Composing a Further Life

to her when she first knew she was going to die; she had heart failure, she had diabetes, and she had incredibly high blood pressure, she knew what the outcome was likely to be and she was still spirited. Then she had that first amputation, that really took the heart out of her, according to the kids. Then when she had the other leg taken off, she stopped being the strong and powerful figure they were accustomed to, and they were surprised to find that their mother was a human being, too.”
    Dick’s second wife, Ann, had been a schoolteacher. This marriage lasted only about a year and a half, with no children. “You know, I didn’t really want to marry Barbara Ann, I tried to call it off and didn’t have the guts,” Dick explained. “And then with Ann, I really knew from an early point this wasn’t a good idea but was so infatuated, I went forward with it. I was just incredibly mad about her, and she did not love me. And within six months of being married to her, I stopped loving her, and had we stayed together, one of us would have killed the other. It was an ugly, poisonous relationship. We were unfaithful to each other, me very early in the relationship, she later on. She was an alcoholic, and I probably would have become one had I stayed with her.… I couldn’t bring home checks fast enough. I had signed a book contract with Harper and Row, a very nice advance for the book on race, and it was almost gone before we got it. Like that.” Dick resigned from Yale, pulled out of the marriage, and took a job at the University of Maryland.
    Barbara Osborne and Dick met in Maryland. “She came and joined my laboratory,” he told me, “and that was my salvation, to be with somebody who had the same core intellectual values and somebody who had a great deal of common sense as well. I mean, you know, she doesn’t want to go out and buy something just to show it off. And we love each other.”
    Barbara is a white woman from Pennsylvania, fourteen years younger than Dick. Unlike him, she had been involved in the idealism of the sixties and had campaigned for Eugene McCarthy. With no children of her own, Barbara has made a sustained effort to engage with Dick’s children, and one or another came to live with them at different periods. More recently, Dick’s grandson Charles has spent time with them in the summer while his mother, Marilyn, who is in the military, has been away for training. It took time for Dick to work out his new role as a grandfather both with his daughter and with Charles. In the beginning, Charles got along better with Barbara than with him.
    “In the early days,” Dick said, “the way I thought I could do it was by making decisions about what our grandson would do and then announcing to his mother what was going to happen. To some extent this was because quite often we would be sending a check. That really didn’t work very well.”
    “What a surprise,” Barbara commented.
    “Marilyn has a very strong will; we don’t know the situation as well as she does, and so forth. What’s worked much better is just to respond to some request. And even,” he said wryly, “actually talking, discussing with her what she thinks ought to happen, has turned out to be a novel and useful approach.”
    Barbara nodded. “Charles called me Grandma until he was about eleven or so, and then he started calling me Barbara, which is fine. He really bonded with me in the beginning. He called Dick ‘the napkin king’ because Dick was always telling him to use his napkin and then giving him orders on how he should behave at the dining room table and how he should cut his food. He was afraid of Dick.”
    I laughed. “This guy has really mellowed.”
    “I know he has.” Barbara laughed. “Exactly. But not totally. At first he was pretty directive about the way the child should behave—he’s five years old, for godsakes. And secondly, for his whole conscious existence, Charles had been with a mom and no dad around, and at that point Marilyn was dating guys, and he didn’t like her dating. So men were competition for him. He used to call Dick ‘that man who claims he is my grandfather,’ all this stuff.… There was tension between the two of them, and Dick was, you know, ‘the kid can’t like me, why do I have him living here with me? This isn’t working.’ As Charles has gotten older, he still cares about me and we are buddies, but he would much rather do things with Granddad, because they want