The Long Accomplishment Read online

  I hadn’t spent that much time with Mary before the wedding, maybe three or four visits to Iowa, where she was living in an apartment on the main drag in downtown Ames, above a shoe store, just down the block from the Tibetan and fair-trade garment store. Her apartment was bigger than two or three New York City apartments end to end, and she lived alone and with a bare minimum of furniture, perfectly curated, antique items, just a very few things, and without much in the way of other stimulation. There were some New Age appurtenances around, photos of various gurus, some books about theosophy, to which Mary gave much of her adulthood. But that was it. Mary’s distress was such that her gaze was eerily penetrating. She kept herself up like someone who came of age as an adult in the sixties and seventies, with a sort of Stevie Nicks wiccan luminosity. She still hennaed her hair regularly, and Laurel helped her do it while we were visiting on a few occasions. But for all her countercultural religious longing, her penetrating gaze could make a conversation hard to sustain. She would drift off in conversations, as though she were strenuously listening, and then come back to look you deeply in the eyes, like she could see all the way down in there, over the lip of self and into the deeper heartache. The first night we were with her in Iowa we went out to the Thai restaurant in Ames, not far from her apartment, and we had the kind of strained conversation that you have with Mary, did she need anything, could we buy her food at the supermarket, did she need any clothes, no, no, no, not really, no, and then at one point she looked at me and said: “Well, I’m so glad she’s not keeping you under wraps anymore! I’m very glad to meet you!” With a mad cackle that I’m told was her stock in trade when she was younger.

  Her circumstances were reduced at the wedding, but that did not mean that she was not content, or that she did not feel great joy at seeing her youngest child getting married. She did feel these things, and if pressed she would even say so, but in saying so you could tell that mere words didn’t describe everything else she faced.

  My other recollection of Mary at the wedding had to do with my daughter, Hazel. She was four at the time, and it was hard to get her attention for anything. She had occupations on which she wanted to spend her time—many of them having to do with watching animated cartoons on the iPad or on the television. But Mary had brought Hazel a couple of presents at the time of the wedding, and wanted to present them to her. I had to work very hard to get Hazel to pay attention to this, but getting her to understand the solemn duty of having a step-grandmother was, it seemed, beyond my paternal capabilities, as indeed it has probably been beyond the capabilities of fathers before me. The morning before the wedding (in a living room that would have several dozen people in it in a few hours), Mary sat down with Hazel and offered her these presents she had brought (and with what money? Mary spent what little she had on her apartment and food, and the fixed income of Social Security afforded her nothing else), and Hazel very methodically unwrapped the first of these, which was a small molded plastic sandwich holder for Hazel’s lunchbox, styled up with the Wonder Bread logo.

  There was this immense gulf between the two of them, Mary Ivie, who had struggled so much, and Hazel Moody, contemporary daughter of privilege, at that moment, even though Mary’s gift was given with great love and forethought, and purchased with entirely nonexistent disposable income, and even though Hazel was nothing if not a loving and easygoing child. I could feel the desire for a meeting of the minds, but could not somehow bring it to the proper conclusion, despite wanting to. Hazel quickly set aside the sandwich container, which I believe went into a drawer in her room, from which it has very occasionally been removed and examined since. She didn’t know how to receive the gift, and Mary sort of hovered there, as if her quietness could be transubstantiated into a blessing, and then everyone looked away, and we all went on with the particulars of getting a wedding organized, because we had to.

  Do I sentimentalize when I say that there was a painful surfeit of feeling for me in that moment, the lost attempts of the generations to speak across their differences to what is really important, the longing for family no matter what? When I think back about my own grandparents now, and my treatment of them, I feel some of my most crippling moments of shame, and I would spare Hazel that. Nevertheless, despite Hazel’s inability to express the sufficient gratitude for the molded plastic sandwich holder, we took a photograph of her from that period and sent it to Mary, and Mary had it framed on her bedside ever after: Hazel in a princess nightgown she wore at our house every night, until it was in shreds.

  The other ache of the wedding day was the condition of my own stepfather, whose difficulties, of a not entirely different cast from Mary Ivie’s, were growing ever more manifest. He was still capable of having a reasonably good conversation, as long as it was focused on a reliable set of generalities, these having mainly to do with the weather, or his golden retriever, on whom he lavished his last bits of meaningful affection, but otherwise he had been stripped clean of the majority of his past, or, at least, all the recent episodes. There were a few memories of the Germans bombing England during World War II, when he, who is English, had, frequently, waited out the air raids in one shelter or another. But those were really the only potent memories, as if there were some kind of muscle memory involved in recollecting the war, as if bits of muscular tissue, the lower back, perhaps, or the sinews and ligaments that connect the head to the rest of the body, were involved in the recounting of the war, the old memories bodily stored where the amyloid plaques couldn’t yet get to them.

