The State Journal Goes Underground

For a considerable time yesterday, I considered the improbable but apparently true idea that I was dealing with a newspaper with an unlisted number.

Nor was that the strangest part of the affair. The real question was why the death of Marvin Rabin had hit me so hard. I knew he was in his nineties, I knew that his hearing was bad, but nothing in the video I had seen looked like a man who could die. Is that silly? Yes, but there’s nothing logical about grief.

And so there I was, sobbing in the café, remembering the Saturday mornings, remembering the temper tantrums followed by impassioned appeals—we were better than that, we could play it better. Then I remembered the toilet bowl brush, and I lost it again.

I had house-sat for the Rabins, and everyone had warned me—Rhoda, Rabin’s wife, was neurotically attached to her house. In fact, Rabin had threatened more than once never to take Rhoda anywhere: she spent the whole vacation worrying about her house.

Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo… runs an expression in Puerto Rico: translated loosely, it means the devil knows more due to old age than for being the devil. If true, I must have an old young man, because I knew what I had to do. And that was?

Well, I went out and bought a notebook, and arrived promptly at the door. And for the next two hours, I terrorized Rhoda. We started in the kitchen, where I instantly confronted her on the sea of medicines next to the stove. And where, I asked her, was her expiration medication log?

Rhoda’s eyes dilated.

I didn’t let up—I quizzed her on everything, we probed ever corner of the house. I took ceaseless notes, sighed frequently, frowned incessantly. I made a British nanny look like Santa Claus.

“I don’t imagine you’ll need to come in here,” said Rhoda, at the entrance to the master bedroom. But I was having none of that.

“I need to inspect every room of the house if I am to be responsible for it in your absence,” I told her, and so we spent ten minutes opening the curtains, making sure the closet doors were hung correctly, noting any stains on the walls and carpet.

And then we came to the bathroom, which of course was spotless. I decided to pounce.

“And where is your toilet bowl brush?” I couldn’t keep the acid out of my voice.

Rhoda blanched.

“I really don’t know,” she stammered, “Joyce—the cleaning lady—does…”

I had to interrupt.

“You don’t know how your staff cleans?”

Two days later, I got the report from Martha, the daughter. Rhoda had gone to bed for three hours after the inspection. And ten minutes after I started the housesitting, I ventured up to the bathroom.

Do I have to tell you?

I will tell you—if you are lucky enough not to know—that this is grief. Because there’s no middle, nothing except the extremes. Which is why I was sobbing, yes, but also laughing hysterically yesterday. Nor was I in any control, especially when I heard Ralph’s voice—sounding completely the same as his father’s. Oddly, he was doing better than I.

Not surprising—that’s another thing about grief. You often find yourself comforting people who are calling to comfort you. So what do you do? Well, it may sound heartless, but we took turns answering the phone, after Franny died.

What else happens? Well, for me, I get jittery, to the extent that I can’t type. So how, yesterday, was I going to do Bach and Beer? Could I play the cello—no, I decided, and then told Lady, the owner of the café, who had been hugging me and crying with me and who, like a good Sanjuanera  had come down the street to call up to me in my apartment to see if I was all right.

Why was I there? Because I wanted to be alone, and the moment I was, it wasn’t right., but I didn’t have the energy, somehow, to get up and go back to the café. But seeing her made me realize—I have to get out of the apartment.

Then I was hungry, and didn’t feel like asking for anything. Eventually I realized—the kids were eating pizza.

“Naïa, do you think some of that pizza wants to be eaten by me?”

“Ask it…”

Then I became obsessed—I had to call the paper. What kind of son of a newspaperman could forget to call the Wisconsin State Journal? I could feel Jack frowning down at me. At least I hope it’s down….

And here I confess—I couldn’t find the number anywhere. And today, when I was thinking better, I finally got it through switchboard.com. And why there? Because in all of Madison.com (the electronic version of the State Journal), I couldn’t locate one number, except for the individual reporters. Those were there, but where was the city desk, dammit?

“People forget you when you get older,” said Franny matter-of-factly. Not quite true—Facebook went wild, and my post on Rabin got 341 hits (a normal day is 100).

Nor is it the lack of a telephone number for the city desk, but doesn’t a city of over a quarter of a million have an arts editor? You know, somebody who goes to concerts and knows everyone artistically in town?

I spoke to somebody today—a nice Wisconsin person who cheerfully took my call and promised to follow through.

That stiff breeze, chilling you from the north? It’s my father—Jack—up there spinning….

Shooting Jack into the cybersphere

Between the hours of 4 and 5 PM, you didn’t want to be on the second floor of this building.

Why?

I had finally been forced to buy a printer / scanner / fax.

