Read Online Coming into the End Zone by Doris Grumbach - Free Book Online Page A

composed himself into a kind of harlequin melancholy, holding out his long ivory hands & admiring his polished nails. His gaze wd wander off & fix on some working-boy or freak until an appalling rasping cough, which seemed too vehement to come from within so frail & flower-like a body, convulsed him, doubling him up into a hacking, flailing caricature. After these attacks he sat back exhausted & quelled the tears in the corners of his eyes with the back of his trembling hands.’
    I suppose these tender, intense portraits of the sick and the aging through the eyes of young men (the young lord goes with his friends to join Firbank for the evening) strike my sympathies now as they might not have twenty years ago. I read on, further than I intended this morning, compelled by the force of these portraits.
    Absorbed by the poignancy of these scenes, I suddenly remember sitting in the orchestra of the new Metropolitan Opera House (it will always be the new one to me), watching the aged Maria Jeritza being brought to her front-row seat by two stalwart, handsome young men. She leaned heavily on their arms; but her majestic head in its customary white fur hat was held erect. Her face was so heavily powdered it was almost unlined, ‘whited out,’ it seemed. She wore dark sunglasses, her body was small and soft. She seemed ageless and frail. The young men deposited her carefully in her seat, the patrons around her applauded. She bowed her head from side to side in gentle acknowledgment of the recognition she seemed grateful for.
    From time to time I looked her way during the performance of Der Rosenkavalier . She never moved her head, she seemed to be absorbed in listening. I could not see her eyes behind the dark glasses.
    â€˜Doesn’t Jeritza look wonderful?’ I asked the man in the seat next to me during intermission. ‘She always does,’ he said. ‘That floppy hat, that wonderful face. You’d never know she was blind.’
    Radio up here is a movable and most uncertain feast. After an hour of National Public Radio, a music commentator with a delivery even slower than mine takes over. He occupies long minutes with his tortoiselike news report, so plodding that I cannot bear to hear him out. A nuclear explosion could have taken place somewhere. At the rate his announcements are made, I would never listen long enough to learn of it.
    Turning off his news in the middle makes me feel unaccountably free. No news is good news, the old saw goes. On the air, on TV, in the newpapers, good news is an oxymoron, an impossibility, since so little good is happening, and what there is does not make for interesting ‘segments.’
    In our time, ‘news’ means tragedy: car accidents, rapes, murders, robberies, train and airplane wrecks, deaths from cancer, heart attacks, and AIDS, criminal acts in the high places of government, academe, the Church, highly-placed-family feuds, and lost, stolen, or battered children. Mistreated wives. The homeless and mad who freeze on the streets. The unemployed and desperate lower middle class. The hungry poor. Wrongly discharged mental patients. Drug addicts, dealers in coke, heroin, crack, and smack: what hard, almost vicious names for the false escapes that the displaced lower and unhinged middle and upper classes indulge in. Corruption. Bigotry. Revenge. Terrorism. Rebellion. Nuclear threats, leaks, breakdown, wastes. The breakdown of the environment: polluted water, air, destroyed forests, reduced ozone layer. The greenhouse effect. All news.
    At the same time, when we are told about them, these catastrophes are so common and expected that they pass along the semicircular canals of the ear to the auditory nerve without creating a single tremor in the heart or the mind. It is not that they are bad news, they are hardly news at all. They are . We hear and read about them, see them on the screen, and accept them as accompanying, almost unnoticed, the act of being