The pic — taken by another old friend, Laurie Peek — makes Tish look rather stern, and she did have that side, though she was a mirthful girl too.
I meant to fictionalize this, but then decided the real story was better than anything I could make up. So here we go:
My old friend – and once, too-briefly, girlfriend – Tish, is sick. Very sick. Pancreatic cancer, accidentally discovered in the course of an appendectomy. I do wish the docs were more on top of things, but maybe that’s expecting too much; not an exact science, after all. And we all die of something.
So of course I drop everything and get on an airplane from Maine back to New York, and go to see her at Sloane-Kettering. I’m kind of a self-centered person, but there are things you just have to do.
Perhaps I should back up a little bit. During my brief romance with Tish, I was catastrophically, disastrously, apocalyptically in love with her – and if you had known her, you’d understand why. But then, although I was the designated boyfriend, I returned from a Thanksgiving visit to my California fam to find her impulsively married to some Italian guy. That’s the kinda chick she was.
O the hills Homerically echoed my complaints, and all my other friends got very tired of hearing about my sorrows. And then, long story short, I got over it, and Tish & I remained friends.
Although I did have a phase when I couldn’t take a shower without imagining that the phone was ringing, and it was Tish – “I’ve made a terrible mistake!” I can’t tell you how many times I emerged naked and dripping-wet from the shower, and dragged my damp trail over to the phone – we had land-lines in those days, kids – only to find that it wasn’t ringing, and hadn’t rung. The white noise of a shower might include a ringing phone, after all – it’s a modest, narrowband signal – and there were a few months there when I never had an un-interrupted shower.
But then I stopped being crazy, and found another girlfriend, and Tish and I were pals again.
She was a great pal, and a very quirky, incommensurable personality. She had a magpie’s eye for the odd unusual object and her little apartment, on 106th Street and West End Avenue, was an Aladdin’s cave of interesting things.
She never lost a prominent place in my imagination, though I subsequently had splendid wives and beloved children; but Tish always had a niche of her own in the secret pantheon.
So here I am, on an airplane – and I hate airplanes, and airports – going to see Tish. You can easily fill in all the botheration – take off your shoes, etc. But finally there I am, at her East Side bedside, and of course, as always with old friends, we just pick up where we left off. Oh, so-and-and-so – have you heard anything? And his sister? -- Well, ahem, we’ve been in touch. This gets a laugh, a big hearty laugh, like Tish always had. “You’re hopeless. Incorrigible.”
So we spend a half-hour or so trading anecdotes about all the old gang, and then the door swoops open and a fine young fella sweeps in, wearing a Dominican habit. He’s the chaplain. Now there’s nobody less Catholic than Tish – though as a hardened Episcopalian, I’m more adjacent than she is. But it must be said that Father D is young and handsome and wears his habit well, and Tish has never been oblivious to that sort of thing.
Father D is gratified that I recognize the habit, and I even know the Latin for his order. But he quickly susses out, as Catholics always do, that I’m not one of the tribe.
Badinage ensues. Fr D: We think you Anglicans are *almost* OK.
Me: We think the same about you.
Me: You know Bentley Hart has this theory of universal salvation?
Fr D: Of course. You better bet that’s true.
It’s good-natured, not hostile at all; I think we both recognize that the really important stuff needs respect, but it shouldn’t lead to antagonism, and let’s face it, he & I have a lot in common. That is, we take this stuff seriously. Though he wears the uniform, which gives him an immense moral advantage. And sometimes, the serious stuff is the stuff you need to handle most lightly. And Dominicans are well-read — he gives me a run for my money on Aristotle.
Tish is vastly amused by this boy-ish backing-and-forthing. Like a spectator at a tennis match: eyes left, eyes right. She has her own questions to ask, and comments to make, though, and Fr D and I both just shut the fuck up and listen, when she chimes in.
Father D spends about an hour with us. That seems like serious pastoral care to me, and I was grateful for it.
Tish departed this bourne a couple of days ago; a vast loss to me but I daresay a relief to her – those last weeks weren’t great. Though old colleagues and former students gathered round about – “I didn’t know these people even liked me”, Tish said. Another friend said her apartment was like Grand Central Terminal.
One of the Old Irreplaceables. Sit tibi terra levis, Tish.