Yesterday, September 24, 2011, was the seventy-seventh birthday of one of Freddie's oldest and dearest friends, Robert Alvord. It was also the day of Rob's memorial service. His death from cancer was not unexpected. In fact, Rob had called Freddie late one night during the week before his passing to tell Fred that he was dying. He wanted to say good-bye, and to acknowledge the importance of their friendship to him.
After Rob died, Freddie was called to the Alvord house for a consultation about the music for his memorial service. Rob had left a list of his requests, so Freddie handled the negotiations with the organist at the church. Some of the selections he most wanted the guests to hear would have involved a full symphony orchestra, so Freddie and the music director worked out a reasonable compromise.
The event, which took place on a Saturday morning three weeks after the cremation, was like a movie for me. The family, preceded by the verger who led them up the aisle in a group, filled up the first three rows at St. Alban's church. Their appearance did not shout money. It merely murmured "very rich, very old money."
They were in fact just a bit underdressed, confident enough not to do the conventional thing. Jacqui wore ivory silk pants and an apple green silk tunic. I suddenly felt dowdy in the black weeds I keep for such occasions, which at my age, I'm sadly finding more and more useful. This clan, lean and mostly blond, bronzed with year-around tans, crushed by their obvious grief, nevertheless walked in with the assurance of people who know their place in this world if not the next.
Rob grew up in a prosperous family of three generations of lawyers who represented the railroad industry. For all I know, the patriarch may have been a robber baron, but the Alvord money and influence allowed Rob to indulge in other things besides lawyering. He was enthusiastic about music, sketching and painting, and writing poetry. Some months before he died, the book of poems he had written to his wife, one at a time, every day since their wedding, was published.
Thus did the Robert Alvords perfectly follow the family plan of Thomas Jefferson, which, roughly paraphrased, explained his vision: I practice politics that my son may be a philosopher, and his son may be a painter.
Rob prepped at St. Alban's, and went on to Dartmouth and then Harvard Law. He married well, had several golden children, divorced, then married the beauteous Jacqui and produced with her two more golden babes, all of who were present at the event.
Our rector did not conduct the service. For that job, the family imported the priest who had been Headmaster of St. Alban's School after the halcyon days when Rob was already a legend there. The school, just next door, had already been established earlier as one of the major threads in this event. Of the five people who spoke on Rob's behalf, four reminisced fondly about the days they shared there. They all stressed, unselfconsciously, that they had tried to follow the precepts laid down by their very excellent school, but that Rob was without dispute the best among them. At the homily, the priest said that if Rob had been a student in the British public school system, of which St. Alban's is a slightly more egalitarian model, he would undoubtedly have been voted "Best Boy."
The priest then segued into his sermon by saying that when he got word that Rob had died, he was on an annual vacation with French friends at their country place in the Provence. When he told his hosts about Rob’s passing, the host descended into the ancient cellar of the house and brought up a brandy that had been bottled by his grandfather. The label, written in his grandfather’s hand, read Eau de Vie, 1954. The priest then connected the image to the Gospel story of The Woman at the Well by saying that "Water of Life" is what Christ offered, and that it was always flowing freely, gushing toward eternal life, and that it was available to all. Rob and his tribe seemed to have been splashed with a generous amount, buckets and buckets of it.
After the service, the congregation was invited to a reception at the Alvord residence a few blocks away. It was a large, comfortable place, Kennedy-esque, a little rumpled and full of large old antiques and large old dogs, who wandered forlornly among the guests, looking bewildered and begging for affection.
We stood in line a long time to speak to Jacqui because the chauffeur, an old family retainer, was weeping inconsolably on her shoulder. The second son finally rescued her by saying she was needed in the kitchen. I thought that a servant weeping at the master’s passing suggested a virtuous life.
Freddie remarked under his breath that he had seldom seen so many WASPs in the same place. I said,” This surely isn't Temple Emmanuel." I went on to say something like you're looking at the American Dream, the crème de la crème, right out of Edith Wharton, and Louis Auchincloss. Rob was to the manor born, was informally and without dispute voted "Best Boy" at St. Albans, lived by the ideals of his class—loyalty, generosity, strong sense of civic duty, reverence for family life. He had lived seventy-seven virtuous years, then died reluctantly but with grace and dignity, in the bed and house to which he was born, heaped with honors and mourned by his large family and army of friends. Lord now lettest thou thy servant Robert—a leader of men, a lover of life, and a jolly good fellow—depart in peace.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Friday, September 9, 2011
A FORAY INTO HEDONISM, AFRICAN STYLE
A FORAY INTO HEDONISM, AFRICAN STYLE
Frequent and regular visits to beauty salons—beauty parlors as they are still called in the south—were something new to me when I lived in Africa. In the States, I only went to get my hair cut a couple of weeks after I really needed it. Spending a lot of time and money on beauty treatments made me nervous and offended my puritan sensibilities. I told myself silly and righteous things about both money and time, such as, “They could save an entire African village for what some women pay for manicures,” and “Why spend all that time sitting under a dryer when there are so many important things to do in this world?” I realize that back then when I started talking about The World, I was into some level of grandiosity and should have calmed myself down.
