We got to doing letters quickly and easily, and I soon began to draw on her as a collaborator in composing the letters—what to say and how to say it. Does that sound all right?—What if you said this instead of that?—What on earth am I going to write to the man who sent me the 600-page manuscript about fairies on Venus?—This one’s a whiner, you don’t have to answer him… Delores was always better than me at kind answers to kooks, but she was tough-minded too, and encouraged me not to answer a letter that was troublingly weird or made unreasonable demands. She got to be so good at replying to the eternally repeated questions that I could hand her a letter and just say “idea for Catwings” and the true tale of how I happened to think of cats with wings was all ready in her computer—though she varied it slightly according to her mood and the age of the inquirer. She had a gracious, graceful tone in discouraging problematic requests by explaining why I couldn’t personally reply just now. She covered for me beautifully. She loved to answer children’s letters, even when they were the mechanical kind some teachers make kids write. The open kindness and generosity of her spirit lent all my correspondence a quality it would never have had without her collaboration.
She never came more than once a week, usually only once every three or four weeks. I’d do the most urgent business correspondence and let the rest and the fan mail pile up. She got a computer before I did, and it eased her work a great deal. When I got one, it didn’t make much difference at first. But when email really got going I began to be able to deal with all the real business myself. Still Delores and I together handled nonurgent business, the fan letters from readers, and what we called the Gimmies: the letters everybody who becomes visible to the public gets, asking you to do this, give to that, endorse this book, speak at that good cause, etc. Even if you can’t possibly say yes to them, most such letters are well intentioned and deserve a civil no. Delores said no thank you in every possible way, always politely. It was a great burden off me. She said that the Gimmies were boring but just various enough to be entertaining too.
As for fan mail, letters from readers have always come to me on paper only, my crude but effective way of keeping the volume down. The letters people write me—often with pen and ink, or in pencil, crayon, glitter, and other media if they’re children—are ever amazing, giving me immense pleasure and reward, but they are also never-ending. I knew there was no way I could handle the load if I tried to read and answer them on my website or on email. But I have always felt that such letters deserve a reply, however brief, and for years Delores was my invaluable aide in answering them.
We loved each other as friends, but didn’t have extensive contact outside our work sessions. She was a busy woman: she soon became the writer Jean Auel’s secretary four days a week, and was agent and manager for her husband, the painter Henk Pander; when her parents grew old and sick she looked after them, and late in life she adopted and brought up her granddaughter. Our friendship was expressed mostly during and in our working relationship. I always looked forward to Delores coming, and we always spent half the time talking, catching up. Once, when I was scared by a stalker, she and Henk gave me wonderful immediate support.
As the years went on she seemed to grow shyer and more withdrawn from her friends than she had been, I do not know why. She told me once that she liked coming to work with me because we laughed together.
Her computer began to get out of date, and her life was complicated by various issues; her energy was being overtried. She couldn’t or didn’t want to figure out how to help me with e-correspondence the way she did with paper mail, which she took home along with dictated answers or suggested notes from me. So I came to do all the email and most of the letters, leaving her only some Gimmies and no-thank-yous and those fan letters that needed only acknowledgment.
Delores’s joy in life had been visibly flagging for a long time when she was diagnosed, last year, with cancer. At first it seemed local and curable, but proved to be metastasizing. It killed her in a few months. There was a brief and lovely respite or remission for a few weeks late in her illness, when we were able to visit with her quite often, and laughed together as we had used to laugh. Then the cruel disease closed in again. She died a few months ago, attended with great tenderness by her husband.
I find it extremely hard to talk about people I loved who have died. I can’t now make a proper tribute to that complex and beautiful woman, or say more than that I miss her friendship in every way.
Without her, I’ve had to give up the effort to answer fan mail, at least temporarily. As for the Gimmies, some of them get answered, some of them don’t. I suppose I could hire someone to do that.
But I doubt that I will. I can’t put my heart into it.
Without Egg
July 2011
VISITING VIENNA IN the early 1950s, Charles and I stayed in style for very little expense at the old König von Ungarn Hotel, which had been there since at least the 1820s. We ate breakfast at a café around the corner. Always the same café and the same breakfast: good coffee, fresh fruit, crisp rolls with butter and jam, and a soft-boiled egg. Perfect. Invariable. Every morning.
I don’t know why I got it in my head one morning to vary it, but I did, and when the tall, middle-aged waiter arrived in his impeccable dark coat, I indicated that I wanted the usual breakfast, without the egg.
He appeared not to understand, which, given the quality of my German, was understandable. I repeated something like “Kein Ei,” or “Ohne Ei.”
He responded slowly, in a shaken voice, “Ohne Ei?”
He was disturbed. I was ruthless. Yes, I said, without egg.
He stood for quite a while silent, trying to handle the shock. He visibly forced himself not to appeal, or plead, or show his disapproval. He was a waiter, a disciplined, skillful Viennese waiter, and must obey the most perverse customer. “Without egg, madame,” he said softly, almost unreproachfully, and went away to fetch my eggless breakfast, which he brought and set before me with silent, funereal dignity.
We still laugh recalling that tiny incident of nearly sixty years ago, but it is also kept alive in my memory by a sense of guilt. For one thing, in 1954, in Vienna, an egg meant something. The city was just coming out of very bad times. It was still occupied, divided among the U.S., the British, and the Russian armies; the cathedral had rearisen and the opera house was rearising from the rubble of bombing, but damage and destruction was everywhere, and the effect of privation plain to see in the faces and bodies of people on the street. An offer of food in a city that has gone hungry is not a small matter.
Also, I willfully and needlessly disturbed the order of that waiter’s universe. A very small universe, the Viennese café breakfast, but a stable, orderly, perfected one. Better not change something that has achieved excellence. And it was unkind to demand of a person who spent his working life maintaining that excellence to impair it, to do something he so clearly felt was wrong. After all, I could have let him bring the egg and simply not eaten it. He was far too good at his job to have taken notice, except possibly for a mild, commiserative “Madame doesn’t feel hungry this morning?” To have an egg and not to eat it was my privilege. To refuse to let him bring the egg was to interfere with his privilege, which was to bring me a complete and proper Viennese café breakfast. I still want to laugh when I think about it, and I still feel a twinge of guilt.