At Odds

 

Because Noonan had such a jaunty air about him, a kind of self-confidence gone awry, people tended to think of him as something of a braggart. It didn’t help that he always seemed to have handy a number of suggestions that could help to avert the certain decline, as he saw it, of American society. If he had his way, he often said, applicants for marriage licenses would need to satisfy state-mandated restrictions at least as stringent as those required for anyone seeking permits to style hair or trim nails. In the same vein, it was his firm belief that nobody should be admitted to a four-year college without having first worked for a full year at what he called a real world job.

 

In Noonan’s defense, it should be noted that his agile mind enabled him to mount cogent and insightful arguments whether he chose on any given day to revisit something like the villainy of Richard Nixon (a favorite subject of his) or to render in considerable detail how the decadence on display in Berlin night clubs in the 1920s contributed to the decline of the Weimar Republic and the political gyrations that brought Adolph Hitler to power.

 

Noonan’s willingness to embrace his role as the outspoken "village explainer" was reinforced by his high-pitched, somewhat nasal voice and his physical appearance. He was, at least in his youth, rather slim and had long, somewhat unruly thick, black hair, which, because he combed straight back, emphasized his broad forehead. To Noonan’s college friends, his swept-back hair, along with his tiny, horn-rimmed glasses and wispy goatee, made him look very much like photos they had seen of the legendary Bolshevik figure, Leon Trotsky. Thus, the nickname, Trotsky, they bestowed on him. And yes, he may have in fact resembled Trotsky, but it was also a sly dig at the way he reacted to something like a slight rise in student fees with the fury that would have been more appropriate if he were leading revolutionary forces trying to oust the Czar of all the Russias.

 

When Polly met Noonan, she could see that he felt called upon to help other people see, and also understand, more clearly all those things that were so obvious to him. That she found rather irksome (and a bit amusing too), but she was willing to treat it as a minor defect since she was drawn to his tendency—which she shared—for bluntness and plain talk. Both of them were secular, exceedingly so, but both were convinced that some otherworldly force, specifically, the unique circumstances that brought them together, had endowed their relationship with a resilience far greater than that of couples who more gingerly aired their differences. But they? Why, they were so committed to candor and truth-telling that both entered into their courtship with the easy confidence of two people who were quite comfortable, moments after they met, in expressing their mutual disapproval of each other’s choice of careers.

 

This initial encounter they made so much of wasn’t all that remarkable since it took place, like that of countless other couples, at a crowded, noisy party. But it was an event neither of them had planned to attend. They didn’t know each other, of course, nor did they know any of the other guests, or even why the party was being held. Noonan, still a doctoral student in comparative literature back then—and prone therefore to detect metaphors and symbols that might have escaped the notice of more literal souls—tended to think of their first meeting as having overtones from the theater of the absurd, Pirandello, he thought, or maybe even Ionesco. He also claimed that the nature of their first meeting was such that Polly and he had fused—his word—in a manner that resembled the miracle of birth itself.

 

More prosaically, Polly had blundered into the party because she was hoping to get an advance look at some newly refurbished apartments on the north slope of Beacon Hill. But the friend who gave her this tip mistakenly transposed the address of the building undergoing renovation. That brought Polly to a three-story apartment house where, even while standing on the sidewalk, she could tell there was a raucous party underway on the second floor. Polly, puzzled at this turn of events, then asked a couple who appeared to be on their way into the party if they had any idea where she might find the building she was looking for. The couple themselves were unfamiliar with that part of Beacon Hill, but they invited her to join them, indicating that someone at the party might be able to help her. Polly agreed, but once she entered the party, she discovered that the number of people jammed into the apartment, plus the loud music being played, made it difficult for her to mingle or to engage in a conversation of any kind.

 

Noonan’s route to the party was more direct. He lived one flight up from the festivities, and though he was accustomed to the loud music that routinely came from the apartment below his, the noise that night reached a point where he decided to lodge a complaint with the party’s host. But once he went downstairs he found it impossible to get any farther into the party than an alcove off the front hall of his neighbor’s apartment.

 

He was now in a room that would have been a good-sized walk-in closet in most houses, but was deemed large enough on Beacon Hill to serve as someone’s idea of a study. In a tiny space filled with a television set, a commodious easy chair, a desk plus desk chair, as well as a small bookcase, there was a couple who were deeply engaged in an argument in which they tried to preserve their privacy by sounding out words with exaggerated movements of their lips. Only inches away from them another couple were clinging to each other with such ardor that they appeared to be on the verge of sexual congress. Also squeezed into the room were two husky, thick-necked males hovering over a female whose dress barely contained her ample bosom, and off in a corner, wedged into a space near the book case, looking very much like someone who was being held against her will, was this tall, attractive, dark-haired woman who turned out to be Polly Carswell.

 

Noonan tried to get Polly’s attention by peeking around the arguing couple and waving at her. He also tried to introduce himself by telling her his name, but just then the music, already loud, grew louder still. Polly managed, nevertheless, to respond to his overture by raising her dark, thick eyebrows and flashing a quick smile. Seconds later, by snaking one hand around the heads of the arguing couple, she managed to put an empty glass she had been holding onto the book shelf.

 

Noonan took that as a signal of Polly’s desire to leave the party, so he turned around, turned away from her in fact, but simultaneously reached back with his left hand, clearly inviting her to grab onto it. She, reaching forward, did so, and the second he felt her hand in his, he tightened his grip, and then began leading her out of the room.

 

With liberal use of his elbows, Noonan was able to pull Polly past both the couple who were arguing and the couple oblivious to whatever else was going on, but still blocking his path to the doorway were the two brawny males. Noonan, though thin and rather spindly, did have a powerful pair of legs, and that helped him, once he lowered his right shoulder and charged ahead, to slither through a narrow opening between the two linebacker types while still holding tightly to Polly’s hand.

 

That took the two of them outside the closet-sized study, but Noonan, still holding on to Polly, then barreled his way through another knot of people who were standing between them and the open door leading out of the apartment itself. By now, their momentum was such that when he and Polly emerged from the apartment they barely remained on their feet as they descended in pell-mell fashion the flight of stairs going down to the entrance of the apartment house.

 

Once outside—their hands now uncoupled—both took a breath of fresh air and then exhaled. Polly even leaned forward, with her hands on her knees, like a long distance runner who had just crossed the finish line. Seconds later, she stood up, and reaching out to shake Noonan’s hand, she said, "Polly Carswell. And you are—I’m sorry, but with the noise in there, I didn’t quite get it."

 

"Noonan," he said, "First name, Lawrence, but nobody except my mother, God rest her soul, ever called me that. To everyone else, I’m just Noonan."

 

"Well, thank you, Noonan. I never would have gotten out of that hellhole without your help."

 

Then, after recounting how she ended up at the party, she said her experience made her feel that she should remain in her Back Bay apartment rather than consider a move to Beacon Hill if loud parties were a regular occurrence in that neighborhood.

 

Actually, Noonan told her, that area of Beacon Hill was quiet most of the time, except for the apartment that happened to be right below his.

 

"Just my luck," he said, "to be living above a dentist in his early fifties who’s trying to recover from an acrimonious divorce by turning himself into Beacon Hill’s premier party animal."

 

"Oh, you poor thing," Polly said, "how do you put up with it?"

 

"Ear plugs most of the time, but they weren’t of much use tonight. So right now, since my apartment is uninhabitable, I’m going off to have a cup of coffee in the diner down the street. Care to join me?’’

 

She agreed, and so if Noonan’s rescue of Polly represented the "birth" of their relationship, their cup of coffee together gave them the chance to explore the first of the many issues over which they disagreed.

 

During their short walk to the diner, both commented briefly on the surprisingly early June heat wave Boston was going through just then, but Noonan quickly got into telling Polly that although he had completed his course work for his doctorate in comparative literature, he was still writing his dissertation. Then came the groan he usually emitted when he talked of how he had been working on his doctoral thesis for more than two years, but would probably need at least another year or more of rewriting and revising before he was prepared to submit it.

 

"And why, sir, has the writing of this dissertation taken you so long?" Noonan said, suddenly sounding as if he was interviewing himself.

 

Then, answering the question he had posed, he said, "Fair question, and one frequently raised by some of my more fickle friends, not to mention my thesis adviser. Briefly, it’s because the gods of literature have chosen me to challenge the universally accepted belief—the dogma, to be more accurate about it—that Herman Melville’s poetry is so inferior to his novels that it’s best left forgotten."

 

"Well, I hope that your family and friends appreciate your tenacity at least," Polly said.

 

Oh, they do, Noonan said, but that did nothing to ease his major problem, which revolved around the difficulty he had in making much progress on his dissertation while also supporting himself by teaching at not one but two community colleges. By the time they were in the diner, he was well into his description of the dreadful working conditions he and his fellow teachers in the community college system had to endure, including puny pay and inattentive students and classes that were too large, as well as the lack of office space for faculty members or a desk to call one’s own or even a place to hang one’s coat.

 

So practiced was he in this rant that he was able, while delivering it, to get a better look at Polly than he had during their short walk to the diner. He could see now that her short, no-nonsense hairdo had a slight, barely discernible part in the middle of it so that it naturally swept back on either side of her head to cover her ears. Her hair style in its simplicity perfectly framed an oval-shaped face, with dark eyes that were narrow and deep set and slightly slanted, a nose that was long and delicate, and a tiny mouth with bee-stung lips. Suddenly, with somewhat of a shock, he realized that he was sitting next to a woman who was a sibling look alike to those strikingly beautiful females painted so often by Amadeo Modigliani.

 

He had just reached a point in his declamation where he was telling Polly what it was like to find no other space but a crowded college cafeteria to hold student-teacher conferences when she interrupted him.

 

"Tell me," she said, "what will you have accomplished if you get a few more people to appreciate Melville’s poetry? And before we go much further, you should know that I’m not a great admirer of Melville. I found Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale to be so off-putting that I never even finished the book."