Another variation of this interior conversation was, “I’m supposed to be an intellectual.” That was a killer, because while I wanted to be taken seriously in the university community and then the professional world, I never wanted to look as undone and ill kempt as many of my colleagues did. The most successful women in the English Department in my day weren’t spending any time deciding which lipstick looked better—Fire and Ice or Pink Perfection. And in my own heart of hearts, I worried that the pursuit of fashion and beauty would crowd out thoughts of Beowulf, Chaucer, and The Great Vowel Shift.
Once I moved to Africa, my perspective changed. The African sun and air were beating me up and drying me out. I worked 14-hour days most of the time and had little focus on personal care. When I realized that I was beginning to look haggard, I decided that attention must be paid.
On Saturday afternoons, if no emergencies arose, I had an unaccustomed bit of time to myself. I started frequenting a local salon for regular mani-pedi appointments. And since I was already there, I decided to have my legs waxed and then get an occasional facial. I began to enjoy the feeling, and it was certainly affordable, even if one paid top dollar and tipped handsomely, as I always made sure to do.
Malawian beauty salons are almost always run by East Indians, who made up the merchant class in that part of Africa. Malawian girls did the actual work. Well-off Malawian women came in occasionally, but the clientele was largely Indian.
The young Indian women were often startlingly beautiful and soignée. Even the teen-agers came in for regular facials and hair treatments on Saturday. They joked and gossiped in Chichewa with the Malawian salon attendants and were as fluent in the local language as they, understandably so because they had all been born in Malawi.
Many of the older Indian ladies retained vestiges of great beauty. They were usually obese by our standards but evidently not by theirs. They seemed to like themselves just as they were. They didn’t talk about their weight or their diets, their exercise routines, their fat-to-muscle ratios in the obsessive way that so many Americans do. They just lolled about, looking faintly bored, having the dry skin rubbed off their heels and elbows, or having more holes pierced in their ears—the better to wear the fantastic gold jewelry they all seemed to have.
Making appointments, I should say having appointments, was difficult because time meant nothing in that environment. Many times when I showed up at the appointed time, I was told that the hairdresser hadn’t come in yet (no transport), or that the water was off, or that the manicurist had gone to a funeral in Blantyre. Come back tomorrow. Or the day after. Whenever.
Another annoying aspect of the beauty salon was the behavior of the Malawian girls. They increasingly got on my nerves. Some days a whole pack of them would be sitting around the shop, reading European or South African fashion magazines, laughing and squealing together. It was not restful. Further, they had a way of scrutinizing white people closely, looking intently at their hair, their skin, their clothes, and asking personal questions: how many servants do you have (a sore point for me), how many boyfriends do you have (another touchy subject), and the inevitable—will you take me back to the States when you leave?
When they talked and laughed among themselves, I would hear the word “Mazungu,” or foreigner, leading me to believe they were having a joke at my expense. About that time, I learned of a South African trained woman who made home visits to give massages, aromatherapy, manicures, pedicures, and best of all, foot massage. I never went back to the Malawian shop again.
The new masseuse, Salima, wasn’t very good, I’m sorry to report. She pummeled my body like bread dough, with no sensitivity at all; and she wanted to play the radio throughout the entire appointment. I found some dreamy sounding tapes in town and told her that I wanted to hear them in silence. She finally complied. After that, my Saturday afternoon sessions of soin passed more peacefully.
I did not miss the Malawian beauty shop, but my visits there brought to mind a trip to a 300-hundred year old Turkish bath I had visited some years earlier in Istanbul, the year of the fall of the USSR. Shortly after the fall, I was sent with a party of specialists to visit the Russian Far East, Siberia, and all the “Stans.”
After five weeks in chaotic territories, I felt terrible, toxified by pollution and a diet of greasy, starchy food, washed down with rotgut vodka (the only comfort at the end of seemingly endless days). I was also nervous and achy, strung out from too much danger. After nine flights on the Aeroflot of the outback and twenty hours on a train through three war zones in the Caucasus, we were finally able to reach Baku. We flew to Istanbul for a few days’ rest before flying to Frankfurt and then home.
