Читать книгу A Widow’s Story: A Memoir - Joyce Carol Oates - Страница 17
ОглавлениеFebruary 16, 2008.
To Richard Ford
Ray is definitely feeling better but I am not going to tempt fate by going on too long optimistically. Thanks, Richard, for your moral support. It is greatly appreciated . . . Maybe you could (come down from Maine) and drive all the Princeton afflicted around. That could be your “new phase.” Biographers would be thrilled. How much easier than writing . . .
Much love to both,
Joyce
(Richard Ford, hearing that Ray was hospitalized, very gallantly offered to fly down to Princeton and “drive me around”—an offer of such generosity, I was deeply moved even as common sense advised me to decline.)
February 17, 2008, 4:08 A.M.
To Emily Mann
Ray is said to be improving—and I think that this is so—but he has such a long way to go & is so weak & prone to fevers, I’m dreading the future; somehow I don’t think that he will ever be “well” again—this experience has been so ravishing. And in any case I have to see it as a presentiment of what lies ahead, unavoidably. I can’t sleep for thinking of all that there is to do, that I doubt I can do . . .
However, you did get through a worse and more protracted experience so I suppose that I will, too. Night thoughts are not productive but—how to avoid them?
I put together a little packet of snapshots to bring to Ray, to cheer him up, and came across the most beautiful photo of you and Gary, taken some years ago by Ray at one of our parties. . . . I’m sure that I’d given you a copy at the time.
Much love,
Joyce
(Emily Mann’s husband, Gary Mailman, stricken by a virulent infection following a medical procedure by a physician associated with the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, was hospitalized for ten days at about the time Ray was in the Princeton Medical Center—Emily’s and my hospital vigils overlapped by a few days. Gary nearly died and recovered slowly afterward at home, over a period of several months. But he did recover.)