 

Noonan’s response was to pull his head back, much like a boxer trying to avoid a vicious left hook.

 

That caused Polly, with a grin on her face, to correct herself. "Okay, putting that aside for a moment, which you apparently think I should, let’s move on to a larger point. All this time invested in a thesis you have yet to finish? And in the end, do you really think you’re going to change the minds of all those people who consider Moby Dick Melville’s greatest work?"

 

Noonan sidestepped Polly’s question by complimenting her for being so perceptive—no, not about the intrinsic worth of his thesis, he said, but about the rigidity and mindset of all those people who refused to acknowledge the full breadth of Melvile’s work.

 

"My problem, you see, is that when everyone else is going left, I have this desire to go right, or vice versa. That means, as regards Melville’s poetry, that I consider him to be at least the equal of his contemporaries Whitman and Emily Dickinson and miles ahead of that versifier Longfellow."

 

Rather than respond to Noonan’s defense of his thesis, Polly chose instead to offer him some helpful advice.

 

"If I were you, I’d look at it this way. It’s a dissertation. You need to finish it in order to get your doctorate. And you need that degree to get hired by some half-decent college. So the grown-up thing to do, quite frankly, is to finish the damn thing so that you can escape the community college hell you so dislike."

 

Veering off in a completely different direction, Noonan said, "But what of you, oh lady of mystery?"

 

Polly, by pursing her lips and releasing a little puff of air, seemed to indicate that she didn’t see herself as a lady of mystery. Then, quickly, she told him that she had grown up in a small town in New Hampshire, which was not far from the medical center at Dartmouth, where her father was a cardiac surgeon. After graduating from Vassar, she had intended to go to New York City but was talked out of it by her college roommate’s father, a former mayor of Boston. He not only warned her away from New York, but urged her to come to Boston, a much more charming place, he told her. He also promised her he would help her find something interesting to do there. The mayor, as Polly put it, was a man of his word, and within a week after she arrived in Boston he arranged for her to be hired as general assistant to the advertising executive who had played a major role in getting him elected.

 

"Oh my," Noonan blurted out, "that doesn’t sound to me as though the mayor did you much of a favor."

 

"Please," Polly said, clearly annoyed, at being interrupted. Noonan tried to apologize to her, but she, talking right over him, explained why she so appreciated what the mayor had done for her.

 

"You should understand," she said, "this is an agency where job titles don’t matter and the great work you did yesterday is quickly forgotten if you fail to do even greater work today. You rise or fall, depending on how well you serve our all-knowing, all-powerful leader, who, by the way, happens to be a genius. He also likes to keep some distance between himself and anything that might serve as a distraction. In three years, I’ve become the main contact and conduit between him and the rest of the agency. I’m his call screener, gatekeeper, his human shield, I guess you’d call me. And no, I’m not his concubine, although many of my colleagues, out of sheer envy, like to think I am because I get to work so closely with the one and only Harold Endicott. Among his employees, Endicott is simply referred to by his initials, with the H always capitalized."

 

"So you’re content to serve as the handmaiden to someone who sounds as if he’s the Josef Stalin of Boston advertising?"

 

"For now, yes, because my goal, you see, is to be Harold Endicott’s successor."

 

"Well, my advice to you is that you forsake advertising, now, immediately, tonight if at all possible. Otherwise, it’s likely to eat away at your soul."

 

Polly, laughing, said. "I’ll give you this much credit, Noonan. You’re the first man I’ve ever met who seems primarily interested in my soul."

 

"It’s the years I’ve spent with Melville. It’s hard for me to get through a conversation without invoking the soul in one way or another."

 

"Well, I’ll look after my own soul, thank you. As for you, well, this may sound like Psych l01, but it strikes me that the time you’re taking to finish your thesis is a classic case of the approach/avoidance syndrome, or more simply put, fear of rejection. My solution to that? Forge ahead, all flags flying, damn the torpedoes. Pick a date, any date, make that your zero hour. That’s it, do or die, ready or not, you go to the last page, you write The End in big, bold letters. Then, tie a bright red ribbon around that sucker and hand it in."

 

Noonan was about to mount a defense of his work habits and rebut the notion that he feared rejection, but Polly, after a quick look at her watch, announced that she was leaving.

 

"I make it a point to get a full night’s rest," she said, as she hurried towards the door. "Otherwise, I won’t be ready for tomorrow’s scrum."

 

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Their second meeting—it took place the night after they met—was the pivot point that brought them from two people who were intrigued with each other to a couple who, though still at odds on so many things, ended up living together. The impetus for their first official date came from Polly, who always claimed, only half jokingly, that the window air conditioner in her apartment played a vital part in the quick ripening of the relationship between her and Noonan during a summer when stretches of record-breaking heat and humidity made everyone in Boston feel as if they had failed to dry themselves off after taking a long, hot shower. Not to be overlooked, however, was the spirit and energy Polly brought to any endeavor, whether she was carrying out a direct command from Harold Endicott or trying to learn more about an interesting young man who had rescued her from a party she wanted no part of.

 

Thus, her call to Noonan the morning after they met and her invitation for him to have dinner with her that night. She wasn’t quite sure why she was so anxious to see him again, but she felt a need to convince him that he should be more serious about the direction of his career. All this Melville business he had told her about, that struck her as a bit sophomoric and perhaps self-defeating. For Polly this readiness to reshape the trajectory of Noonan’s career was the kind of challenge she couldn’t ignore since she was the inveterate fixer of things off-balance and out of kilter, the corrector of misplaced modifiers, the person who, even if she was hurrying through a room, would stop to straighten a picture that was hanging a fraction of an inch too far in one direction.

 

Noonan was still half asleep when Polly reached him, but he managed a firm yes to her invitation, and when he did, Polly suggested, the time, 7:30, and place, a restaurant that was a gathering spot for people in Boston’s advertising industry. Noonan had begun to tell her how much he enjoyed meeting her, but she cut him off, saying Endicott was on the other line.

 

The directness of Polly’s approach to Noonan was matched by the comment she made when she arrived at the restaurant and unburdened herself of her bulging suitcase-like briefcase.

 

"Let me begin by saying that we should congratulate ourselves for being so grown up last night," she announced. "There’s nothing I hate more than all that pussyfooting around during girl-meets-boy meetings. I’m also drawn to men who speak up rather than dilly dally around."

 

"I, too, think it’s a pleasure to meet someone who goes from a to b in a straight line," said Noonan.

 

But a moment later, with Polly as the animating force, they fell into the kind of verbal tussle neither of them ever tried to avoid—and which always served, in a surprising way, to bring the two of them closer to each other. The first subject they dealt with was the contrast in their upbringing and their family backgrounds, her’s definitely upper class, his thoroughly working class. What followed from that was a delineation of the attitudes and preferences and views on matters political, social, and cultural between the daughter of a cardiac surgeon and his wife, who was a prominent activist in New Hampshire’s Republican party, and the son of a machinist who was a leader in his local labor union, and the sibling of an older brother who was an organizer for the hotel workers union in Boston.

 

That led them into a competition of sorts, starting off with Polly’s description of the New Hampshire village she grew up in as a world best reflected in Currier and Ives prints, complete with historic homes, such as the one her family lived in, which was built by her mother’s great grandfather, Matthew Putnam, who was one of the town’s first settlers. The Putnam family home was located across the town common from a classic white-shingled church so nicely framed by two enormous sugar maples that it had become, according to Polly, one of the most photographed churches in America because it was a can’t-miss stop for bus loads of tourists, all with cameras ready, who visited New England during the fall foliage season.

 

Noonan countered with a more detailed depiction of his hometown, a small city in Rhode Island, once prosperous, but now filled with half-empty mill buildings bordering on a polluted river. He focused in particular on the town’s divide between the mill owners and their favored employees who lived in big houses on tree-lined streets and the Irish and Italian immigrants, the mill workers, like his family, who lived in triple-deckers, none of them historic, as he pointedly noted.

 

There was a similar contrast in Polly’s account of idyllic summers she spent at the lake-side home (plus two guest cabins) in the White Mountains owned by the Putnam family. Noonan responded with his account of what it had been like for him, since the age of 15, to spend his summers working for an uncle ("We called him Simon Legree.") who owned a road paving company. He was particularly evocative in recalling what it was like to spend hot summer afternoons breathing in the noxious fumes from steaming hot asphalt paving he and his co-workers smoothed into new roadways.

 

Polly apparently felt she could match the misery Noonan encountered in his summer job by telling him of how much she disliked the private school in Vermont her parents sent her to because they didn’t care for the high school in their New Hampshire village. She had yet to recover, she claimed, from four years at a school were students were required to do daily chores, including the milking of cows and the feeding of chickens. Noonan felt he didn’t need to say much more about his high school that this one fact: In a class of 110 students, he and three others were the only graduates to go off to a four-year college, which, in his case, was the state university in Kingston.

 

A foreshadowing of their divergent political views came when Noonan asked Polly how she and her parents could stand living in a place where the only state-owned dally newspaper was owned by a publisher who ran front-page editorials in which he accused Dwight Eisenhower of being a conscious agent of a world-wide Communist conspiracy. He also scoffed at the phrase emblazoned on New Hampshire license plates, Live Free or Die, since he couldn’t imagine what combination of malign forces posed a threat to anyone who lived in New Hampshire.

 

Polly’s reply, tart and succinct, was that her parents, and yes, she too, very much appreciated the feisty independence of New Hampshire’s residents, particularly their refusal to vote for any public official who would try to impose a sales or income tax on them.

 

For any other couple, all this would have seemed as if their first "date" was on its way to becoming undone, but for them this was a form of foreplay, so they forged ahead, with Polly recapitulating at greater length, why she was so pleased with the choice of her profession. Working closely with Endicott, she said, was the equivalent in her mind of being allowed to peek over Picasso’s shoulder as he finished one of his great paintings. By way of illustration, she spoke, in hushed terms of that moment she was looking on as Endicott was reviewing proposed ad layouts for a new account, a household cleaner. Suddenly, with a quick swipe of his pen, he crossed out two words in the headline of one ad and added a question mark at the end, thereby creating a tag line that lent itself to a catchy jingle.

