February 12, 1984

Dear Mother,

No, I don't think it is a good time for you to visit. It is too cold, and this house, as I have told you before many times, has no central heat, none whatsoever. We have a wood stove in the kitchen and another in the big front room, and I have a little space heater that I use in the little corner where I have my piano. It doesn't work well--only one of the coils lights up--and I have to wear gloves when I play, with the fingers cut off so I can feel the keys. Sometimes my fingers ache so from the cold that I can barely move them.

The other thing is that we have no indoor plumbing, which means you would have to go out the back door to the outhouse when nature calls. That is not such an unpleasant thing when it is spring, or summer--in fact it is quite lovely to sit there on a summer night, with the crickets going, and the owls calling (actually that is more early fall). But in winter it is miserable; you really learn to develop an iron bladder holding your pee so that you don't have to get up in the middle of the night. Yes I know you are used to roughing it but you would not like this. Wait until spring and then we will see. We will see, but I can't guarantee anything.

Actually Stig isn't terribly well just now. It isn't his hip so much. That is actually improving a bit, with the help of the cortisone injections a doctor in town is giving him in exchange for some of his photographs. He is doing--was doing--a series on animal footprints, deer and bear and whatnot, in the soft mud near the river bank, and the doctor, who fancies himself an eccentric mountain man type, really took a shine to them, lucky for us. The trouble now is with these terrible panic attacks, or attacks of fear. I don't really know what to call them, but they are terrifying for him and for me. Sometimes he will wake up in the night and call out in a voice that is almost unrecognizable to me, an awful frightened old woman's voice, reedy and plaintive and yet angry all at the same time. He tells me that when it happens he feels, or dreams, that someone has just thrown a dark burlap-like material over him that smells of death and dirt, like a funeral shroud, and suddenly he cannot breathe. Then he feels the touch of cold hands on him through the fabric--rough, indifferent, business-like hands, like the hands of an undertaker, pushing and kneading at him. It is at this point that he begins to scream. I have been sleeping in the front room by the stove this week because it has been happening so often. Last night, thank God, he slept the whole night through. Let us hope that this is the beginning of a trend.

The doctor says that these attacks may have something to do with the car accident, which happened five years ago this week. A deer hit them, as I believe I told you. His daughter was seriously injured, and is now paralyzed from the neck down. Sometimes we get hand-painted greeting cards from her. She paints with her mouth, actually, holding the brush between her teeth, and this woman who runs a gift shop in the town where she lives with her mother sells them, apparently in large quantities. Sometimes I tell Stig she ought to send us a little of the money instead of the cards, which we could really do without. Frankly they're hideous, ghastly--angels and birds and smiling suns and the like. I actually think that the cards are part of some perverse, twisted scheme of the mother to exact revenge from Stig, whom she naturally holds responsible for the wreck, though it wasn't his fault. She's a very disturbed person and I wouldn't at all put it past her. She works at a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant and wastes all her money on a psychic in some feckless attempt to determine if her first husband, a truck driver who was in big trouble with drug dealers, is still alive. She has the hair-brained idea that she is somehow going to have him declared legally dead and get money from some insurance policy he had, I'm not sure how and I don't think she does either. She has an IQ of about 60, I should think. The only time I saw her she was skipping down the street in a pink rain poncho with a gardenia behind one ear, and wild red hair done up in a crown of braids, like someone out of Willa Cather. Stig sends her and the daughter, whose name is Cora, money whenever he can, though I know she blows it on the psychic or on drugs. What can I do? He loves his daughter, though he hasn't been able to see her lately because it brings on more of the attacks.

No, we do not need any money, but thank you very much just the same. We are managing quite nicely, all things considered. The potatoes and corn and tomatoes I put up in the fall have seen us through most of the winter, and the doctor sometimes gives us some venison from deer he has shot in the mountains. Then we have lots of canned things. I have some piano students in town too. There is a girl there, the daughter of rich back-to-nature NYC escapees who are remodeling a big craftsman-style house close to downtown, who is quite talented, but lately she has decided that she is more interested in being a poet with a capital P, very much on the Edna St. Vincent Millay model--cigarettes and wispy gestures and boozy mournful promiscuity and rhymed couplets. Which is a pity, because she's a much better piano player than she is a poet. The other students are some elderly retirees who need something to do and a soccer-playing teenage boy with a tin ear who wants to play Scott Joplin rags of all things. He's absolutely hopeless but works harder than the girl so I keep on trying. I'm also doing some faux-painting of marble and wood for this rich lady who lives a couple of miles up the road. I do some housekeeping for her too--a bit of dusting and laundry. She has MS and can't get around well. Somehow we manage.

