Stealing History by Gerald Stern

Stealing History by Gerald Stern

Author:Gerald Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595341167
Publisher: Trinity University Press


41 Angela Hazley’s Death

June 1, 2010, I got a call from Pamela Hazley, Angela Hazley’s daughter, that her mother had died the night before, in a hospital in Pittsburgh, from complications following a heart attack just on the day they were going to release her and send her home. Pamela, who is fifty-eight, thought she was calling my ex-wife, Pat Stern. She must have gotten my number from Angela’s address book and confused one—hurriedly written—number with another. Angela, I loved so much. Pamela and I talked for twenty minutes, mostly about arteries, valves, procedures, and very little, I now realize, about Angela’s last hours, where her mind was, what she expected, what she said, or what was said to her. It would be impossible for me to get to her funeral, yet I wanted to go there, to be with her children whom I knew so well, and her grandchildren. She was the center of a large family who came to her every Saturday night for dinner, as did many of them during the week. She lived in the oldest stone house in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, near an absurd town called Homer City, which I found for her—and Dick—in the mid-1960s when they moved from Slippery Rock, PA, where Dick was teaching at the state college, to Indiana (I.U.P.) to join me where I was teaching after I left Temple University in Philadelphia—in 1962, I think—not quite voluntarily.

Dick, who was a part-time hypnotist as well as an English professor and the head of the state teachers’ union, died, or was found dead (in 1995) in a hospital parking lot in one of the small towns in central Pennsylvania where he was putting Bell Telephone employees to sleep or making Westinghouse secretaries howl like wolves or dance the tarantella. He was my closest friend in the late 1940s and early ’50s—we were in New York together and Paris and southern France—and his early poems were excellent. Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas were the poets he was closest to. When Pat and I went to Europe in the early 1950s, I wrote asking him to come over—with Angela and Pamela—for an extended stay and even offered to lend him—or give him—the money for it, maybe rent a big house, since prices were insanely low then in Europe. (We paid seven dollars a month for a small apartment in Vienna, about fifty cents a night for a huge room in Florence, near the Duomo, and could eat a decent meal, cheap wine included, for about twenty cents, also in Florence.) But he had already bought a sixty-acre dairy farm, near Butler, Pennsylvania, and was raising cattle and baling his own grass as well as working as a foreman at the National Biscuit Company on Penn Ave in Pittsburgh and selling eggs to the women on the line. He wrote his poems in an old dairy house, which he had fixed up as a study, and was planting trees, repairing roofs, and spreading manure



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