  I had so passionately resisted my stepfather as a younger person. There had seemed to be many reasons to do so! I could write a whole book about resisting my stepfather, and in that book I would attempt to make myself look good in vain. It’s more honest to say that I treated him shabbily, and whether it had to do with being the oldest male child, and the guy who was (psychoanalytically speaking) the man of the house after my parents split for five years or so until my mother married my stepfather, I cannot say. The shabby treatment of one’s stepparents is not a project that one thinks out. One treats the stepparents shabbily in a blind grief, an infantile grief. You follow the emotion to its logical conclusion, the emotion being something along the lines of resist! My stepfather could not have had it easy with my brother, my sister, and me, as we were well provided for by my biological dad in every way. My stepfather must have felt how difficult it was to be dropped in the middle of the drama of individuation that was three children in boarding school, all of them struggling with drug and alcohol problems of various kinds. Now it can be revealed: I understand it must have been difficult. And I regret those times.

  But finding him in extremis as he now appeared to be at our wedding, a man with only episodic memory, a man of minimal emotional or psychological animation, excepting perhaps anxiety—when it was apparent that he didn’t really know what was going on—with only a dim idea of who all these people were, was exceedingly difficult to watch. Both Mary Ivie and Ken Davis, my stepfather, would get dramatically worse in the coming years, so any snapshot of the wedding found them, actually, at a reasonably good point, though occupying a space in the room, here alone on a chair, there gazing out a window, that somehow troubled the surface of the party, or, contrarily, forced us all to go a little further, in terms of extending ourselves with people who couldn’t really make themselves comfortable in the space of our celebration.

  At some point, after a lot of running around and having fragmentary conversations, we understood that it was time for the ceremony itself, and even though we’d already been married at City Hall, there was a way in which this felt more like the ritual that wedding refers to, which perhaps means that getting married only achieves its full force when it is being witnessed by a full complement of friends and relations. This squares with Laurel’s nightmares about getting married, from her childhood. It was about people looking at her.

  We had curated the guest list very carefully with the nearest and dearest, and we had arrayed the house i
n the most informal way possible, and I was not wearing a suit, and Laurel had made sure to solve the problem of a dress with a minimum of expense and fuss (well, she had two, actually, one for during and one for after), and so it really was a wedding of two people who cared about each other in front of their immediate family and friends, not some kind of society-page wedding, which, at this point in life, would have appalled me. I thought, perhaps irrationally, that I would rather be torn apart by grizzlies than appear, for example, on the New York Times wedding page. Although in my capacity as a Universal Life Church minister (more on this below), I would be happy to conduct a New York Times wedding ceremony, if you need one.

  And so it came to pass that my cousin, the Reverend Jack Moody, arrived, and I encountered him in the hallway snapping on his clerical collar and gathering up that scarf that they wrap around your hands, and fiddling with the pages of the script I had given him, a boilerplate thing with no church service surrounding it, adjusting his hearing aid so that he could hear properly, and then we were all filing out. There was no “who gives away the bride” stuff, which is how it should be, because the bride is not property. Laurel came out with her dad and me, as the Moodys (my mom and her husband on one side of the patio, and my dad and his wife, my stepmother, Sarah, on the other) were getting themselves settled in some chairs outdoors. The extended family and friends filled in around them.

  It was brisk shading into outright cold. If we had just managed to arrange for the outdoor ceremony two weeks earlier it would have been so perfect! How did it get this way? Forbidding, solemn, but also powerfully evocative of the indomitable, with faint traces of loss coexisting with the poignancy of the autumnal scene. It is often Laurel’s tendency to look back and to see how a thing could have been done better. She is a great artist in this way, because many truly great creative people of my acquaintance change their minds with lightning precision and ferocity. They always see all the sides of a problem, and though their revisions are inconvenient they are often right. So Laurel does not often rest in a decision the way I do. I make a decision, and even if it’s wrong I hang onto it with a sometimes sanctimonious contentment. I did it! I made another decision! The ramifications of this for the precise dating of our family wedding ceremony was that we vacillated about the day, and then, once we decided on the day, we regretted our decision, Laurel did especially, because it was possible that it was too late in the season to be practicable. The leaves were already beginning to fall. We had watched them go.

  I had been following the daily forecasts, and, later, the hourly forecasts, for three or four weeks, and no matter what it said online (on AccuWeather, or any of the multiple weather apps I had on my phone), I told Laurel that it was going to be partly sunny and mild, when in fact mostly what was forecast during those three or four weeks was drizzle. I’m not sure we had ever come up with a secondary plan on what to do if drizzle turned out to be the mood of the day. However, because we were making informality our rule, we would have been able to adapt, which is less easy to do if you have spent, say, $100,000 on your wedding, and have a tent in the yard with caterers. If we’d had to do it inside, we could have done it inside.

  But a strange thing happened when we got out onto the brick patio beside the house (which had upon it a round wool carpet with a slightly homemade artisinal vibe that we had recently purchased for this very purpose), and that is that the hitherto gray and ominous day, with its umber and sienna views of the low, exhausted Connecticut Berkshires (now the redoubts of the deer-slaughtering locals), suddenly gave way, however briefly, to the sort of shafts of narrowly defined afternoon sunlight that you associate with rainbows and sentimental renderings of the divine that are favored by the greeting card industry. I mean, yes, that the sun came breaking through the clouds. It couldn’t have been too soon for Laurel, who had bare shoulders, nor for some of the older people in attendance.