I experienced Istanbul as a rebirth: I woke up in a bed with fresh linens. We had hot water, room service, café au lait. No menacing KGB agents were posted outside our doors. No one asked to see our papers, as ragged soldier had done throughout our wild train ride through the mountains.
Once in Turkey, I felt safe but exhausted, grimy, ill, and tense in spite of having made it out to safety. On my first morning there, I saw an advertisement on the bedside table for a 300-year-old Turkish bath in the neighborhood. I instantly decided to go and had the hotel man point the way.
Once at the bath, I realized that I was a complete outsider. The Turkish women sat around nude, sipping thick coffee in tiny cups. Almost all were quite fat with pendulous breasts. Many bore brutal scars on their bellies. Cesareans perhaps. A sisterhood of cicatrices. They seemed utterly un-self-conscious, as though they were chatting in a coffee shop.
I felt as if I had landed on another planet. A young woman took my ticket, gave me a towel, showed me where to put my clothes, and indicated the place I was to sit. I sat, feeling immensely self-conscious as every eye in the room was on my naked, scrawny, pale white body. The woman appeared every few minutes to splash me with a bucket of warm water. Finally she motioned to me to take my place on the heated marble dome, the central feature of this ancient structure. I lay down on my stomach, and for the first few moments the stones felt blistering hot. While I waited, I wondered about the people who had stretched out where I was.
The young woman returned, and with big sponges and brushes, she scrubbed, soaped, and splashed one side and then the other. She asked without words if I wanted my feet done, my hair. I signaled “everything.” In the hour that followed, she managed to convey wordlessly that she was unhappy, that she had three kids and a husband who drank and beat her.
When I left, I wasn’t sure what the appropriate tip should be, so I aimed high. She mimed surprise and displeasure at what I had given her, so I gave her some more. As I was getting dressed, I saw her gleefully showing the other women the money, evidently gloating over her good fortune in having a foreign client too stupid to know the local pay scale or too tired to care.
In spite of this minor irritation, I returned to the hotel in an altered state, slept a deep and dreamless eighteen hours, and woke up feeling purified and more or less returned to myself. All this for less then the price of a good haircut in Washington or New York.
Frequent and regular visits to beauty salons—beauty parlors as they are still called in the south—were something new to me when I lived in Africa. In the States, I only went to get my hair cut a couple of weeks after I really needed it. Spending a lot of time and money on beauty treatments made me nervous and offended my puritan sensibilities. I told myself silly and righteous things about both money and time, such as, “They could save an entire African village for what some women pay for manicures,” and “Why spend all that time sitting under a dryer when there are so many important things to do in this world?” I realize that back then when I started talking about The World, I was into some level of grandiosity and should have calmed myself down.
Another variation of this interior conversation was, “I’m supposed to be an intellectual.” That was a killer, because while I wanted to be taken seriously in the university community and then the professional world, I never wanted to look as undone and ill kempt as many of my colleagues did. The most successful women in the English Department in my day weren’t spending any time deciding which lipstick looked better—Fire and Ice or Pink Perfection. And in my own heart of hearts, I worried that the pursuit of fashion and beauty would crowd out thoughts of Beowulf, Chaucer, and The Great Vowel Shift.
Once I moved to Africa, my perspective changed. The African sun and air were beating me up and drying me out. I worked 14-hour days most of the time and had little focus on personal care. When I realized that I was beginning to look haggard, I decided that attention must be paid.
On Saturday afternoons, if no emergencies arose, I had an unaccustomed bit of time to myself. I started frequenting a local salon for regular mani-pedi appointments. And since I was already there, I decided to have my legs waxed and then get an occasional facial. I began to enjoy the feeling, and it was certainly affordable, even if one paid top dollar and tipped handsomely, as I always made sure to do.
Malawian beauty salons are almost always run by East Indians, who made up the merchant class in that part of Africa. Malawian girls did the actual work. Well-off Malawian women came in occasionally, but the clientele was largely Indian.
The young Indian women were often startlingly beautiful and soignée. Even the teen-agers came in for regular facials and hair treatments on Saturday. They joked and gossiped in Chichewa with the Malawian salon attendants and were as fluent in the local language as they, understandably so because they had all been born in Malawi.
