She's gone, but Alice is with him more than ever
Calvin Trillin's "About Alice," his short tribute to his wife, who died in 2001, is funny and hasn't a maudlin note. Heartache is mostly out of sight, and he doesn't play for sympathy. He doesn't even mention the date of her death, of cardiac arrest in a New York hospital: Sept. 11, 2001. She was 63. Still it's hard to read with indifference that for all their 36 years together Bud Trillin -- as he's known to friends -- never stopped trying to impress Alice, and that if he had ever felt that he had disappointed her "in some fundamental way," he would have been devastated.
Trillin, 71, was in Boston last week for interviews and book-signings. At the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, he sat talking by the window of his fourth-floor room, overlooking the wintry Public Garden. After more than five years, he gives no sign that talking about Alice, which he must do over and over on book tour, is hard. He has a deep voice, soft features, and eyes like blue lasers, and he chooses words with a writer's deliberateness. "I realized at some point," he said, "which made it possible for me to write it, that I wasn't going to write about the details of her death. I didn't want it to be about Alice's death or my grief. I wanted it to be about Alice."
The facts of their life together are unremarkable, on the surface. They met at a party in 1963, were married two years later, and had two daughters. They lived in New York. He wrote for The New Yorker, as well as books. She taught writing in various settings to different kinds of students -- including prisoners at Sing Sing prison. She supervised content for public television programs on education. Their kids came first in their lives. He showed her everything he wrote, because she was astute and honest. She recovered from lung cancer in 1975, but years later it became apparent that radiation therapy had grievously damaged her heart.
Alice was a character in many of Trillin's books ("Travels With Alice," "Alice, Let's Eat"). Mostly she appears as the droll and wise wife and mother, even a bit zany, tolerant of her clueless partner, and the reader grants the author a certain exaggeration. He calls it "sitcom writing." That too was a reason to tell this story -- "to flesh that out, and correct the record," he said, "to write about her in a more substantial way than just in her role as the sensible mom."
It's about her but also, of course, about him, and them. When he published a New Yorker article last year, of which the book is a slightly expanded version, he was surprised at some of the readers' reactions. "I didn't understand that I was writing about marriage," he said. "When people say to me that they sent the book to people who were going to get married, or when young women say, 'This is the way I want my husband to be,' I thought most people felt that way about their wives. That is why they are married. It seemed to me fairly simple."
Simple it might be, but uncommon enough for the Trillins' friends to admire it. "They moved in pretty sophisticated New York settings," recalls Roger Wilkins, a historian at George Mason University who was on The
An elder New Yorker writer once counseled Trillin against showing his work to Alice, since what any writer wants is unreserved praise of his brilliance. "An honest response, which is what he knew Alice would give, would strain the marriage," said Trillin. "I thought, yeah, that makes sense, and if I thought I could get along without it, I would. It wasn't only that she was good at it but that she had no ax to grind. She didn't care whether this was the sort of thing the magazine needed or whether it would please the editor above the first editor. She didn't have any agenda, except me."
He smiled at recollections of how attuned she was to his writerly self. "We would be out to dinner someplace or driving," he said, "and Alice would say, 'You're working on a sentence, aren't you?', and it was always true. She could tell from my expression that I was trying to figure out how to change something to make a transition right.
"About every two or three years," he said, "I made myself laugh while writing. When Alice heard that from the next room -- my office is right next to our bedroom -- when she read the piece, she always knew what the line was. It was always the silliest line. She said, 'I knew you would think that was funny,' but would say, 'Oh I guess you can leave it in.' I don't have that any more."
But he has his daughters, Abigail and Sarah, in their 30s, and their four children, to whom the book is dedicated. "I sometimes describe myself as a grandfather who writes on the side," he said. "They're increasingly the center of my life. I'm not sure where I would be without the girls -- I mean literally. Not even what country I'd be in. I dedicated a book to them, and wrote, 'A father who finds himself with two Cordelias can count his blessings.' "
He pretty much got back to work right away after Alice died. Five books, including a novel, have appeared. (There are 25 in all.) At first he could not write humor -- "It just seemed not something I was interested in doing, for a while" -- but that too resumed. He showed "About Alice" to his daughters, "in case there was anything in it that they didn't want to see in print."
He stays busy, helps with grandchildren, and has kept the Greenwich Village brownstone that he and Alice bought and renovated in the late 1960s, where they raised the girls. It's home, part of the cluster of things, beginning with Alice, that tied this writer's life together.
"People would say to me, when the girls were at home, 'Why don't you get an office somewhere?' " he said. "In the first place, it would be lonely there. When one of the girls would come in and say, 'Will you tie my dolly's apron?', I was always happy to see her. I would tie dolly's apron, then go back to work."
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com. 