Yes I heard about Dan's marriage to that Margot woman from Maury, who evidently keeps in regular contact with him, though I don't remember any particular rapport or closeness between them in the past. I haven't heard from him in ages, no doubt because of what I said to him at Patricia's memorial service. No, it wasn't tactful or kind of me, but I think it needed to be said, after everything Patricia had to put up with from him. What a disgraceful abasement this marriage is for Dan, but in a way I feel that it is a proper and fitting fate for someone of his low, vain, cravenly narcissistic character. Margot is the perfect mate for him, really--obsequious and flattering, and absolutely ruthless to anyone who expresses doubts about his supposed genius, and the value of his pitiful handful of dry scholarly monographs on Pater and Symons or somebody. God how boring. I pity the children, Mary Renfroe most of all, who saw through Margot quite young. I'll never forget meeting them at a restaurant and Mary Renfroe crying to me in the coat room over something Margot has said. But then at the table she and Margot were both joking about how the waiter poured the wine ineptly just when Dan was raising his glass, sloshing wine on his sleeve, so evidently there is some understanding between them. Poor kid--that's all I can say. Sid is a more hardy, sturdy, self-enclosed type; I don't think Margot can do much damage there, thank God, though she will try her damnedest.

As for Patricia, she seems much more distant to me lately, much more remote. There was a time after her death when her presence was, I don't know, so vivid, so alive for me. I was always looking up from wherever I was sitting and expecting her to come bustling through the door at any second, newspapers and galley proofs under her arms, flinging her scarf carelessly aside and shaking out her hair in that peculiar shivery, cat-like way she had, and telling me about some idiot at the press, mimicking them with scary accuracy. And I was always hearing her singing. She really had the loveliest untrained lyric soprano--she could have been an excellent Susanna or maybe even a Countess. But now she is taking her place among the other dead I have known, joining their sepia-colored ranks, fading into an anonymous grayness, like the groups of bystanders that you see in old photographs of people in city streets. I suppose it is because I am getting older, and she died so young, really. That is what happens to the dead, especially those who have died young--we leave them behind; we are distracted and consumed by the aches and pains and worries of middle and then old age; the new experiences that we have, and that the dead did not live long enough to have, fall upon them like a soft layer of new dirt, covering them up further, obliterating them from our view.

Maury has a new young man--has he told you? Probably not; he is always so cagey about his private life, especially with you. It would have been nice had he waited longer after Paul's death, I think. It has only been a year and a half, after all, and this young man, this boy--honestly--is terribly young. He was doing some cloisonné for the people in the apartment across the hall and burned his hand, and Maury ran over and bandaged him up, and I suppose fell for his faun-eyed long-lashed dark good looks and flowing locks, which he is quite vain about (the day they visited here he was constantly glancing at his reflection in my big china cabinet's glass). He is awkward and shy and yet cockily self-confident and has all the ruthless self-involved heartlessness of the young--and a shrewd awareness of the fluttering of hearts he sets off in those around him. There's something of the sleek, devious petted animal about him. This will not end well, I am sure (for one thing Maury is 42, and this child can't be more than 23), but Maury is smitten--and in some mistaken way thinks he deserves this, after all he endured with Paul. Poor Paul.

Mother, I worry about you in that God-forsaken town, with no one but poor dim Evie to keep you company. Have you made friends? Have you surrendered your scruples and pride and started playing bridge, for God's sake? I'm still amazed that you could pull up all your roots and head back south, after all these years up above the Mason Dixon. I can't understand it, but then I've never lived down there, and don't hear the call of ancestral voices beckoning me back home. Carry me back to old Virginny--Jesus, I'd rather die. But you were born and bred there, so I suppose it's different for you. Take care of yourself, and do me a favor, please: watch the evening cocktails, will you. The last time I was down there I must say I was a little taken aback by the imbibing that was going on after six. Doubtless you'll say it's none of my business, and you'd be right, but you're my mother, and anyway I've always been matter-of-fact and tactless with those I truly care about. Among whom I do number you, believe it or not.

Lately I have been playing hymns from the Cokesbury hymnal--can you imagine? It's because they are simple, and don't tax my hands too much when they're cold and stiff (which is most of the time), and because they console me, oddly enough, though they mean nothing to me in a religious way. "O God our help in ages past" is my favorite: the last verses about time are quite lovely, don't you think?

A thousand ages in thy sight
are like an evening gone;
short as the watch that ends the night
before the rising sun.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
bears all its sons away;
they fly, forgotten, as a dream
dies at the opening day.

O God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
be thou our guide while troubles last,
and our eternal home!

Peculiarly, though, the last lines don't touch me deeply. Despite (or perhaps because of?) all the uprootings and dislocations I knew as a child--the constant moving from place to place, the endless sequence of squalid tenements and shared houses (do you remember Maia, the tarot card reader who tried to take over our bedroom?)--I don't feel any real longing for an eternal home, for some fixed unchanging abode in the sky. This messy, dilapidated temporary home is enough for me. For now, at least.

Love,

Dorothea