These Small Blessings

Pip – August, 2019

As I move slowly and somewhat reluctantly toward writing—or rather re-writing—my next book, Will’s Things, I am heartened by the way an invisible power strews blessings in my way to overcome to some degree my hesitation.

First, the readers who have sent me comments on Little Brother, out now since the spring, thanks to Sarabande Books. To my surprise and delight, readers write that they have enjoyed my memoir, always my goal, but one I didn’t expect to achieve with my story of a life cut short. I’m hoping for the same reaction to Will’s Things. These stories are to me supremely interesting, and they shine a special light on tragedy.

One message this morning was from the youngest son of a Louisville family deeply involved with the Binghams long ago. I only knew the writer as a little boy lost in a mass of siblings with a mother who influenced me deeply when I watched her relentlessly waltzing with sweating men at summer home dance parties. She wrote several memoirs—I have all of them—making usually gentle fun of the housewife-mother role as it was ordained in the 1950’s, calling her husband “the roommate.” I thought both her dancing and the sobriquet she bestowed on her husband were very bold at a time when bold women faced enormous criticism and sometimes years of imprisonment in a mad house and/or the dreaded lobotomy.

So for this youngest son to commend, after so many decades, the story of my brother Jonathan, whom he knew, was enormously reassuring. I hope to hear someday how his dance-mad mother performed in her conventional role.

We’re in the midst of a heat wave here in Santa Fe, temperatures roving into the high eighties or nineties, and this is exhausting for everyone including me and my dog Pip. Being black is a liability in extreme heat and even the dog park could hardly rouse him from his lethargy.

Seeking relief, I dropped into the cafe/travel book store in my neighborhood for a cold drink and some companionship. And who should fall into my lap, so to speak, but a pretty young woman who is a poet and a writer of short stories, just starting out on that long road, full of hope and expectation. She’s working in the cafe and going to college and somehow managing to retain her faith in herself as a writer; she even pulled out a small black Moleskin notebook like the ones I’ve carried all my life. Making notes about publishers and books works much better on a page than on a screen.

At the same time, I met a young man who received a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation that paid for graduate school in a field connected to conservation—always one of Doris’ aims for her foundation, created through her will, and now with an endowment of more than a billion dollars.

Covid crushed my biography, The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke abetted by the apathy of my publisher, Farrar Straus & Giroux. But this beautiful book is out there, in hardcover and paperback editions, and will be found, little by little, over time; and this young man’s grant reinforces the sentences with which I ended my book:

“The evil that men do lives after them/The good is often interred with their bones.” These lines, spoken by Shakespeare’s Anthony at Caesar’s funeral, cannot be Doris Duke Duke’s epitaph. She was attacked in the press, pilloried because of her wealth and the size of her intentions. But the good—the enormous, the magnificent good, the fruit of her imagination, her gift for empathy, and her astonishing generosity—lives on.”

And that is another blessing.

In Writing gratitude Little Brother: A Memoir Will's Things Santa Fe