This is the fifth article in the “Tabula Rasa” series. Read Volumes One, Two, Three, and Four.
Bleb
“Bleb” is worth eight points in Scrabble. Thought you might like to know. I have known the word since Wednesday, June 11, 1958, when I learned it from a company physician at Time Incorporated, in Rockefeller Center. He said I should have been hospitalized four days ago, but there was nothing much to do about it now, go back to work.
I went back to work, writing two weekly sections of Time called Milestones and Miscellany. Each filled just one column on a three-column page, and writing them was the entry-level job of new young writers. Milestones were squibs about births, deaths, and marriages, bits of information culled from newspapers and the wire services. Miscellany was a stack of ten or eleven one-sentence news items to which I added puns as titles. Time the Weekly Newsmagazine, March 17, 1958:
My first wife and I lived then at 285 Avenue C, in Stuyvesant Town, on the Lower East Side. On June 7th, as I did routinely, I left the apartment soon after nine and headed for the subway and work. You might ask why I was going to work on a Saturday. Time’s writing week was Wednesday through Sunday, and our weekend was Monday-Tuesday. En route to the subway, I had not even reached Fourteenth Street when I suddenly felt very sharp pains in my chest. I tried to brush them off as anxiety. I had no shortage of that in general, and these were days of particular anticipation and concern. Our first child was due. Cursing my mental stress, not to say neurosis, I kept going, and got to work about an hour before a phone call summoned me home. The time had come for us to go to the hospital, which was across town and up near the George Washington Bridge.
For some weeks, I had taken birthing classes there, so that I could be in the delivery room until the final minutes, when I would be sent out by Mary Jane Gray, the obstetrician. That day got longer and longer, the baby uncoöperative (an unfair description of my beloved oldest daughter), and the chest pains persisted. Was this a hundred per cent anxiety or was it to some extent a heart attack? Already in my head was a first edition of the hypochondriac’s coronary almanac. Pericarditis? Aortic aneurysm? Angina? Myocardial infarction? One of my heroes was an Oxford don who, when stricken with a heart attack in the South of France, got into his car, drove seven hundred miles to a Channel ferry, got off at Dover, and went home. If he could do that, I could make it from the delivery room down the hospital stairs and across the street to stare at the Hudson River.
Across the street from the main entrance to Columbia-Presbyterian was Bard Hall, a dorm of sorts for medical students. I was familiar with it, friends having lived there. In Bard Hall, students had helped me concoct medical scenes for the hour-long plays I had written for live television. Out the back doors was a terrace overlooking the Hudson. The new day June 8th was not far beyond first light. I stood on the terrace watching the river while my daughter Laura was born.
Cartoon by Roz Chast
I expected the chest pains to disappear on cue but they did not, while I spent a couple of days—Time’s Monday-Tuesday weekend—shuttling back and forth in our old Mercury between the hospital and the Lower East Side. On Wednesday, after I returned to work, the pains were still present, so I went down to a lower floor where Time Inc. maintained a medical office. A doctor listened to my chest, called for an X-ray, and some minutes later told me that my left lung had partly collapsed. On the lung’s surface, a pimple-like development called a bleb had popped. As if from a flat tire, air had escaped into the chest cavity, where—the term “cavity” notwithstanding—there was no room for the air. The pressure amplified the pain from inflammation around the bleb.
The Caribou Rack
When people come to visit for the first time, I am sensitive about our living-room windows and sensitive about a caribou rack, which hangs from invisible fishing line against the brick chimney of our kitchen fireplace. The fireplace is obsolete, long filled with pussy willows, andirons cold for years, fatwood at rest, fixed in time. The caribou rack, as I have always called it, is actually one half of a complete set of antlers, snow shovel forward, the right half. Our living room—close by, and built as an addition—was designed on graph paper by Yolanda Whitman, my wife, and ratified by an architect, who generously if not flatteringly said he thought the fenestration remarkable in its proximity to the golden ratio (1:1.68). The principal set of windows is a recumbent rectangle about twenty feet wide and a bit over five feet high, with seven components of varying width—four narrow ones flanking two larger ones, all separated by dark mullions, with what appears to be a fifth of an acre of plate glass in the center, framing a woods-and-meadow scene. Deer in the scene. The red fox. Wild turkeys. Robins. Wrens. Bluebirds. Grackles. Vultures. A bear once. As birders are much aware—others, too—birds fly headlong into such windows, fall, flutter in great pain, and die. That doesn’t happen often here—once, maybe twice, a year—but that is once or twice too many for certain people we know, including former students, whom I am anxious to impress, and who leave with the fresh impression that I am an environmental hoax. They mention anti-collision decals and reflective repellents.
