Composing a Further Life

my best friends at Exeter was a guy by the name of Andrew Norman. His mother was Dorothy Norman, the mistress of the great photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who was married to Georgia O’Keeffe. Dorothy ran what was really a salon in New York and also had a weekly column in the
Post
. She had built the first modern town house in New York—International Style, [William] Lescaze was the architect. That house on Seventieth Street was incredible. Artwork all over the house. And she took me under her wing. ‘I’m your godmother,’ she said, and she would call up to Harvard and say, ‘Come for supper, when can you get down?’ and I’d say ‘Sure.’
    “The Normans had a big place in Woods Hole, so at the end of my freshman year, Andy said, ‘Why don’t you come up when you’re finished with Houston and we’ll go sailing?’ ” Jim was traveling with a couple of friends who were both painters, and the three of them stayed at Woods Hole and met other artists, as well as writers and political activists. Jim fumbled briefly for the name of Gyorgy Kepes, whose paintings explored natural forms and ecology, and found it by looking down at the bookshelf where books by and about Kepes were lined up, which gave me the link from Jim’s interest in art to his later interest in ecology and the environment. “So Dorothy and my friends and I drove up from Woods Hole to Wellfleet and spent the day at the Kepes house,” he continued.
    “Dorothy and I became very close friends. This was my first time seeing the Cape, and I’ll never forget her taking me around. I remember she stopped the car between Woods Hole and Sandwich, and along the highway there were tables selling seashells. She said, ‘This is one of my favorite things, let’s just see if they have any good shells.’ What became so fascinating was her artist’s eye making distinctions. Through her, I became an absolute connoisseur of rocks and seashells, as you can see.” Jim pointed to bowls and baskets of shells along the window ledge. The room we were sitting in, like any room in which Jim spends time, was full of beautiful objects of art and nature, collected over the years, each one with a story.
    “I buried Dorothy,” he went on, “and I buried Andy. I introduced Andy to his wife, who’d been my girlfriend, and we buried her. It was a very close relationship.” Talking with older adults about their lives inevitably involves memories of friends and family members who have died, an inexorable rhythm of loss, but Jim seems to have felt greatly privileged in officiating at the funerals of people he has known and loved, often people he married and whose children he baptized. All of the transitions of the life cycle are evoked, and for me at least there is the suggestion of ongoing development, for the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer expands on the words of Psalm 84, shifting the emphasis from peace and bliss to continuing learning and growth, asking that the deceased, “increasing in knowledge and love of thee, may go from strength to strength in the life of perfect service.”
    “Well, now we’ve done the Houston business and the Dorothy Norman business, we’re sort of in a good position,” Jim went on. “We’re in my junior year, and I was involved … I went back to church. I’d started doing that in Houston, and I never stopped. So all of my sophomore year I was at Christ Church in Cambridge and, you know, full circle.
    “Then in my junior year, I went and heard Paul Moore speak at the Canterbury Club [the Harvard Episcopal students program] about his work in Jersey City. He absolutely devastated me. Poverty was the essence of Jersey City at that time, like the South Bronx ten years ago. It was really a desperate place, having done a complete flip in population. During the war, it became a terminal for the very poorest of the poor sharecroppers from the South who just engulfed it.
    “Paul went back in that talk to having been shot through the heart and given up for dead at Guadalcanal. He didn’t die, and the fact that he lived, he said, made him think about his life and that maybe God had something for him to do, and …” Jim gestured that he was skipping a long story. “So he’d go into seminary when he got out of the Marines. At that time it was the beginning of the worker priests in France and a big fascination with poverty at a deep level, Dorothy Day and so on, and also the beginnings of the civil rights