 

"And that I should tell you," she said, "is what we mean when we refer to something as a seminal moment because within a couple of weeks half of America was humming and whistling and singing that phrase. By then, that household cleaner had already set sales records and was firmly established as a leader in its product line."

 

Noonan’s response to that was to let out a loud cheer. "Yahoo, hurrah, hooray, let’s hear it for snappy slogans and catchy jingles and record-setting sales."

 

"Laugh if you want," she said, "but that’s just one reason why Endicott’s firm is able to compete with large New York agencies for national accounts.

 

Noonan, having heard quite enough about the genius of Harold Endicott, then reiterated his plan to reorder the world of Melville scholarship. His dissertation, in his words, was the harpoon he intended to send deep into the heart of the White Whale cult, which was his blanket term for a cabal of scholars and critics who tended to think—at least as Noonan saw it—that Herman Melville’s career began and ended with the writing of Moby Dick.

 

Moments later, after they had moved on to a contretemps about Polly’s loyalty to the hometown Red Sox and the reason why Noonan chose to root for the New York Yankees—it came down to his admiration for excellence—the two of them discovered something that they shared in common, the striking contrast between themselves and their siblings.

 

Polly, it turned out, had never got along very well with her two older brothers, both of whom, in her view, had been cowed by their father into attending medical school. She was quite certain that her brothers, the older one having just finished his residency, the other just starting his, were miserable and constantly on edge because they realized they would always be measured against a father who had gained renown as a pioneer in cardiac surgery. She and her older sister, Dorothea, were grateful, she said, that they had not felt any pressure to become doctors because their father, though he would undoubtedly deny it, was not comfortable with the increasing number of young women entering medicine.

 

She and Dorothea, who was two years older than her, had always been close, but she claimed that the differences between them were such that most people didn’t think of them as being related. Dorothea had married her high school boy friend a month after both of them had graduated from college and in a little over three years they had become the parents of two little girls. Recently, Polly said, her sister was delighted to learn that she was pregnant again. The grimace on Polly’s face when she said that made it clear she didn’t feel any woman should be delighted to learn that she was pregnant, particularly for a third time.

 

Noonan followed up by explaining that his mother had died from breast cancer just before her fortieth birthday, when he was eleven years old. He then switched to saying how much he admired both his brother, who was five years older than him, and his father, but said that neither of them had any idea why he wanted to pursue a life of scholarship and teaching.

 

"My brother’s name for me," he said, "is Mister Head-In-The-Clouds. My father, I’m afraid, fully agrees with him. His idea of a joke is to ask me every now and then what I intend to do when I grow up."

 

As for that air conditioner in Polly’s apartment, it became a matter of importance near the end of their dinner when Noonan, alluding to Boston’s heat wave, went into some detail about what it was like for him to live in an apartment so hot and cramped and so lacking in cross ventilation that he felt a kinship with those inmates held in the infamous Black Hole prison in Calcutta, India. By then, Polly, mellowed by the martini she had before dinner and the bottle of wine she had shared with Noonan, was so taken with Noonan’s vivid description of his apartment that she invited him to spend the night in her’s. Then, the next morning, Polly, the ever-ready solver of problems, suggested that it might be a good idea for Noonan to give up his apartment and move in with her, at least for the summer.

 

"First, I think you’ll find that living in a cool place will help you to make more progress on your dissertation. You would also benefit, I think, at freeing yourself from the racket made by your downstairs neighbor. But more than anything else, you should think of this as a humanitarian gesture on my part. I couldn’t live with myself if I failed to save the world’s foremost champion of Melville’s poetry from dying of heat exhaustion before he succeeded in reshaping the course of Melville studies."

 

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Polly’s air conditioner may have provided the cooling breezes that helped the two of them settle into their new domestic arrangement, but the real bonding agent between them was their shared amusement at the bafflement of family and friends who didn’t know what to make of this unlikely pairing between an ambitious, driven advertising executive and a dreamy academic who seemed stuck on the lowest rung of his profession. Both Polly and Noonan thought it hilarious that so many of the people who knew them were shocked at hearing a young couple, supposedly in love, so casually demean each other’s line of work. They derived even greater pleasure from the concerned looks and worrisome frowns of onlookers whenever Polly badgered Noonan about his inability to finish his dissertation, and he, in turn, expressed his distaste (and anguish, too, it seemed) at the latest assault on the English language by Endicott and the copywriters at his advertising agency.

 

Those most puzzled by their affair were immediate family members. The Carswells were civil enough towards Noonan, but while they often referred to Polly as their "rebel daughter," it still surprised them that she now had a live-in boyfriend whose future prospects didn’t seem particularly promising. So too were Noonan’s father and brother cordial and welcoming towards Polly although neither could fathom how their son and brother, inculcated from birth with a dislike of corporate America in general and bosses in particular, had found himself a girlfriend who so enthusiastically boasted of how Endicott’s wizardry helped boost the earnings and profits of his firm’s clients.

 

Not that either Polly or Noonan themselves could have explained exactly what had kindled their affair. Their lovemaking, frequent and intense, seemed a natural outgrowth of their attraction to each other. But the closer they became, the less amenable they were to modifying their strongly held views. Indeed, Polly seemed to flaunt even more her devotion to Endicott and the world of advertising, while Noonan never wavered in his determination to continue working on a thesis that might, or might not, upend the established truisms of Melville studies, no matter how long it took. The repetition and fervor with which they both stated these convictions left the impression that for them a brisk exchange of views, particularly if flavored with an insult or two, had the same bracing effect on their relationship as an ice-cold shower is said to have in boosting the circulation of the blood.

 

The speculation from Polly’s friends, most of whom came from the world of advertising, was that her affair with Noonan could only be explained as some kind of crazy and maniacal release, something that helped her deal with the stress of coping every day with Harold Endicott’s many change of moods. Noonan’s friends could understand why "Trotsky" was drawn to someone as attractive as Polly, but they were puzzled by his tolerance for a girlfriend who, judging from her remarks, seemed to treat Endicott’s clever and whimsical ads with the reverence they themselves felt towards Shakespeare’s sonnets or Tolstoy’s novels. That led all these people to wonder whether Polly and Noonan—she with her snide remarks, and he with his stinging comebacks—were trying to prove the truism about how opposites could be attracted to each other.

 

In that respect, there could not have been two people more unlike each other in terms of dress and physical appearance. Polly was known for the faultless blend of color and design and texture of her clothes and how everything she wore so perfectly matched her purse and shoes and various types of fashionable hats, each appropriate to a changing of the seasons. Noonan was not exactly slovenly, but he was customarily dressed in a variety of tweed sports jackets that had seen better days, rumpled chinos and button-down shirts, the latter sometimes a bit ill-fitting because he purchased them at the once-a-year sale of clothes left behind by customers of a dry cleaner near Harvard Square.

 

Also, though they were approximately even in height, Polly seemed taller than Noonan because she was rarely seen without her stiletto heels. And Noonan? He was just approaching his thirtieth birthday, but he had already developed a stoop in his shoulders from carrying a backpack every day crammed full of books, exam papers, lecture notes, and office supplies, as well as the snacks he needed to survive his long hours of teaching and commuting between one community college on Boston’s northern border and the other just south of the city.

 

Noonan, always the explicator, liked to say that his and Polly’s decision to live together was something akin to two people deciding to take a bungee cord jump off a high bridge. But then, with the timing of a stand-up comic, he would wait a second or two before delivering a punch line. Why, he wondered—complete with a quizzical look on his face—had neither of them taken a moment to check on whether the cord they wrapped around themselves was attached to an object that was fixed and secure? Polly never cared for that image of a couple taking a metaphorical plunge, untethered, into the unknown, but she could see why a blithe disregard for the law of gravity may have been an apt description of a relationship that seemed to make no sense to anyone but themselves.

 

More honestly, and only to himself, Noonan felt some uneasiness about how he and Polly had become so quickly entwined. Much like Polly’s friends, he couldn’t help but wonder if her involvement with him was simply some madcap adventure on her part. He actually cautioned himself to be prepared for the day when she dropped him for someone else, most likely an up-and-coming figure in advertising. He could picture her some time in the future, living in a toney suburb, where she and her women friends, while sipping cocktails on the patio of the local country club, would regale themselves with accounts of the crazy boyfriends they once had when they were young. He could also imagine her surprising her children—who probably thought of her as too stiff and formal—with her story of how she once had this romance with a young academic who was, as she no doubt would have put it, a real zany character.

 

Until he met Polly, Noonan’s romantic adventures had come from affairs, usually of short duration, with other graduate students. Earlier, as an undergraduate, he had had a longer relationship with a young woman, an aspiring poetess, whom he had met in his Chaucer class. He could not, if his life was at stake, recall a line of poetry his girl friend wrote, but he remembered quite vividly the emotional outbursts and overwrought behavior she seemed to think as prerequisites for anyone who hoped to be the next Sylvia Plath.

 

Then, in his last year of college, Noonan, who was a moderate drinker, ended up at a party where he rescued a pre-med student from a boyfriend, quite drunk, who had become abusive towards her. This young woman, who came from an extremely wealthy family, was so grateful for Noonan’s chivalrous act that she embarked on an affair with him. Over the next few months she also treated him to several unforgettable weekends at one of Boston’s most luxurious hotels, where they only paused in their love making to enjoy the lavish food and drink available to them. That affair ended in June, when Noonan’s lover went off to medical school in California and he began his graduate studies at Tufts University.

