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No Word for the Sea
A Professor and His Wife Face Alzheimer’s
Diane Glancy
No Word for the Sea
A Professor and His Wife Face Alzheimer’s
Copyright © 2017 Diane Glancy. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-3252-5
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-3254-9
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-3253-2
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 09/17/15
The excerpt from “Paterson,” Part II, Book Two, William Carlos Williams, is from The Collected Poems, Volume I, 1909-1939, copyright @1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
The excerpt from Of Salome is reprinted by permission of the author.
Acknowledgment also to St. Paul, Minnesota
The Minnesota History Center
Kristi Wheeler and the cabin on Crane Lake
Various faculty travel and research grants, Macalester College
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new
places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds–
since their movements
are toward new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned)
—William Carlos William
“Paterson,” Part II, Book Two
The next evening Mary Magdalene and Salome went out and purchased embalming spices.
—Mark 16:1
I was not, in the beginning of time, a head on a plate.
—“Of Salome: On Death and Beauty”from Journal of the Posthumous Present Marvin Bell
Stephen Savard
What did I do with my cell phone? What would I do for dinner? Where was Solome? Did she leave a note? Something in the fridge? I fixed myself a sandwich. Sometimes she was helping our daughter, Soos, with the baby. Or she was at a meeting. I opened the front door. I went for a walk.
Solome Savard
Wear warm clothes.
Those were the words she heard from the next table. She had nothing but warm clothes in her closet. Winter was most of the year in Minnesota. Sweaters and trousers in logging-camp brown. Kerosene yellow. Lumberjack check. Wood-stove black. She could push the restaurant voices away, but she listened to them as she watched for Stephen.
The thought of Crane Lake and their cabin five hours north of St. Paul rested a moment in her thoughts. She remembered thinking Stephen would be president of Cobson College. The thought returned like small waves lapping the shore. Her husband, Stephen Savard, was provost of the college, and could become president when the current president left or retired. But Stephen had been depressed. It happened suddenly, but with certainty. He had been a history professor, chair of his department, dean of his division— then provost— still going where he was going. What was bothering him? They had worked all their married life for their children and their place in St. Paul among friends and colleagues. Why had she never looked beyond possibilities? What was this cut back she felt cornered in her thoughts?
She read the menu in the restaurant.
Imagine tables close as clothes in a closet. Two women at the next table talking. Imagine someone’s mind wiped clean as the next table in front of her. With a chill she remembered Stephen’s mother saying she found her father’s work-tools in the dining-room drawer. Solome remembered his distance at family gatherings.
In the restaurant, the conversations were unrelated to one another, yet all sounded together. Imagine the conversations lifted above the knives and forks like rigging in an inland harbor. Imagine seeing no one she knew in the downtown St. Paul restaurant that overlooked the Mississippi River. She thought of the miles the water traveled from Itasca, its headwaters, to the gulf in New Orleans. At least she didn’t have to explain Stephen’s absence to anyone.
Imagine a country without its own language. Well, it had a language. It just wasn’t its own. It came from across the ocean, tossing boats, stirring waves. It was itself made of other languages, bits and pieces meshing over history, reverberating in the restaurant.
She tried again to call, but Stephen must have turned off his cell phone, or left it in his office. No one answered at the house. Where was he?
When had Stephen begun? Begun what? A journey into forgetfulness. A journey into his own language, into words that did not follow their order.
Solome looked at the menu again. Should she leave or stay?
Sometimes she asked Stephen about something and it was as if he was already separated from the land. It angered him when she caught him like that. When did Stephen fall into his roily language? What did that mean? She didn’t know. Or he would repeat the same question. Where was the shore he was headed? It was as if he spoke behind a seawall.
They had been married thirty years. They had three children. One daughter, Gretchen, was working toward a Ph.D. at Columbia. The other, Susanna, was married and had a baby. Mark Stephen, their son, born twelve years into their marriage, was a freshman at Cobson College. Solome and Stephen had a resonance and a history. They shared a family. A people. A country. They shared a language, broken as it was.
She sat in the restaurant a while longer. She called Stephen again, but there was no answer at the office, or the house, or on his cell. Finally she ordered. She would eat by herself if Stephen didn’t show. She remembered in school, she had been called, Solo.
Solome had had a name from
