Extra Innings by Doris Grumbach Read Free Book Online

postcard from Stone Harbor, New Jersey, where she often vacations. It reads: ‘Loved your football book.’
    There is a lesson in all this. Mary McCarthy once told me she was very good at naming books, as indeed she was: she provided me with the name for the biography I wrote of her, The Company She Kept , to echo the title of her own book, The Company She Keeps . On the contrary, I have a genius for misnaming books. Chamber Music found itself on the MUSIC shelves of bookstores, The Missing Person , a novel about Hollywood in the silent days, ended up among MYSTERIES , and now there is my new football book.…
    Other mail: A letter from a young man with AIDS who lives in the Far West. He writes that he was diagnosed several months ago. Since then, the time has passed ‘rather numbly,’ from denial or shock, he is not sure which. He read End Zone , interested in what I had to say about the friends I had loved and lost from AIDS:
    The dam broke, I’ve been angry, cried and then started to focus on what life means to me, what is important.… I hope the rest of my life—be it five years or fifty—is lived with some clarity and belief in values, in love of friends and respect of self, others and the world. I would be exaggerating if I gave your book all the credit for helping me past this point. It is at least a wonderful coincidence.
    He says he has found Oregon, as I have found Maine, a wonderful change, and that he is planning a garden for next spring. His lover and he are heading for Mexico in January, he concludes, because Oregon is very wet and dreary at that time of year. ‘We will think of you when he shows me the Mayan ruins.’
    To receive a letter like this gives me reason to write, to know that one such reader is out there and, even in a small way, has been affected by something I said. More than the hope of monetary reward, or of fame, or of the chance of immortality, I write in the hope of hearing one person say ‘Keep writing,’ the injunction with which Bob Doyle ends his letter.
    Sybil asks me to accompany her on a book call to East Blue Hill, where a lady, who is moving to Tennessee, is selling her house and her books. Ordinarily I don’t go along on these jaunts because I feel unequal to them. I usually think the books I am looking at are not worth very much, but Sybil sees value in many of them, and is usually right. I don’t enjoy the dust that has settled on old collections, and I sneeze and then quickly grow impatient, reluctant any longer to give up the time it takes to go through them carefully.
    Sybil, a true book woman, is indefatigable, patient, and generous in what she pays for books, so she is better off going to see them alone.
    But there is one thing about such visits that interests me. Better than pictures, furniture, clothes, or architecture, books may reveal the character, the personality, the nature of the owners. What they bought and collected over the years, or inherited from parents or grandparents and kept, often throws light on their lives. In a way, it constitutes sociological data from which it is intriguing to construct fiction about them, or atleast to raise interesting questions and attempt some answers.
    For example: A Maine farmer, whose family has been on its Bucksport land for 150 years, collected books of Japanese prints, mostly erotic (as Japanese art often is). Is one permitted to make something of that? Or, a long-widowed elderly woman is selling her large collection of hard-boiled modern fiction. Or, a Methodist minister is ridding himself of his collection of volumes on the subject of homosexuality.
    Recently, very early one morning, we went to Penobscot to buy the books from a family of five, parents and three children. Their collection was varied and indicative. There were many well-used greasy cookbooks, with written-in additions and corrections to the recipes, a good number of Catholic classics by Fulton Sheen,