 

In his second year at Tufts, Noonan found a studio apartment in nearby Somerville, where his neighbor across the hall was a secretary at Harvard, who came from a small town in western Massachusetts. She was engaged to a young Naval officer and intended to marry him the next summer when he finished his tour of duty, but in the meantime, she and Noonan ended up more or less living together even while she was still making plans for her wedding.

 

Noonan could never forget his distress the night that young woman, in tears, told him she had become so enamored of him she wasn’t sure she wanted to go ahead with her marriage. It took Noonan two hours of wiping away her tears, as well as a lot of talk about the great joy she and her boyfriend would share in raising their family, plus one last frenzied bout of sex, before he convinced the secretary to go through with her wedding. For several years after that, just before Christmas each year, Noonan would receive a card from his former lover along with a photo of her and her husband surrounded by their growing family.

 

Noonan knew immediately there was no comparison between his relationship with Polly and that of other women he had known. The telling point for him was how he accepted with equanimity the end of his previous affairs. It was inconceivable to him that he would be similar unaffected if Polly were to leave him. For one thing, he couldn’t deny how much he enjoyed the envious glances of other men when he and Polly walked down the street or entered a restaurant. But what struck him most was how different this affair was from anything he had ever known before, how much more substantive it was. He knew it was a simplistic way to think about it, but he thought of his romantic adventures before he met Polly as something like reading a well-written but formulaic middle-brow best seller. But his experience with Polly—that had the depth and meaning to be found in novels like Anna Karenina or The Magic Mountain. And sex—it was a constant and welcome and overwhelming surprise to him that Polly didn’t allow their disputatious relationship, or her exhaustion from long days of serving Endicott, to impinge in any way on the excitement and passion of their love making.

 

For Polly, her involvement with Noonan was a bit more of a puzzle, since he was so different from any of the men she had dated from the time she was in high school. Generally, her beaus—as she and her sister liked to call them—were Ivy League types and all were quite likely someday to become partners in prestigious law firms or hold high-ranking positions in large corporations. All of them were the kind of young men her parents would have considered ideal husband material, but Polly, from an early age, had made clear to her family, and to her mother most of all, that she had no interest in becoming the supportive spouse of a more accomplished husband. Her mother, always quite voluble, was left speechless the day Polly let her know, in a purposefully casual manner, that yes, she considered marriage a possibility, but she could not imagine, not yet anyway, ever having children.

 

Polly worried, though, whether she was drawn to Noonan because having a live-in partner from the other side of the tracks underscored her intent not to emulate her mother or sister or any of her female relatives. But even that, she felt, didn’t begin to explain how she had become romantically involved with someone who could both upset her and amuse her, often at the same time.

 

In trying to think through the quickening of her feelings towards Noonan, she remembered for the first time in years her literature professor at Vassar, an older woman who struck her as Victorian in her taste and manner, but who would emit a very unladylike gasp when she used the French word, frisson, to explain the emotional ups and downs of Emma Bovary. Polly understood that frisson, strictly speaking, was meant only to describe the physical sensation associated with a surge of emotions. She didn’t think, either, that there was a parallel between her affair with Noonan and the tumultuous relationship of Emma Bovary and her lover, Rodolphe, but, yes, frisson, or some variation of it, was one way of explaining how she felt about Noonan. One thing she knew for certain: None of the men she had dated, including the one she lived with for six months soon after she moved to Boston, had caused her to recall the professor who so graphically uttered that word, frisson, when trying to describe a love affair that was beyond the comprehension of anyone except the two people caught up in it.

 

Polly’s growing attachment to Noonan, and his to her, never lessened their day-to-day carping—who used the last of the butter but didn’t replace it?—that was similar to the quarrels any young couple might have while learning how to accommodate themselves to each other. But there were other more memorable encounters, such as the day Polly was surprised and outraged to receive a letter from her landlord who threatened to impose a fine on her for failing to pay her monthly rent—and this after she had given Noonan a check for the rent payment and asked him to mail it when he passed the corner mail box on his way to the subway.

 

Noonan tried to defend himself by claiming the U. S. Postal Service was at fault for the check never having reached the landlord, but Polly, brushing that aside, ordered him to deliver a new check, by hand, the first thing the next morning, even if, she added, he might have to cancel one of his classes. She could not believe, she added, that he could be so irresponsible, so unaware of something as important as getting a rent payment in on time.

 

"Your brother sure hit the bullseye when he came up with Mister Head in the Clouds as his nickname for you." she said.

 

She also indicated—though it was something of a mumbled aside—that Noonan might need to find a new place to live if he failed this time to follow her instructions. Noonan wanted to argue still further the culpability of the Postal Service, but he could see that he had no choice but to comply with Polly’s request. That he did so may have helped to heal the breach between them, but two days passed in which they barely spoke to each other and their physical contact consisted of a brief good night kiss.

 

Relations had returned to normal a week later when Noonan, looking through his backpack for essays he was about to return to his students, came across a crumpled up envelope containing the check. He was so shocked that he quickly excused himself and rushed into the hallway where he found a trash container. There, after looking both ways to see that nobody was coming, he tore the envelope into several pieces and and buried them deep within a mess of scrap paper and old newspapers and coffee-stained paper cups. Even after he returned to his classroom, it took him a few moments to regain his composure.

 

Two weeks later, the rent check imbroglio behind them, Polly was not at all satisfied with Noonan’s non-answer when she asked him one night how much progress he was making on his dissertation. Her response to that was to hand him the next night, without saying a word, a neatly typed memo, two pages long, entitled Dissertation Writing Schedule. In it, she laid out, with dates in one column, and a number of pages to be rewritten or revised each day in another, how he could finish his thesis in a bit over two months.

 

Noonan had been watching the television broadcast of a Red Sox game, when Polly handed him the memo, but after quickly glancing at it, he turned the TV off. He then began, slowly and methodically, to rip each sheet of paper into elongated pieces. Polly, seated in a chair on the other side of the room, said nothing, as Noonan, without explanation, then proceeded to tear each strip cross-wise into even smaller segments. Finally, with the torn paper cupped in each hand, he rose from his chair and walked to the center of their living room, where he flung the thoroughly shredded memo into the air, letting it fall around himself like so much celebratory confetti.

 

After brushing some of the pieces from his hair and shoulders, he turned towards Polly, and in a solemn voice, said, "Apparently you can’t grasp the simple fact that I’m trying to bring new insight and understanding to the monumental work of a literary giant. That can’t be done by following a production schedule more suited to a factory turning out widgets."

 

To emphasize that point he explained that an underlying reason for his dissertation was his sympathy for Melville’s struggle in his later years to support his family by taking a day job as a customs inspector in the port of New York. Then, each evening, he told her, after Melville returned home, he went to his room to continue writing his epic poem, Clarel.

 

"So here’s Melville, thoroughly exhausted from the drudgery of his day job," he said. "But each night, after dinner, when he goes upstairs to his study to work on his poem, he would often pace back and forth, literally stamping out with his feet the rhythm and cadence of the 18,000 lines of iambic tetrameter verse he wrote in recounting the the pilgrimage to the Holy Land of a young man, Clarel, who was on a mission to replenish his Christian faith."

 

Noonan, agitated now, was flinging his arms about and his long, swept back hair was falling down first on one side of his head and then the other so that he had to keep flipping it back into place, while telling Polly how insulting it was to him—and yes, also to the memory of Melville—to suggest that his thesis in defense of Melville’s masterpiece could be carried out according to a strict and unforgiving timetable.

 

Polly had begun walking away, heading towards the bedroom, but Noonan continued in his rant to explain a basic difference between Moby Dick and Melville’s other masterpiece, Clarel. Think of this, he said, in Melville’s novel, the central feature was Ahab’s quest to extract revenge—and God knows what else, he added—by finding and killing Moby Dick. But Melville, older and tested by adversity, and all but shunned by critics and readers alike, had marshaled all his genius and remaining energy into telling a tale, not of killing and retribution, but of a hero searching for the true meaning of Christian love.

 

Polly, in the bedroom by then, poked her head back out and said, "Now that you’re done with your little tantrum, I assume you’re going to pick up the mess made you’ve made before you come to bed."

 

Noonan didn’t make a move that night to comply with Polly’s order, and for some time the next morning, the pieces of paper still lay scattered over the living room floor. But this was a Saturday, when Noonan usually carried out his weekly cleaning of the apartment, so by noon, in the middle of his cleaning, he thought it only sensible—and hardly a concession to Polly—to scoop up with the vacuum cleaner all traces of the memo.

 

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Their decision to marry could be traced back to an evening in August when Polly returned home, very exhausted, from a day filled with crises and internal strife. Noonan greeted her with a glass of chilled wine and placed before her a plate of snacks, but all Polly wanted to do just then was to collapse into the big easy chair in their living room. Noonan immediately knelt on the floor in front of her to massage her sore feet while reminding her yet again that she should switch from stiletto heels to more sensible shoes. He also expressed sympathy for her when she recounted her never-ending struggle to mediate the ongoing conflict between those co-workers who considered every command from Endicott to be a message from a deity and others who wanted badly to drive a stake through his heart.

 

After telling him that without his ministrations she would never make it into work the next day, she said, "You may not realize this, but I think of you as similar—not exactly the same, mind you—but similar to Harold Endicott."

 

"What, what?" said Noonan, his voice clearly expressing something between surprise and outrage. "You can’t really mean that!"

 

"Yes, I do—and let me tell you why. You’re both brilliant, but each in your own way of course. And both of you are absolutely certain that you’re one hundred percent right about everything, which is why you both have such a low opinion of anyone who doesn’t agree with you. You’re not quite as crotchety as he is, not yet anyway, but like him, you see no reason why you should change. You’re you, hopelessly so. And so is Endicott, one of a kind, sui generis, now and forever. In fact, neither of you have any idea why you should want to change."

 

"Please, I beg you," Noonan said. "say anything you want about me. Accuse me of being a child molester, an ax murderer, a vampire, but don’t tell me I resemble in any way that petty tyrant whose only talent consists of producing ads that help his clients to increase their profits, truth, morality and good taste be damned."

