It was 1977, the year before Watergate, a laughable offence compared to what is going on now in Washington. The cold war was in full swing. My grandmother was dying from an ovarian cancer metastasis. She and my grandfather had come up to the island where my parents had their summer house on Vinalhaven. My mother told me that on their last walk together round Lanes' Island, my grandmother had said, "well Patty, I suppose you'll always be spending time in a place like this." She was trying to imagine what she would not live to see. It was the year in which I was conceived. But of this, she knew nothing at the time. It was not long after my parents' marriage, eleven months, to be exact, that the great event took place. When my grandmother learned of the pregnancy in the fall, she told my mother, why don't you abort it. My father also expressed an interest in my mother's terminating the pregnancy. But this she would not do. She was going to have me no matter what.
Today is my parents' anniversary. They married in '77 on May 1st. I was conceived on the island of Vinalhaven, fifteen miles off the coast of Maine. They were playing tennis with Willard Baldwin, and his dad, in his parents' country house, near Stonington, Dear Isle, when my mother realised that she was pregnant. It was a hot summer's day. But the game had gone well. Willard Baldwin, who had gone to Milton Academy where my dad was teaching the year I was born, had a daughter who later married the poet, Mark Strand. It had been a wonderful weekend. But they never saw Baldwin again. At the end of it, they waved goodbye to Willard Baldwin's mother, a charming woman, who died the following week, and his dad some time later that year... Soon after, Willard gave up his life in Baltimore and went off sailing in the Bahamas. And my parents sadly never saw Willard again. At the end of that summer, when the family was again at home on Lake Avenue in Newton, by Christal Lake, my parents informed the children of their first marriages, Eric and Jessica Goodheart whose father was Eugene Goodheart, a professor of English and Comparative literature at BU and later at Brandeis, and Davie Van Vactor, whose mother, Anita Bullard, later married Frank Kermode of University College London and Cambridge University, England, were informed of the pregnancy, they were not the only ones who were shocked, that, old as they were, thirty-seven and thirty-eight respectively, they were soon to become my parents. And yet, my grandmother's happiest moments, my mother told me, were when she could hold me in her arms. She realised then that she had been wrong in suggesting that my mother end the pregnancy. My father loved me no less. And rejoiced in my birth though he had questioned the sense of it. I was nine months old when my grandmother died. A first novel by my mother, Pat Goodheart, was published a year later. It was completed on the dining room table while my father picked up the slack, cooking, doing laundry, helping to look after me. And during my infancy, when my mother was looking after her mother, I was always with her. Such were my beginnings.
