1 February 1985

At 5:30 p.m., I have just poured myself a gin and tonic, warm, since I have no access to ice, but strong. As I have done each of the 3 or 4 nights since I got my bottle of White Satin and the Schweppes set ups, I just lifted the glass (a kitchen tumbler, half filled) above my head in a wordless toast. Tonight as on each of the preceding nights, the gesture induced a small attack of melancholy. My mood is easily explained. I am alone in the Abbey, except for Ronald Ward, a visiting faculty member from Randolph Macon. Quiet, aloof and holed up in the Cloister Cabins when he isn't off somewhere in his V.W., he hardly counts as a presence—at least not today, when I have seen him only at lunch and breakfast. The Abbey is now, as it has been, in effect, on each of the last few nights, virtually soundless and lighted only in my bedroom and one or two fire corridors, an incongruous place for a toast.
     The prospect of my solitary raising of a glass, of anyone's doing so in such circumstances has its obvious poignancy, or, better, pathos. I feel like Tiny Tim, poor, crippled and made embarrassingly happy by a modest alleviation of his misery. (I suppress a foolish half-urge at these moments, to say with a reedy piping, "God bless us everyone.") Bathetic or not, the incongruity of my pitifully celebratory gesture is, as I have said, obvious, and so is the temporary effect of that incongruity upon my disposition.
     What seems to me less easy to explain is my reason for persisting in this sentimental ritual. I lift the glass in a scenario appropriate to a Dion Boucicault drama—which should make me squint tightly, pucker my lips, and shake my head in disbelief—and a wave of sadness rolls over me. I observe myself doing it while I am doing it and while one part of me wallows in the Emmeline Grangerford invocation of grief, another whistles softly in derision.
     Why have I repeated it for three or four nights? Masochism? Counter phobic fear? Or a brave, off handed, ironic statement by someone sore beset by loneliness? I don't know. I am as puzzled by it as I am by my response to the possibility that this place is haunted. I do not believe in ghosts. I look askance at anyone who does. Nevertheless, I think I have gone out of my way to invite reports from believers since I've been here.
     I broached the subject to John Mainbarrow, who, carefully encouraged and properly assured of a sympathetic hearing, gave me, in roughly the words I attribute to him here, the following report of his own experience, about which he remains, or pretends to remain, skeptical:
     "I've had two encounters here that I can't explain. One of them involved an electric kettle that worked perfectly before and after it acted so strangely just the one time I have in mind. I was in a room with a tutor and one of us turned the kettle on. Almost immediately, we noticed that the kettle was off, and still less than lukewarm. One of us turned it on a second time. Again, a few moments later, we realized that it clicked off without even beginning to warm the water. The same thing happened a third time.
     "The other took place one night, when I was sleeping in the Queen's Room. Although I have always been a quiet sleeper—no tossing, turning, or flailing about—I wakened in the middle of the night on the floor beside the bed with the pillow and bedcovers all on the other side."
     John's reluctant suspicion that something may be going on here is seconded unreservedly by Ronald Ward. Discussing the Abbey's reputation as a retreat of specters, he told John and me at lunch yesterday that on Sunday night when he and I were the only overnight guests (I thought at that time that I was the sole occupant) he heard someone walking whenever he wakened during the small hours—and it wasn't I. (I decided not to mention Mrs. C's having told me that one of the cleaning ladies refuses to enter my room because she is convinced that it has some sort of spectral intruder in it.)
     Reflecting upon these testimonies with the required amount of sympathetic attention while making one's way through some dark, creaking stretch of the old building can produce a momentary chill upon the upper sides of the arms or the back of the neck. The cool prickling sensation can be especially noticeable when, as happened to me this evening, the reflections are accompanied by the sound of an owl's moan like cries and the passing of a draft, slow moving but chill, across one's cheeks and forehead. I have concluded that some impulse in me is moving me to use both the melancholia of the toast and the spookiness of the ghost-hunting as a means of dramatizing my existence at a time when I feel cut off, depressed, insignificant.
