of sexuality. They were both Victorian dowagers in their old wives' summer, and like so many Victorians, male and female, they homosocially derived emotional intimacy in a manner so many found difficult in the traditional bounds of marriage. I strongly suspect that after Zaydie died, Bubbie never pursued physical intimacy again and got through her days quite happily without it.
Whomever Bubbie was before I knew her, she lived her third act as the rarest person in the world: a happy senior citizen. Neither domestic nor professional life gave her any fulfillment, but at sixty-five she realized she could live the rest of her life exactly on her own terms, and she was granted a whole third act to do it. She must have seemed to all of us who knew her as much from the 22nd century as the 19th, or whatever future century it is when people are finally free to live their best lives. She's a model for all of us to whom family life just isn't what we're made for: Go for it. Find your satisfaction. Free your spirit, even at the risk of the grave. Hurl yourself into your arena's center stage. Do what you were meant to do.
For everything Bubbie. Every concert, every dinner, every conversation, memory recounted, every hilarity both intentional and unintentional, every difficult moment and so many more blissful ones, for helping me be alive and making me realize there are others like me close at hand, for everything I owe you, which is more than I can ever, ever know, thank you. I love you forever and will miss you all the days of my life.
A dank, gute nacht, und a leb'n af dir,
Evan
No comments:
Post a Comment