Many of the older Indian ladies retained vestiges of great beauty. They were usually obese by our standards but evidently not by theirs. They seemed to like themselves just as they were. They didn’t talk about their weight or their diets, their exercise routines, their fat-to-muscle ratios in the obsessive way that so many Americans do. They just lolled about, looking faintly bored, having the dry skin rubbed off their heels and elbows, or having more holes pierced in their ears—the better to wear the fantastic gold jewelry they all seemed to have.
Making appointments, I should say having appointments, was difficult because time meant nothing in that environment. Many times when I showed up at the appointed time, I was told that the hairdresser hadn’t come in yet (no transport), or that the water was off, or that the manicurist had gone to a funeral in Blantyre. Come back tomorrow. Or the day after. Whenever.
Another annoying aspect of the beauty salon was the behavior of the Malawian girls. They increasingly got on my nerves. Some days a whole pack of them would be sitting around the shop, reading European or South African fashion magazines, laughing and squealing together. It was not restful. Further, they had a way of scrutinizing white people closely, looking intently at their hair, their skin, their clothes, and asking personal questions: how many servants do you have (a sore point for me), how many boyfriends do you have (another touchy subject), and the inevitable—will you take me back to the States when you leave?
When they talked and laughed among themselves, I would hear the word “Mazungu,” or foreigner, leading me to believe they were having a joke at my expense. About that time, I learned of a South African trained woman who made home visits to give massages, aromatherapy, manicures, pedicures, and best of all, foot massage. I never went back to the Malawian shop again.
The new masseuse, Salima, wasn’t very good, I’m sorry to report. She pummeled my body like bread dough, with no sensitivity at all; and she wanted to play the radio throughout the entire appointment. I found some dreamy sounding tapes in town and told her that I wanted to hear them in silence. She finally complied. After that, my Saturday afternoon sessions of soin passed more peacefully.
I did not miss the Malawian beauty shop, but my visits there brought to mind a trip to a 300-hundred year old Turkish bath I had visited some years earlier in Istanbul, the year of the fall of the USSR. Shortly after the fall, I was sent with a party of specialists to visit the Russian Far East, Siberia, and all the “Stans.”
After five weeks in chaotic territories, I felt terrible, toxified by pollution and a diet of greasy, starchy food, washed down with rotgut vodka (the only comfort at the end of seemingly endless days). I was also nervous and achy, strung out from too much danger. After nine flights on the Aeroflot of the outback and twenty hours on a train through three war zones in the Caucasus, we were finally able to reach Baku. We flew to Istanbul for a few days’ rest before flying to Frankfurt and then home.
I experienced Istanbul as a rebirth: I woke up in a bed with fresh linens. We had hot water, room service, café au lait. No menacing KGB agents were posted outside our doors. No one asked to see our papers, as ragged soldier had done throughout our wild train ride through the mountains.
Once in Turkey, I felt safe but exhausted, grimy, ill, and tense in spite of having made it out to safety. On my first morning there, I saw an advertisement on the bedside table for a 300-year-old Turkish bath in the neighborhood. I instantly decided to go and had the hotel man point the way.
Once at the bath, I realized that I was a complete outsider. The Turkish women sat around nude, sipping thick coffee in tiny cups. Almost all were quite fat with pendulous breasts. Many bore brutal scars on their bellies. Cesareans perhaps. A sisterhood of cicatrices. They seemed utterly un-self-conscious, as though they were chatting in a coffee shop.
I felt as if I had landed on another planet. A young woman took my ticket, gave me a towel, showed me where to put my clothes, and indicated the place I was to sit. I sat, feeling immensely self-conscious as every eye in the room was on my naked, scrawny, pale white body. The woman appeared every few minutes to splash me with a bucket of warm water. Finally she motioned to me to take my place on the heated marble dome, the central feature of this ancient structure. I lay down on my stomach, and for the first few moments the stones felt blistering hot. While I waited, I wondered about the people who had stretched out where I was.
The young woman returned, and with big sponges and brushes, she scrubbed, soaped, and splashed one side and then the other. She asked without words if I wanted my feet done, my hair. I signaled “everything.” In the hour that followed, she managed to convey wordlessly that she was unhappy, that she had three kids and a husband who drank and beat her.
When I left, I wasn’t sure what the appropriate tip should be, so I aimed high. She mimed surprise and displeasure at what I had given her, so I gave her some more. As I was getting dressed, I saw her gleefully showing the other women the money, evidently gloating over her good fortune in having a foreign client too stupid to know the local pay scale or too tired to care.
In spite of this minor irritation, I returned to the hotel in an altered state, slept a deep and dreamless eighteen hours, and woke up feeling purified and more or less returned to myself. All this for less then the price of a good haircut in Washington or New York.
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