My concern about the caribou rack is in the hope that it not suggest Teddy Roosevelt, the gun lobby, and the mounted head of Simba. As it happens, Priya Vulchi, a student from my writing class in 2020, was here recently. Sitting in the living room and looking out through the controversial windows, she confirmed that one glance at the caribou antler had instantly altered her appraisal of me.
I have done nothing about those big windows, but there is nothing I would ever need to do about the caribou rack if visitors knew its story. I didn’t shoot the caribou. Nobody shot the caribou. Caribou shed their antlers once a year. In 1975, I picked up the rack off the tundra in Arctic Alaska. Paddling, I carried it down two rivers to Kiana, where an Inuit storekeeper kindly wrapped it up to go as checked baggage to Newark. When I left Fairbanks, I had also checked ten pounds of mooseburger. I didn’t shoot the moose, either.
The Swimming Pool
What folktale begins with a blacksmith in Michigan and ends with a bullfrog in New Jersey?
This one.
In 1888, a blacksmith named Lambert, in Ypsilanti, co-founded a metallurgy company that events swept forward into automobile parts (fenders, running boards, hoods, gas tanks, radiator shells) and a less futuristic line of corn cribs, grain bins, and silos. In 1956, in Kentucky, my brother married Joan Lambert, a great-granddaughter of the blacksmith. Joan had grown up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where the family had settled after the business inevitably migrated to Detroit. Clayton & Lambert, as it is still known, became particularly sophisticated in the use of stainless steel.
When the Second World War approached, a great problem in naval ordnance was coming with it. The cartridges that held the projectiles fired from naval guns were made of brass. As it happened, there was an acute shortage of brass. Clayton & Lambert worked out a way to make the cartridges from steel. In the course of the war, they produced—in Michigan, and at a plant they established in Kentucky—seventy-five million cartridges. Given the objective, who cared what that cost? Well, among others, the Bureau of Ordnance did. Versus brass, the steel cartridges saved the Navy forty-five million dollars.
Thirty years after the war, a truck from Kentucky showed up at my house, in New Jersey, with a swimming pool in it. This was not an aboveground tub. Intended for an excavation eight feet deep, it had a length of forty feet, a lappable swimming distance, one-fourth as long as a fifty-metre Olympic pool. Clayton & Lambert (Clayton had died in 1913) had applied their expertise in stainless steel to a line of swimming pools not only for private yards but mainly for towns, summer camps, and urban neighborhoods. Broad stainless panels, bolted one to the next and sealed, formed their vertical sides. Because they were unlike all other pools, you couldn’t say that they were state of the art. They were the art.
The site we had chosen for our pool was a shady grove of cherry trees, walnuts, and pin oaks beside our garage. The soil mantle there was, as it is on nearly all of our property, scarcely three feet deep, over diabase, an igneous bedrock that is about as hard as anything in nature. You don’t dig holes in it. We needed McAlinden the Blaster. The uppercase “B” is from me. We had met him ten years earlier, when we were building our house and needed to make room for the basement.
Merritt McAlinden, who had landed at Utah Beach on D Day and gone through the Battle of the Bulge, knew his way around what had come to be known as commercial explosives applications. He came to dig our basement. Bedrock three feet down. Required excavation more than twice that. McAlinden studied the architectural blueprints closely, studied the scraped-off diabase, and planned an arrangement of explosive charges. Ka-boom. After the rubble was cleared, we had a flat, smooth, igneous surface on which concrete was poured directly. In sixty years at this writing, the house, resting on the diabase bedrock, has not settled a sixteenth of an inch.
For his explosive feats, Merritt McAlinden was a local legend, and part of the reason for that reputation was a water tower in a town north of Princeton, which hired him to get rid of it. As the story goes, authorities assured him that the tower was empty. Ka-boom. Like a supermagnified golf ball coming off a tee, the tank fell a hundred and sixty-five feet to the ground and a million gallons of water spread through the town.