And I completely disapprove of them. When I worked at Wal-Mart, I would beg students not to print vocabulary lists. They did, so I went to the computer guys and asked, could they disable the printing option on my emails?

The guys just shrugged.

I was ardently, passionately green. I tried to organize car pools, but getting people to share rides was as easy as getting them to donate a kidney—without anesthesia.

“What if there’s an emergency?” they asked.

“When was the last emergency?” I’d counter.

“I need it for my kids,” they’d say.

Of course, of course, this sent me off.

“It is exactly FOR your kids that you need to start being responsible and start thinking about what kind of world you’re gonna be leaving them!” I’d diatribe.

With just a few exceptions, the love between Puerto Ricans for their cars is only matched by adolescent boys in gringolandia. It’s now common, by the way, to have TWO cars—‘cause what happens if one breaks?

You’d be stranded.

Well, it was curb my environmentalism or lose my friends. I chose friends. But I didn’t, I reasoned, have to give in to the whole nonsense. I took the bus, and smiled evilly if inwardly when gas soared to four dollars a gallon. I vowed—no printer.

Then the box came that I’d been dreading.

Readers of the blook know that Eric and I tore through the house, the day after Franny died. He took on the photos; I did the poetry.

Franny, I’m sorry to say, had the terrible habit of printing out multiple versions of her poems—all slightly different. Worse, she didn’t put any date on them. Right—she knew what version was the final. But the rest of us?

So I jammed as much as I could find into a box, which Eric drove away to West Virginia. I hoped—I knew uselessly—never to see that box again.

I justify this by citing Franny, herself. Because Lorraine, Gunnar’s widow, had tried to keep the memory of the great pianist and composer alive for years after his death.

“You know, at a certain point, you just have to let go. History will remember him or it won’t. Or maybe it will forget him and rediscover him—he wouldn’t be the first to have that happen to him….”

Practical advice from a sensible woman.

Well, Eric shipped the box a few weeks ago. I retrieved it, lifted it, and decided to spend the ten bucks to take a three-block taxi ride home. How much is my dorsal spine worth?

And the box sat there, a challenge each morning, a reproof each night.

“Screw it,” I said, “the essence of neurosis is the avoidance of pain.” A nod of thanks here to my friend Sonia, whose wisdom this is. “I’m gonna open that box!”

Well I prepared myself—I got a scissors and a big hunk of Kleenex.

There’s no sense in not crying if you have to. You’re better off to get it out, vent it, and then go on. Walk into the pain, live it, let it go. That’s what grief, or suffering, teaches you.

So I knew the tears would come. What I didn’t know was the source. Because the first documents to spring out of the box were a series of letters from Don Anderson, publisher of the Wisconsin State Journal, to Jack, my father.

Here’s one…. 

Well, I became Lorraine. I knew Jack had fought for the open housing drive, but I didn’t know how hard, or that his boss had thought so highly of him.

Wait—his former boss. Anderson, I realized later, had retired years earlier. I knew because Jack had written the story, and Anderson had replied.

Well, the guy knows how to turn a phrase, doesn’t he? I like the somewhat false but still funny self deprecation of the “hung for horse stealing….”

And yes, that “pretty and talented” wife does smack of smugness—it explains why women were burning their bras a decade later.

And the pretty and talented wife had—it must be said—some mixed feelings about Anderson.

It wasn’t much spoken off—but it was there. She watched Jack’s colleagues rise to editor, managing editor, administrative jobs that—guess what?—paid better. And there Anderson was, “sidetracking” her husband.

And she had a three-year-old (me), a seven-year-old (John), and a 12-year-old (Eric). And hadn’t “worked” in over a decade.

How did she feel, reading this letter? A letter that praises at the same time that it announces—your husband’s going nowhere. You’ll never be the publisher’s wife, you pretty, talented thing.

I think it was easy enough for Jack. He loved to write, he loved his work, and the respect and admiration of the community were pay dirt for him.

For Franny? Washing little Marc’s diapers?

There are three more pages—a typescript of a talk Anderson gave at a company meeting….

No, there never was a great fortune in that wallet—or any other wallet that a journalist has. About all he got were enough money to buy food and clothes and shoes, and six pieces of paper.

Now in my hands.

And time will go on, and people will die, and no one will know—perhaps—that there was a time when the Ku Klux Klan marched in Madison, or that neighbors could threaten to burn the first black family’s house in the neighborhood.

Or that a guy named John Newhouse had fought the bastards.

But maybe they will.

Went out, bought the scanner, sighed deeply, invoked doña Taí—patron saint of technological idiots—and prepared for the hell it would be.

I don’t want another device in my life.

But how much had he done for me?

World—remember. There was a reporter, John Newhouse.

And he did it better than anyone else I have ever known.