Agee never explained how he would go about making such a film.
78. The Fourth Wife
My father’s fourth wife lived the long death, as they say. In other words, she became mad as a hatter while still quite young. She believed my father, a novelist, had quite imagined every aspect of her life before they met and there was nothing for her to do other than thwart this unholy talent and become brutishly mad, quite unlike the gracious creature he had imagined. She lived in soiled pajamas, collected rocks, and drank staggeringly inventive gin concoctions all day long.
My father had imagined his other wives as well, even my mother, but rather than take such dramatic measures to command their own fate, they had simply divorced him. The fourth wife, however, found her own way and stuck with it. Our days are as grass and our years as a tale that is told, she quite rightly believed.
She just did not want her tale to be my father’s.
He could have written another novel, of course — he was always writing — in which a fourth young wife became quite mad, but this would be quite after the fact, she was clever enough to realize, and quite irrelevant.
79. Example
There was a famous writer who had a house on the coast. He was entertaining another writer for the weekend, this one less well known, but nonetheless with a name that was recognized by many. A third writer, whose husband had died unexpectedly only two days before, had also been invited for the evening. This was done at the last minute, an act of graciousness, as the woman was on her way south, on a trip she and her husband had long intended.
This writer was the least famous of the three. People couldn’t get a handle on her stuff.
The famous writer and his wife made fish baked in salt for supper. There were many bottles of wine. The third writer’s husband was remembered off and on, fondly.
There was a guest house on the property, and she was invited to spend the night there. Her dog, however, would have to stay in a kennel that was also on the acreage. Or, if she preferred, her car. But not in the guest house.
But she wanted the dog to be with her. It was only the third night of her husband’s death. She probably just should have driven off and found a motel somewhere. But it was late. So late.
She didn’t want the dog to sleep on the cold earth of the kennel. He was old, almost thirteen years old. She and her husband had had him all that time.
Finally, irritably, the famous writer allowed them to stay in one small room in the guest house. The rather known writer said nothing during this battle of wills. She smiled and shrugged. She herself had never had a dog, though she used them freely in her fiction, where they appeared real enough.
The widow lay in the smallest room of the guest house with her dog. Never had she felt so bereft. She had signed a number of papers only that morning at the funeral home. Cremation is not reversible, someone there said. She couldn’t imagine why they would say such a thing. She wished she had requested his belt. And the black cashmere sweater the medics had ripped in half when they first arrived.
He had worn that belt every day for years. Sometimes she’d put some leather preservative on it. And now she didn’t have it.
Oh God, she thought.
80. Opportunity
Over the years, our succession of beloved dogs were always losing their identification tags.
Since we traveled frequently and often chose areas to pass through where the dogs could run free and tussle, our dogs lost their identification tags in at least a dozen states. Frequently these tags, which included our home address as well as a telephone number, would be returned to us through the mail with a short note of greeting and good wishes.
With the exception of one finder who was not a realtor or an insurance agent, all the finders who contacted us were realtors or insurance agents who enclosed their business cards.
81. Businesswoman
Late in every summer, our local paper prints an article about recreational hiking in the desert. Each year several hikers die of dehydration in our scenic mountains. The question the article always addresses is: How much water should be shared with a needy stranger gasping trailside from the heat?
“If it came down to having enough for myself or helping someone, I’d have to drink my own water,” a Phoenix businesswoman said most recently, adding that for her it was an ethical decision, with a bit of belief in the survival of the fittest mixed in.
82. Polyurethane
She liked traveling through the American Southwest and staying in the rooms of old hotels in forgotten towns. The questionable cleanliness of the rooms did not bother her, nor did the indifferent food served at erratic times in the local cafés. She went to markets and churches, bought trinkets and the occasional rug. She never had any real experiences, but she was content. This was how she spent her monthlong vacation year after year. She was a teacher of history and mathematics, though not a particularly dedicated one. She moved them along, the little ones.
One evening, in a particularly garish room of awkward dimension, jammed with oak furniture, with prints of long-ago parades covering the walls, after preparing a drinking a cup of tea — she always brought the supplies for tea time with her, including a heating coil — she realized she had no idea who she was or why the end of a day would find her in this close room. She felt anxious but did not give in to the temptation of making herself a stronger cup. Instead she decided to remove the few articles of clothing she had placed in the bureau drawer and return them to her valise. This gave her the feeling she would soon be on her way again.
Removing the cargo pants with just the touch of spandex to add stretch and the linen shirt with hidden button-front placket — garments as yet unworn, which added to the sense of unfamiliarity and unease — she noticed writing in the bottom of the drawer. Under the sensible beam of the flashlight she always carried with her, she read:
On the displacement and destruction of the American Indian, George Catlin wrote in 1837:
For the American citizens who live, everywhere proud of their growing wealth and their luxuries, over the bones of these poor fellows, there is a lingering terror for reflecting minds: Our mortal bodies must soon take their humble places with their red brethren, under the same glebe: to appear and stand at last, with guilt’s shivering conviction, amid the myriad ranks of accusing spirits, that are to rise in their own fields, at the final day of resurrection!
She immediately vowed to no longer frequent public accommodations. She would purchase a mobile home and continue her travels unharried by the sentiments of others. Still, she had no idea who this person who would continue was now.
83. Crazy Injuns
The notion of cyclical time was crucial to Native Americans. For them, sacred events recur again and again in a pattern that repeats the cycles of the celestial sphere.
Time does not progress along a linear path but moves in a cyclical manner so as to provide an enclosure within which events occur.
Past, present, and future all exist together because the cycles turn continually upon themselves.
The progression of time along a developmental path was a concept foreign to Native Americans until the Europeans forced them into history.
84. Winter