Coming into the End Zone by Doris Grumbach

spring of 1987 when my reliable informant (on death matters), the New York Times , published a short, laconic obituary. Teacher, scholar, an expatriate who became a Polish citizen after World War II, she had died in a nursing home in Warsaw, survived by her sister, a niece, and a nephew. Nothing more. Nothing about her learned accomplishments, nothing of her successfully communicated enthusiasms for the world’s great if little-known literature, so that egocentric, self-satisfied students (as I had been) were brought out of themselves into the dark yet illuminating religious fervor of the Middle Ages.
    Had I been the obituary writer I would have added something about her curiously profound understanding of a time so steeped in God that men died and murdered for Him (as the Mayans were doing a hemisphere away), curious because it came from an atheist, a convinced Marxist. In our time the religious spirit that suffused every aspect of human life is long gone. Now we tend to secularize Him, ‘to see Him only in our neighbor,’ Thomas Merton wrote. Prayer has become horizontal, not transcendent, not ‘fiery prayer’ as the Fathers of the Egyptian desert practiced it.
    Maggie was a fiery scholar, a defender of an age whose profound faith she did not share. But she understood it, because her passion for Communism (‘no matter how undogmatic’) resembled it. I picture her spending eternity not in a plebeian downtown campus but at some ethereal Heights, teaching with the great prophets and sages. Had she lived until today she would have been eighty-eight. I miss her.
    My daughter Elizabeth lives on Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina. She sends me a clipping from the local paper about a significant event occurring in Myrtle Beach. A bill is being sponsored by Representative Tom Keegan ‘to ban dwarf-tossing’ in that state. He thinks the activity ‘not only degrading but dehumanizing.’
    What is dwarf-tossing? Just what it says. A nightclub audience has been entertained by the spectacle of David Wilson, a midget, being thrown into the air. The newspaper does not say if it was a contest to see who could throw Wilson highest or farthest or hardest or most often. Or whether there were other small persons tossed at the same time. Wilson wore a protective leather harness and a neck brace and landed on air mattresses. Nonetheless, a few days later, he died in Gainesville of what was said to be alcohol poisoning.
    This did not end the entertainment. The club held another dwarf-tossing. Informed of the bill before the state legislature to stop ‘the fad,’ as the manager called it, the manager disagreed with Keegan’s view that the contest was dehumanizing. ‘Why would a dwarf be doing it if it was?’ he demanded of Keegan.
    Why, indeed, I wonder. For notice? For money? Because there are not too many employment opportunities for midgets? Because cruelty to defenseless ‘freaks’ and animals, small children, and women is common in this society. A misdemeanor charge, with a two-hundred-dollar fine for thirty days in jail, will not cure the common human need to be cruel to anyone who is weak, obscure, and small.
    Each year at the end of September I spend a morning gathering up my files and correspondence so they can be transferred to the University of Virginia Library, where my ‘papers,’ as they call them somewhat ostentatiously, reside. Today I find, under the files waiting to be transported, three letters that must have escaped my last donation to the library.
    The first is from May Brodbeck, chancellor of the University of Iowa when I taught at the Writers Workshop there. She wrote to me in Washington from Iowa City (September 20, 1980):
    â€˜I spend the exhausted evenings—when I can—either at concerts (the Cleveland Orchestra tonight!) or reading: New York Jew , which I loved, of course, an old Sarton, and de Beauvoir’s All Said and Done .