*
By the end of my stay, though, I had to admit: It was a good shop they ran, and I was a different person again, more like I’d been twenty years before.
I wouldn’t miss having doctors and nurses hovering around to remind me of all my pills and exercise appointments, but they truly had helped me.
The week before my discharge I felt ready to face even the least appealing tasks ahead of me. I’d been sending business correspondence, tying up loose ends.
I’d found, in my luggage, one of Max’s old handkerchiefs, one my mother had embroidered for our honeymoon trip to Italy in 1935. I had it pressed, and I mailed it to him at his new address, the apartment where he’d moved in with Julia on the Upper East Side. I’d made the note out to both of them, because this was the new order of things, the rearranged way my life would have to be. I would not be rude. I would not shun or ignore them. Civility and courtesy were the refrain of my song in those days, more than ever.
It seemed to work, I guess. Max called to thank me, and to apologize for his hateful Reno request.
And Julia wrote me back at Silver Hill—on a card, no less. An American Greetings card featuring a child with eyes the size of asteroids surrounded by flowers and a swooping bluebird of happiness. She loved, as I would soon discover, kitsch of almost any kind: patriotic, religious, you name it. Her sentiments would always be highly sentimental.
With all you have on your heart right now, it was so sweet and thoughtful of you to take the time to send this! she had written. I am sorry about everything, but I hope we can be friends.
Friends, no. But I would not waste my exertions cultivating anyone as an enemy.
And as the years went by, I would have to admit to a grudging admiration for Julia and the way, during the long summers that Johnny would spend with them, first in Chicago and then in California, she threw herself into the business of stepmothering. She quit work completely after she gave birth to her daughter with Max, and from what I could tell, never missed her job or looked back, treating both her own baby and Johnny with equally doting attention. All the child-rearing paraphernalia that felt to me like rigmarole, she enjoyed. I missed Johnny dearly, of course, during these bouts of shared custody. They made me feel, at first, like the summer was a marble mausoleum, and I was left behind, dispassionately, for those months’ entirety, interred and cold.
But once I came to see how much Johnny liked his trips out west, and how well Julia treated him, I let myself enjoy my time alone as well. Because that’s the unspoken secret that had always troubled me in the first place: children can be so boring. Even the best of them. And their parents are always boring. But Julia was impervious to that boredom’s effect.
*
My last night at Silver Hill—after dinner and before lights-out—I went for a walk alone around the grounds. They finally let me, being as I was departing the next morning and would then be on my own indefinitely.
Early June, the roses in bloom, all those blossoms like tiny mouths exhaling their perfume into the air above the path.
The moon was full, and under its light the hills did look silver.
I stood looking up at it and thought, without really meaning to, of Artie, my editor at E.P. Dutton, who had been dead for many years. Arthur Eugene Stanley, kind and courtly, who had published my first book of verse, Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises—though he’d wanted to call it Frequent Wishing on the Gracious Moon.
I wondered whether my life might have turned out differently if I had gone with that title instead, as Artie had urged me to. Whether there was another world in which I had yielded to his request, and whether in that world I would not be standing alone under the full moon at Silver Hill, contemplating the wreck of my previous twenty years.
But there was no way to know, and no way to go back. I could not revise. I had been who I had been, and so I largely remained.
20
The Golden State
Never in my life have I shown up at a party empty-handed, and I am not about to spoil my record tonight.
I need to get a hostess gift for Wendy, and something to share with her guests. I’m half a mile from my destination, so my prospects are diminishing quickly. This, perhaps, is for the best: When I have all of Manhattan to choose from I tend to dither, to hold out for perfection—but as any poet can testify, limits encourage both inspiration and decisiveness.