Letters from Amherst. Samuel R. Delany

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      Chip Delany and Barbara Wise as Father Jack and Mother Jack in Eugène Ionesco’s Jack, or The Submission, upstairs in the changing area of Cynthia Belgrave’s CBA Theater, April 1988.

      I spent the six weeks from Christmas till the start of classes (Feb. 1st) down in New York with Iva. We had great fun.

      She’s happily ensconced at the Bronx High School of Science and doing well. All Christmas Eve I found myself wondering about and thinking of you. It seems on so many other Christmas Eves I’ve somehow been able to find the time to sit down and write you. And three weeks later, on Iva’s birthday, I found myself getting all ready to write you yet again, as I’ve done so many years now. But this year, for the first time, Iva decided she didn’t want to have a party. So, instead of the burst of cleaning in the morning, with the rest of the day free while the kids entertained each other, she and I spent the whole day together. And another letter didn’t get written—though she and I had a wonderful time.

      Toward the end of January, down from Canada and on her way to Montego Bay, Judith Merril stopped off to stay with Iva and me for three very nice days. It was quite wonderful to have a house guest. For one thing, if just for those three days, it got me into regular cooking—we had beef stew the night of Judy’s arrival, and I made real breakfasts in the morning. Indeed, on the evening of the second night, Judy said, “Chip, what is the fanciest thing you can do with breakfast eggs?”

      Working at the dining room table on the manuscript for the English edition of Motion of Light in Water, I looked up and frowned. “I don’t know. You can sheer them, I suppose. Then there’s eggs Florentine, poached over fresh spinach—that’s nice. And of course you can always fall back on Benedict. Why do you ask?”

      “Because tomorrow’s my birthday,” Judy said. “And I’m only going to be here for breakfast. And I’d like some birthday eggs.”

      “You shouldn’t have told him that!” Ending a telephone conversation in the corner, Iva laughed. She stood up from the maroon chair. “Now he’ll be off to Zabar’s for all sorts of stuff—and knowing how he cooks, he would have started this morning if you let him, so that there’d be things fresh baked for tomorrow!”

      “I know how he cooks, too,” Judy said. “That’s why I waited till ten o’clock at night to tell him. So he couldn’t take too much trouble. Really, eggs will do.”

      But of course I dashed out (without letting Judy know) and managed to sneak some champagne back into the house. And since Judy tends to sleep late (and Zabar’s opens at 8:00 in the morning), I was over getting smoked salmon and sable and watercress (and fresh hot bagels from H&H—Judy had been going on about how she so missed good New York deli food), with scarf wound round my nose, against the January chill.

      The eggs themselves were simply scrambled in a double boiler with butter, fresh chives, and a dash of Worcestershire. But the fish and bagel and champagne accoutrements were something.

      We sat down to the table at nine-thirty and “breakfasted” till noon.

      Iva was at her most mature and charming—finally to go off to a Saturday morning baby-sitting job towards eleven.

      Judy left from breakfast, an hour after Iva, to go meet Tom Disch for lunch.

      It was all quite fun.

      Now one of Judy’s reasons for coming down through New York was that her grandson, Kevin, at twenty-four, was expecting his first child. The last time I’d seen Kevin was well over a dozen years ago, when I’d visited his mother, Merril, in Milford PA, back when Kevin was a rambunctious moppet of eight. Judy had timed her trip through the city on the off chance it would take in the new baby’s birth and she might drop down to Philadelphia to see them. (“But it’s their first kid, and first children are always two weeks late. So I don’t really have much hope.”) Sure enough, however, twenty minutes after she’d left to meet Tom, there was a phone call from a very tired and precise sounding young man: “Is Judith Merril there …?”

      “I’m sorry,” I said. “She just left for lunch. You missed her by about twenty minutes.”

      “Well,” he said. “This is her grandson, Kevin. Could you please give her a message for me. Now be sure she gets it exactly: ‘Happy Birthday, Great Grandma!’”

      Well, of course I exploded with congratulations and good wishes (and the obligatory, “I know you don’t remember me, Kevin, but the last time I saw you was …”), then had a chat with Merril, his mom, who was there. And whom I hadn’t talked to for a decade. (The last time I actually saw her was when she came to New York and picked me up at the Heavenly Breakfast, to drive me down to Milford, and we had an interesting encounter with some high school drop-out toughs in a diner where we’d stopped for coffee. One came up to me in what was clearly an attempt to start trouble and asked: “Hey, fella. Who does your hair?”—as it was all over my head in a very long proto-Afro [also I wore an earring at the time, back then when everybody else didn’t], the part that wasn’t in a very bushy ponytail.

      (In perfect innocence I answered, ‘Oh, I do it myself,’ and went back to my coffee, while Merril—who was rather heavy and more familiar than I with the mores of the area—held her breath on the counter stool beside me, waiting for the first punch … which never flew. Because it never occurred to me that the guy with the denim jacket, pimply chin, open sweatshirt, and the tattoos showing over his t-shirt collar wasn’t perfectly serious. Back in the car Merril and I laughed about it for the rest of the trip down.) At any rate, Judy’s new (and first), great-grandchild was a girl, five-and-a-half pounds, named Kelly Nichole. Mother and daughter were both fine. (It’s quite astonishing to think of Merril, who’s only a couple of years older than I am, as a grandmother!) And when I got off the phone, I called Tom, who hadn’t left to meet Judy yet, and conveyed the message. “Now be sure to get it right,” I said. “‘Happy Birthday, Great Grandma!’”

      As pleased as I was, Tom assured me he would.

      That evening when she came in, Judy filled me in on the rest of the story. Tom had waited till she was seated at the restaurant table before he’d reached across, taken her hand, and given her the message. The waitress had just come up to take their order, and overheard it.

      So when desert time came, she brought two, both with candles, and the whole restaurant sang Happy Birthday. Twice. Telling me all this, Judy sat back on the couch, laughing. “It was really the most wonderful 67th birthday present anyone could possibly have!”

      Over a couple of gossip sessions Judy told me things about her life—and the SF world—that were just fascinating. In this tiny circle in which I’ve made my living for so many years, much of the gossip about Judy has the quality of legend already. And the first evening she was there, David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer came over—and David tried, not very subtly, to prompt her into writing an autobiography; an idea she likes, I think. If she does it, it will be quite wonderful for any of us sunk in the field’s mythology.

      She told us about her early affair with the legendary John Michel, a Futurean who never really wrote any SF but who was the acknowledged genius of the bunch, the mentor of Pohl and Kornbluth and Asimov as well as of Judy. (“My first half-dozen sales—mysteries СКАЧАТЬ