     My determination to find artificial proofs of my worth has been reinforced by my unsuccessful attempts to cope with a series of peculiarly British frustrations and small humiliations visited upon me in the last day or so. Trying to get back the gloves I lost on the Sunday train has been one of them. I reported my loss at once to appropriate BR officers in both Reading and Banbury. Both of them offered me much encouragement and much evidence of their extraordinary reliability by the way they received me and dealt with me.
     The Banbury Station Supervisor's conduct was incomparably impressive. Tearing a strip of paper from a discarded tablet pad, he took down my name, the date, my address, the time and destination of the train, and a full description of the gloves. He entered the date in his makeshift ledger with great care and the utmost deliberation, pausing to read each datum aloud after he'd entered it and ceremonially touching the point of his pencil to his tongue tip before proceeding to the next. "I should think you'll be hearing from me in the morning," he said with a reassuring wink and nod as we completed our interview. Five days later, I have heard nothing, even though I have twice called, once giving to someone else in the station the same set of particulars I had supplied to the Station Supervisor. His transcription, apparently, has been seen by no one, including him, since he created it.
     Closer to home, and less forgivable, I think, are the malicious crotchets of the lock on my bedroom door, the washing machine in the laundry room and the typewriter in the library. The eccentricities of the aging equipment and furnishings in the Abbey I not only accept but take pleasure in. Thus I smile conspiratorially at the armoire in my bedroom each time I fiddle for as much as thirty or forty seconds with its lock, creatively capable of a dozen or so varied combinations of jammings, slippings, and swift free spins and clicks of no effect whatsoever. (The apparently obvious solution—not locking it—is no solution at all. The doors, five feet high and well over two feet wide, hang open and sway and creak.)
     I have a similar fondness for some of the perverse old structural features of the house. Two of my favorites are the ceilings just inside the doorways to, respectively, the twisting staircase from the "cloisters" and Room 30 on the 4th floor. Both of them curve down acutely just past the lintel, forcing all who come through the doorway to stoop swiftly or tilt to the left if they would avoid driving their skulls into the stony concavity that seems to rush down toward them. I also rather like the Stockhausen kinds of chords and fugal runs orchestrated by the supply lines and drains of the plumbing. Violin scrapings, flute like bleeps, and oboe obbligatos are only a few of their symphonically rich and varied sounds .
     The inefficient antiques of the building are beginning to seem full of charm to me. Sticking doors, grooved and hollowed stair treads sometimes slightly perilous underfoot, and creaking floorboards twelve inches or more wide with spaces between them big enough to lose a ballpoint pen in are all reminders of a long, long past. Some of the Abbey's nooks and crannies, like the small raised chamber concealed behind a hatch in the wall at the end of the third-floor corridor, bring one daily face to face with history. If the legends concerning it are to be believed, it is a "priest's hidey hole," sanctuary for a Roman curate during the angry Protestant days following Cromwell's protectorate.
     With his characteristic flair for animating the most lifeless of subjects, Dean Haberly once told me that the Abbey wall along Church Lane is another memento of this old, old building's historical importance. The pocks and pits, the Dean said—not altogether reliably, someone else later cautioned me—may be the result of gunfire exchanged in this very area during the Civil War, the forces of the two rivals in the rebellion being led, respectively, by the Abbey's Lord North and Lord Saye and Sele of Broughton Castle in the neighboring village.
     For other reasons, too, the eccentricities and oddities, the quirks and conundrums of the place have begun to appeal to me more and more. Balky toilets, drafts beneath doors and around windows, dribbling and intermittent shower heads, telephones that thwart attempts to communicate, deliveries that do not arrive, frequently maddening insistence upon punctilios rigidified by nothing but accidental custom—the whole range of "user-unfriendly" Wroxton and British facilities and circumstances, have begun to command my respect as builders of character. (“That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”) The obstacles and impediments one encounters during a typical day over here are probably the kind of thing that Sir Basil Blackwell had in mind when he explained his longevity, in the quotation attributed to him in the Times printing of his obituary, as the result of his "having lived constantly in a state of mild irritation" throughout his ninety years. It's all part, I suspect, of a tacitly affirmed British system of spiritual enrichment.
     It takes me back, too, with a peculiarly pleasing, but chastening, nostalgia from this place and time so far removed from it, to my childhood, when Americans were less willing than now to sacrifice almost anything and everything for convenience.