 

"But that’s just it. Both of you are nutty, but in a fascinating way. You have your fixation with Melville’s poetry, and Endicott, well, how do you describe someone who spends half his day doodling and listening to Bach cantatas because he feels his mental and physical powers aren’t in synch until the sun goes down? Plus, both of you are lovable. That combination, nutty but lovable—I find it irresistible."

 

For a few seconds Noonan was still upset at Polly equating him to Endicott, but he rose to his feet and pulled Polly out of the easy chair. Then, laughing at how Polly had so succinctly found a way to express a similarity between him and Endicott, they went off to their bedroom to make love. A week later, when they celebrated Noonan’s thirtieth birthday, Polly presented him with two black T-shirts that emblazoned on the front was a slogan spelled out in white, Nutty But Lovable.

 

That slogan, much like a tag line Endicott might have come up with for a prize-winning ad campaign, seemed to provide the underlying rationale for Polly’s first mention, three months later, the possibility of marriage. It happened on a night in November when Boston, for an hour or so, received an inch of wet snow. Polly, having returned from work, needed a moment to brush a coating of snow from her coat while complaining of how she barely had time that day to eat anything more than a small lunch late in the afternoon. She, nevertheless, ate only a handful of peanuts and downed, in two sips, a glass of wine, before she went in to take a shower.

 

When she emerged from the bathroom, with a towel wrapped around her body and another wrapped around her head so that only a tiny part of her face was showing, she poured herself another glass of wine. Then, after taking two quick sips, she turned towards Noonan and said, "Have you ever given any thought to making our living arrangement legal?"

 

Enough of her was showing so that Noonan could see the grin on her face, which seemed to indicate her apparent amusement at the question she had just posed.

 

Noonan, always quick with a quip, was uncharacteristically cautious in avoiding a yes or no answer to Polly. Instead, he reminded her that they had known each other for only a few months. That made him feel, for a moment at least, as if he had deftly shifted onto Polly’s shoulders the burden of deciding whether they should even continue discussing the possibility of marriage.

 

Polly, stifling a yawn, quickly brushed aside Noonan’s more cautious view with another question.

 

"Are you suggesting," she said, "that we don’t yet know each other well enough? And to that, I say there are plenty of married couples who are still learning things about each other long after they’ve taken their nuptial vows."

 

Before Noonan had a chance to respond, she went off to continue preparing for bed, but a few minutes later, returning to the living room, she augmented her thoughts about the appropriate length of a courtship. She hadn’t taken time to wipe away some toothpaste that rimmed her mouth—indeed she still held a tooth brush in her hand—when she pronounced like some oracle the utterance that seemed, for her at least, to settle the matter.

 

"Here’s what I think," she said. "A courtship should be long enough so that the couple has time to learn of each other’s flaws. If those are judged by either party to be egregious—and by egregious I mean smoking, drug use, excessive drinking, a gambling addiction or confusion about sexual identity—then there’s no reason to see each other any longer. Otherwise, what purpose is served by waiting?"

 

Noonan brought the brief exchange to a quick end by saying this was a topic they should discuss another time, when both of them were rested and alert. He was privately relieved, however, to note that Polly had not included in her list of egregious shortcomings an inability to finish a doctoral dissertation. He also assumed that any plans Polly had about getting married would be overtaken by the daily burden of serving as Endicott’s chief aide and confidant.

 

But within days after Polly broached the subject of marriage she was treating it as one more of those tasks she neatly printed out on three-by-five cards each morning, listing in order of importance which of them she needed to complete that day. Within days, therefore, she had already determined that their wedding would be an extremely pared-down ceremony. More importantly, she had decided that neither of them would reveal to anyone that they were married until after the ceremony.

 

"I think that’s the best part, the element of surprise," she said. "As you may have guessed by now, I’ve never bought into the idea of the virginal bride dressed in white. And that whole march down the aisle— it’s as if I’m a family heirloom that my father hands over to a young man who vows to care and protect this very precious object that has just come into his possession. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but as much as it might disappoint my mother, I have no intention of letting her plan and supervise every detail of a day that should belong to me and you. Good gracious, if she got involved, she’d turn it into an extravaganza that would include the presence of at least three generations of every relative from both the Putnam and Carswell families."

 

Noonan fully agreed with Polly’s wishes since he didn’t feel that a crowd of people looking on would lend greater significance and meaning to the ceremony in which he and Polly vowed their everlasting love and devotion to each other.

 

Further progress on when the marriage would take place was then delayed for several weeks because of time constraints on Polly, but by the start of February, the prospect of a long weekend on President’s Day provided a perfect time, they felt, for the two of them to carry through on their sketchy wedding plans. On Saturday of that holiday weekend, Polly and Noonan were married by a justice of the peace whose breath at mid day smelled of liquor, and whose wife, the only witness to the ceremony, was clearly upset when she twice had to correct her husband as he stumbled over the reading of the marriage vows.

 

Each time, Polly and Noonan had stifled their laughter at the way the wife reacted to her husband’s mistakes by taking a deep breath and flaring her nostrils and looking as though she was about to elbow her husband aside. Noonan was better at restraining himself than Polly, who suffered a giggling fit so severe that it took her a second try before she was finally able to utter the words, "I do."

 

Immediately after the ceremony was over, they placed calls to both Polly’s parents and Noonan’s father, all of whom, presented with a fait accompli, had no choice but to extend their congratulations. There was talk by Polly’s mother about a family get-together that sounded very much like the kind of wedding reception she would have wanted her daughter to have, but when that would happen and what it would consist of was, by common agreement, put off for the time being.

 

Polly and Noonan then called a number of their friends, inviting them to join them that evening for drinks at a downscale bar near Harvard Square that was a favorite hangout for Noonan and some of his graduate school friends. Guests who arrived found a sign on the door telling regular patrons of the bar that it was closed that night for a private party.

 

Inside, Polly and Noonan’s friends were greeted by white-jacketed waiters who provided everyone with glasses of champagne and the kind of hors d’oeuvres not usually served at that particular venue. There was also a group of jazz musicians playing some quiet melodies. All that took away any element of surprise about the possible reason for the party, but there was loud cheering and applause, nevertheless, when Noonan, standing on a chair, announced that he and Polly were now married. The dancing and intermittent songfest that followed continued until closing time, when the Vietnamese bartender, in his best broken English, led everyone in a rousing rendition of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."

 

Moments after the newlyweds fell into bed that night, Polly, having drunk more champagne than usual, added a promise to her wedding vows. No matter how long it took her, she told Noonan, she intended to read every last line of Melville’s epic poem, Clarel.

 

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By the time Polly and Noonan were married, some of their friends and relatives had begun to wonder if their verbal thrust and parry was genuine. Was Noonan being serious when he triggered a fiery dispute with Polly over his insistence that no Hollywood film, even one acclaimed as a cinematic masterpiece, was as worthwhile as any of the British comedies starring Alec Guinness? And Polly, did she really think she could prove that people who worked in advertising were uniquely talented by citing over and over again the copywriter at Endicott’s agency who, years before, had a number of his poems published in The New Yorker?

 

All too often they came across as two old-time comics who were reluctant, or unable, to give up a routine that had always worked so well for them. Nothing seemed to give them as much enjoyment as firing off one-liners (or zingers, as Noonan called them) at each other that gained one of them a momentary advantage over the other. But there seemed to be a change in tone, a slight softening in their quarrels, once Noonan, eighteen months after they married, finished his dissertation and was awarded his doctorate. It didn’t make any sense by then, of course, for Polly to continue sniping away at Noonan for his sluggish work habits. Noonan, too, appeared to mute (or lessen in frequency) his derision of advertising once Polly became the only employee of Endicott’s agency who received, in addition to her handsome salary, a generous year-end bonus.

 

Both Polly and Noonan could, in fact, have claimed a victory of sorts—she, for having prodded him to finish his dissertation, and he, for having persisted with it even though he must have known it was unlikely to lead to a major reappraisal of Melville’s career. Or was it that Polly had decided, as an act of kindness, to refrain from further criticism of Noonan’s single-minded devotion to Melville’s poetry once it became apparent that his doctorate had done very little to enhance his job prospects?

 

All along Noonan had thought that his dissertation, because it was so unorthodox, might lend itself to the type of book published by an academic press. That, he figured, would give him a reasonable chance to compete for a tenure track position at one of Boston’s more prestigious universities. He even joked about how any of those universities might be eager to hire him because adding a champion of Melville’s poetry to its English department could be counted as a "diversity" hire.

 

Alas, proposals that Noonan made to various publishers failed to elicit any interest in a book project that argued for Melville as the American equivalent of Alfred Lord Tennyson. He did get two replies from publishers that were somewhat complimentary, but he received only standard letters of rejection from his applications to colleges and universities of any standing. By then he was exhausted from the final push to complete his dissertation and even more so by the spirited defense of his thesis he made before faculty members who only reluctantly—and then, with some reservations—conceded that Melville’s Clarel might be considered equal, at least in its scope and ambition, to Moby Dick.

 

More than that, though, he was so desperate to escape from his community college teaching jobs that he put aside, only temporarily, he maintained, his tendentious advocacy of Melville’s poetry. He then began to pursue a teaching position at those colleges in Boston that could more accurately be described as vocational schools. These were institutions that tried to boost their image (and ensure accreditation) by requiring students who were studying fashion design, say, or something like the principles of accounting, to take a smattering of liberal arts courses.

 

It took a little help from a boyhood friend, an actor of note in Boston theater, but Noonan was hired to teach freshman and sophomore survey courses in English and American literature at Windham, a college in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood that specialized in training its students for acting careers in theater and film. Noonan had no illusions about what his job would entail, not after the dean of the faculty at Windham so concisely explained the prevailing standard of instruction he expected from his non-theater instructors.