  I did not take this for an omen, because if I believed in omens, I would have to start believing in bad omens, the sort that come with ownership of a Charles Manson autograph, and on that day I did not want to go that far. But if it wasn’t an omen, it was at least a nicely dramatic moment. Jack Moody, with his vestments and ritual scarf, and his Bible, whipped through the service. We had chosen two songs we wanted to have, and one of them was by Tanya Donelly, “This Hungry Life,” and she sang first, at the beginning of the service:

  This hungry life won’t let you out whole

  But you can change a thing or two

  Before you go

  This hungry life

  Might not leave you with much

  But you can change your story

  And throw a hand up from the mud

  My particular floodgate of wedding service–related decompensation started during this song, which Tanya sang with her husband, Dean Fisher (a couple, it should be said, with one of those sturdy and incredibly supportive and admirable marriages that their friends cling to as a sign that it can be done, and done with grace and warmth), accompanying on guitar. It’s a devastating song on a good day, but even more so at your wedding, and it was in this little moment of devastation that I saw some flickering of hope for the marriage coming down through the clouds, like the brief Hollywoodish shafts of sunlight, this despite the fact that it had already been a year with a lot of hardship, and I had to engage in marriage with the healthy part of my personality, at the same time overcoming the big roiling part of me that wanted to say It’ll never work. That was the kind of thing I delighted to intone when younger, that only the simpering, the weak, the unrealistic believed that matrimony was rewarding, but I wept at the Tanya Donelly song for the hope of it, for the hope of wanting to try a little more, a little harder, with the matrimonial habit. And having Laurel there, Laurel who had nightmares about the public nature of getting married, and hearing this beautiful song sung by a good friend, was enough to make the hope for the thing, the hope that one might be known and cherished in matrimony, and know and cherish in return, feel legitimate.

  After Tanya sang, Amy Hempel read a portion of that poem by Jack Gilbert, entitled “The Abnormal Is Not Courage”:

  I say courage is not the abnormal.

  Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.

  Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.

  Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.

  Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.

  Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.

  The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.

  The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.

  Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,

  Not the month’s rapture. Not the exception. The beauty

  That is of many days. Steady and clear.

  It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

  Hempel edited down the poem, which begins, if you read the whole, with the Poles riding out on horses to face the German tanks, and she rightly felt that the Poles were not exactly in the spirit of a wedding, and I have quoted above only from her edit. Let’s say the thing described here is simply constancy, so misunderstood and disregarded in the present, and when compared to the Poles riding out to face the German tanks, it seems likewise heroic, but even in the Hempel edit, constancy and the love of the domestic possibility, these are not less heroic (though not abnormal, as Gilbert would have it, either).

  Out on the deck on a round rug, it did not seem hard to be there saying those vows, hearing those songs, hearing Amy Hempel read from Jack Gilbert’s poem. I had no ambivalence, and this was an accomplishment. It was, the lack of ambivalence, something like Gilbert’s “evident conclusion of being,” an ultimate concern. So much language in Hempel’s edit of the Gilbert poem is arresting language: “the thing steady and clear,” in which we imagine we hear Gilbert speaking to his own considerable density of loving relationships, the “amazed understanding” that begins a relationship, a marriage
, let’s say, but is changed to something much deeper and more powerful in the later stages of being together, and intimate, with another person. It is “the normal excellence, of long accomplishment,” which does not mean, I don’t think, that Gilbert is extolling the endurance tests of long marriage, but rather that he is rewarding the regular and thorough attention of marriage, the ability to be there, to show up, and to accomplish daily in scale what some people cannot accomplish ever. I wanted to be there, because I could see the isolation-within-relationships that I had so well practiced before wearing out, and wearing me out. I could see the long accomplishment as an emerging from isolation, a self-imposed isolation, an isolation of self-protective vanity, an enclosed and wounded isolation.

  Hazel, my daughter, also wept during the ceremony, because she was hoping that her cousin, Tyler, my brother’s youngest, was going to give her a ring, too, as he was the ring bearer for the day. She had to have it explained to her why this was not to be the case, but in the meantime she wept, in her very lovely pink silk dress (with a purple flower), picked out by Amy Hempel. Meanwhile, I could see almost every face, because it was a small wedding, and in brief moments I saw into them all. A strange bunch of people, really, including Gregory Crewdson, the photographer, and Marilyn Minter, the artist, and her husband, Bill Miller, and writers Amy Hempel and Susan Minot and Helen Schulman, musicians Jolie Holland and Tanya Donelly and David Grubbs and Hannah Marcus, but also a brace of Moody cousins, and not a few divorced couples who brought their respective new spouses. Not a group that would immediately talk well to one another, perhaps, because when do the disparate entanglements of life prove easy and smooth in one room. But they were the true society that would launch us on our long accomplishment, and in doing so would make that accomplishment manifest, and accessible.