     I'm thinking, for one thing, of the Model T's still around when my father was buying second-hand cars for $50 or $60. Almost everyone driving for any distance at all made sure that he—the pronoun was not sexist for that time—had a full set of tools for on-the-spot repairs (and as a tangible reminder of one's responsibility for vigilant maintenance). Almost everyone was sure, too, to remember spare tires (usually more than one). They were more essential then than gasoline credit cards now.
     There were, furthermore, built-in, engineered difficulties that regularly tested the resourcefulness of the driver. One of them was the positioning of the gas tank: under the driver's seat and below the carburetor. The design often meant that going up a steep hill was impossible unless the driver turned around and backed up, assisting gravity to get the fuel from the tank to the carburetor. Another was the carefully concealed oil and gas gauges that kept drivers edgily in doubt about the level of the vital fluids. (The oil gauge, as I recall, was simply two capped holes somewhere on the side of the engine block. If one got one's finger wet through the opened top hole, the oil was plentiful. If one's finger came out of the bottom test hole dry, he was probably already in serious trouble.)
     Also in those late twenties and early thirties, I can remember, several of Dad's deeds testified to his commitment to a dependence upon self-reliance coming close, in some of its manifestations, to a willed immersion in suffering. He made a point of raising his own chickens and turkeys and beheading one of them on a backyard stump late on a Saturday or Wednesday afternoon for a Sunday or Thanksgiving dinner the next day. He banked the coal furnace each winter night and every few days lugged out heavy containers of ashes with which he filled muddy potholes in the dirt driveway leading to a detached garage. He stuffed his almost sole-less shoes with newspapers before going out on his rainy-night rounds as a milkman.
     When I was four or five, I watched him one afternoon as he fashioned from a wire coat hanger and cloth some cumbersome and dreadful—and as I now suspect, useless and perhaps damaging—prosthetic device to relieve the discomfort of a rupture he suffered. (Self-treatment for ailments was common in the family. Someone told me that Aunt Ella, Dad's oldest sister, once relieved herself of the severe pain of a decaying tooth by heating a table-knife blade in the flame of the wood stove and touching the hot point of the knife to the exposed nerve, "killing it and the hurt with it", she later said.)
     One December morning, Pood, the unruly gelding who cantankerously pulled the wagon assigned to Dad by the dairy for which he worked for several years, slammed his hoof down on Dad's instep, breaking it. For something like five weeks, therefore, Dad served his route on a shattered foot, hauling himself up onto the seat by both hands and jumping gingerly down at the next stop. For the five or six nights right after his injury, I had the exciting chance to begin riding the milk-route with him at 2:00 a.m. and help with the deliveries. On each trip, a quart bottle in each hand, I dashed dozens and dozens of times from wagon to porch steps, full of self-importance. Not many eight- or nine-year olds, I smugly told myself, were up and about like me running throughout the night. In the blackness relieved only by the faint amber glow of widely separated street lights, I ran also with more than a little dread, down the strange, dark ways, hearing Pood's distant hoofbeats making lonely noises on the blacktop.
     But on one Christmas Eve, just before midnight, as we stood waiting for the bus that would take us from our home in Wenonah to the dairy in Merchantville, I looked up at the few strings of decorative lights left burning late at a nearby house and saw the colors explode and quiver. My head spun, and I fell, and Dad had to carry me back to Aunt Het's, where I spent the next month quarantined with scarlet fever. Dad was alone again on the wagon.
     Remembrances of this sort make me attach special meaning to the term "depression" that played, economically and psychologically, so large a part in Dad's existence as a dark and life-threatening force to be fought against constantly, and mostly in solitude and silence. (It was, at last, to kill him, for he died from the shock therapy prescribed as a cure for his descent into an unrelieved and spirit-numbing sadness of a clinical type.) They also make me feel cheap and small whenever I begin to congratulate myself for coping with whatever obstacles I face over here.
     I think I've almost talked—written—myself into looking forward to vexation, problems: "If I'm lucky, there may be real trouble ahead, and we'll have a chance to show them we've got some sand in our craw."
     On second thought, I think I'll wet my whistle with another "gin and..."