 

"Look, I’ll be upfront with you," the dean said. "What we’re looking for here is a broad brush approach. We have to. Our kids come here because they think we can help them get acting jobs, whether on stage or in front of a camera. That’s the only thing they care about. They tend to treat everything else as a waste of their time."

 

That was the precise moment when the Noonan who once told Polly that he tended to go left when everyone else was going right, and vice versa, became the Noonan who decided that if it was broad brush his masters at Windham wanted, then broad brush he would give them. Thus, his courses as he taught them—privately, he referred to them as "From Beowulf to Bellow in Five-Minute Factoids"—consisted of a spirited romp through English and American literary history by focusing (often for less than five minutes) on writers who represented major trends and developments.

 

But Noonan, with little interference from school administrators, gained the favor and goodwill of his students by turning over considerable class time to staged readings of well-known poems. Very cleverly, however, he urged students to "get into character" by asking them to explore the meaning and historic context of the poems he assigned them. Not all of them followed his advice, but those who did were able to deliver thoughtful and quite interesting renditions of poetry of every kind.

 

Noonan himself also spiced up his lectures with his own depiction of literary figures and impromptu renditions of episodes from well-known novels that he considered to be overwrought and worthy of parody. Not surprisingly, his favorite in this regard was Moby Dick. No Windham student would ever forget the sight of Noonan, the somewhat tweedy English professor, suddenly turning into Captain Ahab, as he tromped around the classroom in a peg-legged walk while bellowing about the gold doubloon he would reward the crew member of the Pequod who first spotted Moby Dick.

 

Noonan’s repertoire came to include his acting out of a bare-chested Walt Whitman flinging his arms out wide to embrace all mankind, along with his version of stoical Hemingway heroes talking in that stilted way of theirs about courage and grace and something called duende. He was not averse to adopting a pronounced southern accent when discussing the novels of William Faulkner or the plays of Tennessee Williams, and he could glide smoothly from his imitation of a shy, reclusive Emily Dickinson to a pitch-perfect presentation of Robert Frost’s New England farmer accent, and then throw in for good measure a deep-voiced version of Dylan Thomas reading Death Has No Dominion.

 

At other times, he strayed from whatever he was supposed to be teaching to engage in arguments, mostly with himself it seemed, about the merits of one writer over another while dismissing, usually with an anguished cry of pain, some literary trend or author he despised. Each year, his students could expect Noonan to devote half of one class to a long harangue in which, barely pausing to take a breath, he gave them all the reasons why they, like him, should think of D. H. Lawrence as the most overrated writer in the English language.

 

Noonan’s career at Windham reached its peak when, twenty years after he began teaching there, one of the school’s graduates won an Oscar. Then, when thanking everyone who had helped her to achieve success, she made special mention of Noonan, for having taught her, through poetry, she said, to seek out the depth and meaning of characters she played on stage and in film.

 

Two years later, the award-winning actress returned to Boston to make a film, and Noonan was her host when, with TV cameras and a contingent of news reporters following along, she met with students at Windham. Here again, she told of how valuable and useful her classes with Noonan had been. Noonan would never admit it, of course, but that he became known, at least in Boston, as the "mentor" of an actress on her way to becoming a Hollywood legend, was as satisfying to him as if he had helped Melville gain recognition as one of America’s leading poets.

 

Noonan, by then entering middle age, certainly had the look of a confident, respected academic when he made his way each morning from the condominium in a townhouse on Beacon Hill, where he and Polly lived, to his office at Windham, which was located in another townhouse, this one looking out on Commonwealth Avenue Mall. He was heavier than he had been when he met Polly, his facial features softer and rounder, and his hair, now beginning to grey, had been trimmed back so that it didn’t flop over any longer to one side or the other when he was in the middle of trying to win an argument. His suits, too, were more expensive and well tailored than the rumpled khaki trousers and sports jackets that were once his standard outfit, and he now carried a handsome leather brief case rather than a tattered backpack. Whether he intended it or not, by allowing his goatee to grow into a full beard and replacing his tiny horn-rimmed glasses with larger, more modern rimless ones, he had erased any resemblance between himself and Leon Trotsky.

 

Polly, unlike Noonan, changed hardly at all in appearance or manner as she approached middle age. But now she was more than the hard-working, purposeful aide whose job it was to carry out Endicott’s commands. She still did that, of course, but she had become the only person Endicott ever looked to for advice. In the privacy of Endicott’s office, she would let him know, tactfully most of the time, but bluntly when necessary, whether she disagreed with him on the thrust of a new ad campaign or why, for ethical reasons or good taste, he should refrain from taking on the account of a product that was of questionable value. She even had enough influence with him to express her disagreements on any hiring and firing decisions he was about to make.

 

Until Polly had turned 37, and Noonan was 41, they had been in general agreement—yes, every now and then that happened—about their decision to put off having children. The many discussions they had had about this issue always ended with both deciding that, one, they had more time before they needed to make such an important decision, and two, they had to take into account when, or whether, it would be possible for Polly to take maternity leave. The one person who felt a much greater sense of urgency about whether Polly and Noonan should become parents was her sister, Dorothea, who kept reminding Polly how rapidly fertility began to diminish once women reached their late thirties.

 

Since Polly’s work commitments always seemed to be the biggest factor in deciding whether they should become parents, she felt it was up to her to determine if and when she would become pregnant. She also sensed that it would not have bothered Noonan to wake up one day and find that it was too late for them to start a family. Thus, she decided, on her own, to launch what she referred to as the "pregnancy project."

 

She did so, with a dramatic flair, waiting until New Year’s Eve, when they were at a party with a group of their neighbors. Then, moments after everyone had celebrated the arrival of the New Year with champagne toasts and an off-key rendition of Auld Lang Syne, she nudged Noonan into a room away from the other partygoers.

 

"Bulletin, bulletin, bulletin," she said, in a giggly, light-hearted way. "Or is it surprise, surprise, surprise? But here’s my New Years’s resolution—I’ve decided to give myself a year in which to get pregnant. But if by midnight next New Year’s Eve, I’m not officially certified as pregnant, I’ll consider the matter over and done with."

 

Noonan was surprised, stunned in fact, at Polly’s announcement, and though he wanted to ask her why she had made such a momentous decision without first discussing it with him, he didn’t want to sound as if he might be trying to change her mind. He could see it was too late for that. So, he greeted her news with a hearty embrace, a fulsome kiss and then the whispered suggestion in her ear that they leave the party right then lest they waste any more time in trying to meet her deadline.

 

Within a few months, Polly’s doctor suggested to her that she would most likely need to undergo a fertility regimen in order to become pregnant. Polly was non-committal about that, only saying that she wanted to see if the old-fashioned way, as she called it, would work. But then in December, two weeks before her New Year’s Eve deadline, she informed the doctor that she had no interest in beginning fertility treatments since she was giving up her effort to become a mother.

 

That day she uncharacteristically arrived home well before Noonan. Equally unprecedented, she came into the front hall to greet him as he was hanging up his coat. It took her all of two sentences to inform Noonan of what had transpired between her and her doctor that day.

 

Noonan instinctively put his arms around Polly and began to say how this must have been a disappointment to her, but she cut him off, saying, "Relax. Look, I had a moment, a few sniffles in fact, but that’s it. That’s all I’m going to allow myself."

 

She then led him into their living room, where she already had a bottle of champagne on ice. While opening it, she told him, "I can’t think of a better way to end our campaign than with a champagne toast, which I, for one, surely deserve after a year of abstinence. You, likewise, should be celebrated for your whole-hearted and unforgettable participation in this endeavor. One last point about how things have turned out—I’m going to admit to you, and never to anyone else, how relieved I am that nature decided for me what I’ve always sensed, that I wasn’t well suited for motherhood."

 

Noonan, sipping his glass of champagne, decided to leave unsaid that he also felt likewise relieved at learning it wouldn’t be necessary for him, at his age, to take on the arduous tasks required of a new father.

 

That brief moment of comity did not mean they were beginning to mellow in any way. Polly wasn’t about to give up her constant criticism of Noonan for his tendency to gain weight, and Noonan just as routinely reminded Polly that she should try now and then to eat a healthy, nutritious meal rather than rely for sustenance on snacks and a steady ingestion of caffeine.

 

There seemed little likelihood, too, that they would ever reach some type of rapprochement on the tennis court, where fellow members of their tennis club would have dearly loved for Polly to mute both her constant badgering of Noonan for his cumbersome moves and her own overly dramatic grunts and oomphs when she served. Her soundtrack also included her triumphant yell when she won a set or her outrage (and barely stifled obscenities) whenever Noonan, who always looked as if he was lazing around, scored a point with a well-placed lob that barely cleared the net.

 

On their vacations, always limited in duration because of Polly’s work schedule, they were the couple who, whether in Paris or Rome or London, could be heard bickering over their itinerary or where they should dine or if they were dissatisfied enough with their hotel to switch to another. A major point of contention between them was Noonan’s preference to discover at leisure those areas not usually visited by tourists. Polly, not surprisingly, insisted that they follow her detailed hour-by-hour schedule that allowed them to squeeze in more visits to historic sites and museums in a week than most people could manage in a month.

 

Noonan finally decided, without any complaints from Polly, that it was far better for them to spend their vacation time at the Putnam family’s summer home in the White Mountains where he liked nothing better than to sit in an easy chair on the screened in front porch with a stack of novels by his side. Polly would join him for longish weekends, but her typical day in New Hampshire usually began with an early morning plunge into the chilly waters of the lake only steps away from the main house. Later, she would paddle her canoe across the lake to a small town where she bought the daily papers and supplies, and then, on her return, she might organize and lead a bevy of nieces and nephews on a long hike.

 

Increasingly, as the years went by, their most spirited flare-ups centered on their divergent political views. During the Vietnam years, Noonan had played an important role in supporting the Windham students who, always in colorful dress, became a fixture in anti-war protests all over Boston. Polly was never an overt supporter of the war, but she resented the turmoil engendered by war protests. Her innate conservatism got an added boost from her close ties to Endicott. He had become a prominent figure in the group of corporate executives, all male and all quite conservative, who seemed to think of themselves as unofficial overseers and protectors of Boston’s business community.

