Free About Alice by Calvin Trillin Page A

looked at her boyfriend and thought, “But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?”
    The letter that made me laugh was from Roger Wilkins. By the time of Alice’s death, Roger occupied a chair of history and American culture at George Mason University, but in the seventies he had been on the editorial board of
The New York Times.
In that period, I’d sometimes join the regular lunches he had with the late Richard Harris—a remarkable investigative reporter for
The New Yorker
who had the aggressively unsentimental worldview often found among people in his line of work. Alice and Roger became acquainted when she accompanied me to a conference I was covering in New Orleans. In off hours, when we’d gather around the hotel swimming pool, she and Roger sometimes had long, serious conversations. It wasn’t unusual for me to find Alice having long, serious conversations with people I’d been bantering with for years. She got engaged with people’s lives. If she said to a friend’s son or daughter, “How’s school?” she wasn’t just being polite; she wanted details, and she wasn’t shy about offering advice. If people we were visiting mentioned that they’d been thinking about renovating their house, Alice was right on the case, room by room. In such architectural conversations, she could get bossy, and sometimes I felt obliged to warn our hosts that one of her characteristic gestures—the gesture she used when she was saying something like “You have to open all of this up”—was remarkably similar to the gesture you’d use to toss money into the wind.
    She wasn’t among those whose response to tragedy or loss was limited to offering the conventional expressions of sympathy before moving on with their own lives. In 1988, an old friend phoned us to say that his grown daughter, a young woman we’d known since she was a child, had been raped by an intruder. This was a dozen years after Alice had been operated on for lung cancer, and among the things that she wrote to our friend’s daughter was that having lung cancer and being raped were comparable only in that both were what she called “realizations of our worst nightmares.” She said that there was some relief at surviving what you might have thought was not survivable. “No one would ever choose to have cancer or to be raped,” she wrote. “But you don’t get to choose, and it is possible at least to understand what Ernest Becker meant when he said something like ‘To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything,’ or to begin to understand the line in ‘King Lear’—‘Ripeness is all.’ You might have chosen to become ripe less dramatically or dangerously, but you can still savor ripeness.” Alice had a large envelope in which she kept copies of letters like that—along with copies of some letters she had sent the girls and copies of poems we had written for her on birthdays and documents like the announcement of a prize for community service that Abigail, our older daughter, had been awarded at Yale and an astonishing letter of recommendation that a professor had provided for Sarah, our younger daughter, when she applied for her first job after getting her M.S.W. On the envelope was written “Important Stuff.”
    In his condolence letter, Roger talked partly about that engaged quality in Alice, but he also got around to her appearance. “She was nice and she was concerned and she was smart and when she talked to you, she was thinking about you, and, also, she was so very pretty,” he wrote in September of 2001, a few days after Alice died. “I always thought of you as a wonderful guy, but still I couldn’t figure out how you managed to get Alice. Harris once told me it was just dumb luck.” When I read that, I burst out laughing. Harris had nailed it