Barbara

It’s June. Barbara Epstein passed away on June 16th, seven years now. June: the month to lose poetry. If you knew her, you will remember what her laughter sounded like, now that you have a visual. First there’d be the intake of breath, then one short burst of merriment out, followed by an escalating sound that might never stop–a girlish sound, promising more merriment, but never negative, because it was her job to protect people from their worst self and best self. When I was moving to Berlin for a time, she hugged me around the neck and said, by way of a send off (dinner preceded this): “Honey, I want you to find love over there. We talk about it all the time.” The “we” she was referring to were her friends, her family, the world: she only shut you out if you were stupid or mean enough to use other people, not honor the family, betray confidences, allow yourself to be defined by envy. She loved “Gore,” and she loved you and you–to her, everyone was a star, and it was her privilege as an editor, a mother, a friend, to shine her people up, make them shinier to themselves. She adored her grand children, and the poets she had known as a young scholarship student at Radcliffe where one poet likened her striking style of dress in those pre-Eisenhower years, to something out of “Annie Hall”–distinct, American, and original. She was all of those things. She was amused by the romance of fame–in others. Once, I asked her what a famous friend of hers was “really,” like and she said: “Well, she’s a masochist, which is ALWAYS adorable.” Having dinner at her place was one of the occasions you looked forward to, because it was fun to talk baby talk to her–one felt like a sexy baby in her presence–because she wasn’t formidable to herself, just herself, and it was that self that would take care of you, even if you didn’t know that’s what you were asking for when you saw her. Does New York even produce girls like this anymore? Once, we went to a party at the Pierre together. We got off the elevator, and walked down a long pink hall. Eerie feelings about a mother. I opened the door to what I took to be our host’s apartment, but it was the kitchen. Arching her eyebrow, Barbara said: “Purely instinctual.” And we laughed. She had the best kind of humor because it was never a put down; why would she do that, when the world put everyone she cared about down enough? I never heard her say an unkind word about anyone. She could feel angry, yes, but what was the point of malice? I miss her all the time and if things were reversed she would miss me all the time. Over the years, the personnel in her apartment building changed. First there were black elevator men, etc., then everyone was Russian. Arriving at her apartment one night, I pointed that out. She said: “Honey, the blacks are out. Come on in!” Another time we were discussing the critic Anataole Broyard, and the recent disclosure that he was black. She said: “Honey, we always knew he was black. He was too good looking! With that shaved head….” She said: “Honey, you lose so many things in life, you can’t worry about it.” She said, when some personal matters got out of hand: “Honey, you have to work.” And then she went silent when I said I couldn’t leave X situation, or Y person; her silence when your self-destruction was greater than her wish was deafening. She believed in me, and I believed in her, and it has taken me years to act as fully as possible on her belief in me. In our last e-mail exchange, I told her she had to conserve her strength so she could get well, and she wrote: “I know. But I miss you. B”