 

These political differences between Polly and Noonan began to sharpen even more once they moved to Beacon Hill and Noonan became active in the neighborhood association that kept zealous watch over the distinctive architectural character of the Hill, as its residents referred to it. Whether the issue was the renovation of a store front or the proper care and feeding of newly planted street trees, Noonan was deeply engaged in helping to enforce the strict guidelines mandated by Beacon Hill’s designation as a historic landmark district. The energy and vigor he put into protecting his own neighborhood from unsightly and out-of-scale developments led to his emergence as unofficial spokesperson for a loose alliance of Boston residents who were opposed to any building project anywhere in the city that might contribute in some way to a dreaded phenomenon they referred to as "Manhattanization."

 

In his letters to the editors of Boston’s two daily papers and with the op-ed pieces he contributed to neighborhood papers, and in his testimony at public hearings, Noonan warned in ominous tones of a city where high-rise towers would cast shadows that forever darkened Boston’s streets. He was as assiduous in pointing out multiple examples of how winds generated by high-rise buildings routinely swept pedestrians off their feet. When testifying at hearings about various development projects, there was always a moment when he brandished the poster-sized version of a photograph he had taken of two beefy security guards, who were themselves straining to remain upright, while they helped an older woman cross a wind-swept plaza leading to the entrance of Boston’s tallest building.

 

As dramatic as that photo was—and as eloquent as he was in his testimony—Noonan made little headway in stopping the construction of the oddly-shaped structures of glass and shiny metal that were rapidly replacing Boston’s stock of traditional brick and granite structures, none of which, as Noonan liked to say, drew attention to themselves. In his critique of these new and, at least to him, outlandish buildings, Noonan could make it sound as if the architects who designed them, and the developers who built them, were guilty of violating basic standards of morality and decency.

 

Polly naturally sided with the views of Endicott and his business associates who were not at all concerned about the possibility of "overbuilding" in Boston. She never said so outright, but her snide remarks about Noonan’s concern for preserving Boston’s historic character were similar to those she had once made about his attachment to the power and majesty of Melville’s poetry. (Polly had yet to reach a half-way point in her reading of Clarel.) Echoing the views of Endicott and his coterie of business leaders, she would chide Noonan for wanting to turn Boston into a theme park, something, she warned, that would result in a city much like perfectly-restored colonial Williamsburg.

 

Maybe, she used to tell him, if he kept at it, he might someday run for public office, maybe even get elected to serve as mayor of a city she referred to as Yesterdayville. One Christmas, she underscored Noonan’s desire to thwart new development—or for living in the past, as she often said—by giving him a complete outfit of clothing, from tri-cornered hat to frock coat and knee-length trousers and ruffled blouse that represented the height of fashion in colonial Boston.

 

The bickering between them on this subject took on an added dimension when the city’s largest developer, who happened also to be a client of Endicott’s agency, announced his plan to build a cluster of high-rise towers in a two-block area bordering that gem of Boston’s park system, the Public Garden. Within days, Noonan and his followers, had organized a series of "emergency" meetings throughout the city to warn Bostonians of the great harm that could come from this particular development. Noonan presided over each of these sessions, but he was accompanied by a professor from MIT, who presented a slide show that illustrated how shadows and wind created by the new project would kill off every last bit of greenery, from grass and trees to shrubs and flowers, throughout the Public Garden.

 

Noonan’s gambit did succeed in persuading state officials to delay approval of the project pending a detailed review of its impact on the surrounding area. That led to a declaration of war between the mayor of Boston, an avid backer of the project, and the governor of Massachusetts, who enjoyed nothing more than reminding the mayor that state government in many instances had the power to intervene in the governance of its capitol city. What followed was a political donnybrook, complete with wild accusations and counter arguments from both sides, along with the showboating and front-page headlines that were inevitable once different factions and interest groups all over the city allied themselves with either backers or opponents of the project.

 

The developer had been caught off guard by Noonan and his allies, but he, or more precisely, his trusted friend and adviser, Endicott, with the help of his trusted adviser, Polly, quickly responded with a series of full-page newspaper ads. These were essays, accompanied by charts and graphs and highlighted quotes from well-known economists and urban planners, that warned of dire consequences if this project did not receive approval. Boston, the ads asserted, was about to solidify its reputation as a city that was anti-growth and anti-business and its economy would be constrained (and doomed even) because of the whims and fancies of people who would put the fate of a flower bed over the city’s economic survival. The controversy reached its apex when thousands of hard-hat laborers staged a massive march on the Massachusetts State House demanding immediate approval of a project that would provide them with hundreds of jobs.

 

Oddly enough, but understandably too, Polly and Noonan were more guarded than usual during this time in expressing their disagreements between themselves since neither wanted to reveal the stratagems their respective sides were likely to pursue. Noonan was unaware, therefore, that Polly was the one who urged the developer to frame opposition to his project as class warfare. She, even more than Endicott, provided the developer with the finely-honed remarks in which he criticized well-off residents of Beacon Hill and Back Bay for dismissing the new jobs and tax revenues that would benefit those people who lived in the city’s less affluent neighborhoods. He had no idea, either, that Endicott had worked behind the scenes with leaders of labor unions to organize the hard-hat protest, or that Polly herself had written the pugnacious, somewhat humorous slogans for the picket signs carried by the demonstrators.

 

Polly and Noonan may have never shied away in the past from publicly airing their grievances with each other, but neither were pleased with the kind of attention that eventually came their way because they were on opposite sides of this issue. First, the gossip columnist at the tabloid paper in Boston speculated about the possible effect—negative, she seemed to think—this controversy would have on the marriage of a certain couple who lived on Beacon Hill. In her account, Noonan was depicted as a respected academic, but also somewhat of a snob because of his obsession with protecting the charm of his distinctly upper-class neighborhood. But Polly she portrayed as the tough-minded advertising executive working behind the scenes to get a project approved that would give the city an economic boost.

 

Polly and Noonan were somewhat amused to have attracted the attention of a columnist who was seen by most people as something of a comic figure because of her tendency to treat the latest peccadillo of some show business figure as earth-shaking news. They did not feel the same way about a column that appeared the next day in the other daily newspaper. That writer hailed Polly as a feminist hero because she was not afraid to work for the approval of a project that her husband so strongly opposed. She went so far as to make Polly seem like some Joan of Arc figure engaged in a battle to save Boston from economic stagnation and decline.

 

Polly’s reaction to the column was to wonder why she deserved to be admired for simply doing her job, but Noonan couldn’t help himself from scoffing at the Joan of Arc allusion.

 

Noonan’s response was a loud, "Wow—who is this saintly creature fighting for the right of a rapacious developer to profit from a business deal, regardless of its effect on the public?"

 

"Tut, tut," said Polly. "Could a certain someone be yearning to be seen as the hero who’s come to save the city from dark shadows?" Seconds later, cooing, she said, "Mon pauvre petit garcon, he wants so much to be appreciated."

 

That was the exchange between them in the morning, but that night, when Polly returned from work, she took a more serious tone when telling Noonan she knew why he so vigorously opposed the project she and Endicott were promoting.

 

"It has very little to do with the trees and the flowers in the Public Garden, of course," she said. "Anyone can see that your hostility is an outgrowth of your dislike of Endicott and the developer and all the other people who have achieved the success and wealth and public esteem that you both envy and despise. To me, your anger is that of someone who realizes he’s nothing more than an overhyped puppy barking and yelping and carrying on while chasing a car he’ll never catch."

 

"Nonsense," Noonan said, "fatuous nonsense, if I may repeat myself. But even if true—better a puppy chasing a car he’ll never catch than being the lackey of Endicott and his friends. Then again, you and your loathsome partner in crime would gladly do the bidding of any client, no matter the consequences. In the meantime, there’s a certain poetry, I think, rough and unfinished poetry at that, about a project whose looming shadows represent, both in symbol and substance, the disregard this developer and his enablers have for this city."

 

"Symbol and substance," Polly said. "Oh, I bet there isn’t an English class at any college in America where that phrase isn’t used at least once in every lecture. I prefer, however, to be on the side of of those people who live in the real world, people whose vision and commitment will help the city to remain a living, growing organism, not something to be preserved as a museum piece."

 

The next day, Polly and Noonan, and everyone else on both sides of the controversy, were surprised to learn that the governor and developer, negotiating in secret, had come to an agreement. The project would be allowed to proceed because the developer was going to reduce slightly its size and mass and change the shape and placement of its tallest tower so that shadows on the Public Garden would be reduced.

 

Many of Noonan’s associates felt they had won a decisive battle, but Noonan wasn’t about to claim victory, not when the developer would still be allowed to build a project that, even as modified, violated so egregiously all the city’s height and zoning requirements. No, to Noonan there was little reason to celebrate since the developer and his investors would still realize enormous profits from their project. His dismay was such that he announced his resignation from the group, saying it was time for some of his younger associates to fight the destruction of what he always referred to as "Boston’s human scale."

 

Polly wasn’t satisfied with the outcome of the controversy either. It bothered her that, through no fault of her own, she had drawn attention to herself since she always felt it was far better for Endicott’s firm if its work was credited solely to its owner. To her, that endowed Endicott’s agency with a mystique that was unavailable to any of its rivals. Personally, she also felt that she and Endicott had been used by a developer who once vowed never to reduce by one square foot the size of his project, but was now so lavish in his praise of the governor that he seemed to have forgotten her and Endicott’s efforts on his behalf.

 

Once again, for one brief moment, this similarity of feelings between Polly and Noonan seemed as though that might enable them to find some common ground. But only days after a dispute that had so divided the city was resolved, Polly’s father, who had been suffering from prostate cancer, passed away. Now, they found themselves involved in another conflict—but not between themselves this time, not at the start at least. Rather, this was a difference of opinion that arose between the female and male siblings of the Carswell family over the planning for their father’s memorial service.

 

Two years before, when Polly’s mother died, her funeral service consisted of her oldest son and oldest daughter delivering remembrances, and then two grandchildren reading some of their grandmother’s favorite poems. The Carswell siblings had thought they would hold a similar service for their father, but because he had been such a preeminent figure in his field—and also such a valued mentor to many younger surgeons—three of his colleagues and two surgeons who trained under him expressed an interest in eulogizing him. The Carswell brothers immediately expressed their opposition to having five eulogists. That would prolong the service they said, and they weren’t so sure all five of the surgeons had been that close to their father. Polly and Dorothea disagreed. They saw no problem, they said, with a service that included tributes to their father’s illustrious career.

 

Noonan knew enough not to involve himself directly in this familial face off, but he didn’t hesitate in letting Polly and Dorothea know that he sided with them and he quietly cheered when Polly took the lead in making their brothers feel as if they weren’t grown up enough to decide something as important as who should be allowed to speak at their father’s service.

 

"Oh come now, fellows," she told them, "what’s with this business of placing limits on the number of people who want to honor father in this way. I’m well aware that it may have been a burden for both of you to live in father’s shadow, but I should think you’re able to put up with one more round of testimonials to his greatness. Look, it may well be that these eulogists are trying to give the impression that they’re father’s equal in some way. That wouldn’t surprise me. But do we really know that? So, shouldn’t we, in the same spirit of openness and cordiality that father always showed towards his colleagues, permit anyone who wishes to speak to do so?"

 

Noonan was pleased, but discreet about it, when Polly’s brothers, wisely in his opinion, conceded to her wishes. He remained silent too when the memorial service with its spate of eulogies—all eloquent, but all somewhat repetitious—added a solid half hour to a service that took place on a hot, muggy afternoon in August, when there was hardly any air to breath in the small church near the family’s summer home in the White Mountains. He even stood next to Polly, placing a supportive hand on her shoulder, when she was forced to apologize, albeit half-heartedly, to her brothers and their wives for having argued on behalf of the five eulogists. By then, her apology didn’t matter very much since the brothers, and particularly their wives, had already told many of the guests at the post-service reception that Polly bore the entire blame for putting everyone through such a long and very uncomfortable afternoon.

 

Noonan was usually quite adept at discerning Polly’s moods, but later on, about fifteen minutes or so after they had begun their drive back to Boston from New Hampshire, he failed to notice that she might not welcome a light-hearted remark about how best to curb overly long memorial services.

 

"I decided something today," he told her. "When I die, I’m going to do all my friends one last favor—absolutely no eulogies. Also the venue must be air conditioned, and the entire service from start to finish, should last no more than five minutes."

 

Polly didn’t respond right away, so Noonan, rather impatiently, prodded her, saying, "I know you heard me, but if you didn’t I’m prepared to repeat myself."

 

"Of course I heard you," she said, "but it takes time to process such twaddle. And twaddle it surely was."

 

"Well thank you for that, but I’ve never cared for these weepy get togethers where people take turns showering encomiums and fulsome praise on a person who isn’t there to hear them. Frankly, I found today’s event a bit of a bore. Oh, the tributes may have been well deserved, but I felt as though we were caught up in a competition in which too many people were trying to ‘out mourn’ each other. A truly disgusting display, if you ask me. The only thing missing was a pack of professional mourners who, for a small fee, will wail and weep and put on quite a show. Personally, I want my leave taking to be a bit more restrained."

 

"So there you have it," Polly said, "a sterling example of someone using false modesty to cover his insecurity about himself. Oh, how noble of you to save the world from excessive mourning. But let’s be real here—this strikes me as a preemptive move by someone who’s not entirely sure how many people, if any, want to pay homage to his memory. Oh, that claque of yours, your Beacon Hill neighbors who want the city preserved in amber might shed a tear or two. And yes, there might even be a few of your former students who might want to say a kind word because you bought them off with higher grades than they deserved. Ah, but a simple, spartan service—that avoids the possibility of only a few people showing up to bid you farewell."

 

Noonan was about to parry Polly’s false modesty remark by reiterating more strongly his view that people should know how much they are appreciated and loved while they’re still alive, but it rankled him that she was drawing a comparison between the number of mourners who were eager to honor a surgeon who saved lives and the paltry few who were likely to pay tribute to an English professor at a second-rate college. Thus, Noonan’s even more pugnacious response.

 

"You know what?" he said. "Let me go one step further with this funeral business. When I die, I don’t want a funeral nor do I want anything resembling a so-called celebration of life, or any of the folderol we went through today. As far as I’m concerned, you may put my ashes out with the rest of the weekly garbage collection."

 

Noonan’s rejection of a conventional funeral, stated with such firmness, sounded a bit more extreme than he may have intended, and for a second or two, he wondered if he should amend slightly what he had said. But before he had a chance to say anything, Polly spoke up.

 

"Oh, why don’t you stamp your feet and have a hissy fit any three year old would envy. Look, it’s fifty-fifty on which of us will be in a position to determine how the other person’s passing is going to be commemorated, but here’s my plan if you kick the bucket before I do. I intend to give you a send-off that will be nothing less than a three-day festival of music and dance, a real bacchanal. Then we’ll top the whole orgiastic thing off with a firework display unlike anything ever seen in this part of the civilized world."

 

"You’ll be that happy to see me go? Or is this your admission that I’m worthy of a three-day blowout?"

 

"I’ll leave it to you to decide the underlying purpose of the celebration I have in mind."

 

Rarely did Noonan, or Polly for that matter, ever retreat from an argument, but this one time, mostly because Noonan was tired and sweaty he lacked the usual appetite to persist.

 

"Let’s drop it," he said. "I don’t think plans for my funeral are a matter of urgency right now. Besides, all I want at the moment is to get out of my sweaty clothes, take a refreshing shower, and then dive into a very dry ice-cold martini."

 

"You’ll get no argument from me on that," Polly said, "but one last point: If the coin flips so that I go first, I require you, I implore you, I order you, to honor me with a funeral ceremony that’s appropriate and fitting. No limit, either, on the eulogists. Otherwise, I swear, I will return to haunt your days and nights."

 

section break

 

 

Quite often the quarrels between Polly and Noonan were quick little outbreaks that consisted of a sarcastic remark from one prompting a sharp reply from the other. There was usually no great harm, no tell-tale bruises at least, done by these quick tit-for-tat exchanges. Also, the duration of these altercations was similar to that of a summer squall, when an ominous cloud suddenly appears followed moments later by a torrential downpour that almost as quickly gives way to bright sunshine and little evidence that anything happened except for a puddle of water here and there by the side of the road. But their differences over the rituals that accompanied death bore a resemblance to an underground fire smoldering away in an abandoned coal mine, emitting years after year toxic vapors and fumes.

 

Strangely enough, this was one dispute between themselves they didn’t share with others. It was as if they had decided, without ever saying so, to be more circumspect than they had been after the public airing of their differences became so well known during the brouhaha over the project proposed by Endicott’s client.

 

Polly’s father died when she and Noonan were still in their fifties, so there was no need for them to resolve just then their differences about how they wanted their own deaths to be commemorated. But their opposing views on the subject of final rites in general led to red-hot disputes once it became apparent that Noonan had decided, as some form of personal protest, not to attend funerals and memorial services for various friends and relatives.

 

It wasn’t as though this was a policy he announced. Rather, it began to make itself known not long after the memorial service for Polly’s father, when he failed to attend the funeral for a colleague who had been a close friend. That struck Polly as so odd that she asked him why he hadn’t gone to the service. Noonan first said he had been too busy, but when she said that sounded like a flimsy excuse, he told her it was a matter of taste.

 

"I’m sure everyone paid tribute to my old friend’s professional achievements," he said, "and that’s just fine with me. He was a helluva teacher, way better than just about everyone else at Windham, yours truly included. But I’d bet my life there wasn’t a whisper about his well-known affair with a neighbor and how that nearly caused both the destruction of his marriage and that of his lover’s, with painful aftereffects that hovered over both families for years."

 

Polly didn’t think much of that explanation either. Promptly, she let Noonan know that showing respect for the dead—and expressing condolences to a grieving family—was far more important than how one might feel about the sins and transgressions of the person who had died. A person’s death, she said, was a good time for forgiveness and forbearance and should not be seen as an opportunity to revisit shortcomings and failings.

 

Noonan shrugged his shoulders at that, but soon after, when a cousin, who had been close to Noonan and his brother, had a stroke and died, Noonan missed her funeral because he claimed to be suffering from the intermittent sciatica that made it difficult for him to walk. Polly might have accepted his reason for missing out on that funeral if he hadn’t within two days experienced a miraculous recovery. When Polly raised a question about the sudden disappearance of his sciatica, he told her that it was his sincere hope she would never experience the kind of pain that made it impossible to stand on one’s feet, let alone walk.

 

"You know what’s remarkable?" Polly said. "Since I was there, I saw people at that funeral who used canes and walkers, even one couple, old friends, who came although they were in wheel chairs."

 

That skirmish was followed by a more serious one a year later, when Noonan made an exception to his non-attendance at funerals after an uncle, his mother’s brother, passed away. But he ended up walking out of the funeral mass because, he claimed, the fumes from the incense so liberally spread by the priest caused his eyes to water and affected his breathing. Polly responded to that by saying the odor of incense, while it could be annoying, was hardly life-threatening.

 

Noonan explained something similar had happened to him years before at his father’s funeral, and while he had put up with it then, he vowed never to sit through anything like that again. He could see no reason either why he should have to put up with the possibility of a coughing fit and constricted breathing because of an ancient practice, now unnecessary, that was meant to offset the odor of a decomposing corpse.

 

"That’s it for me and funerals in Catholic churches," he said. "With Catholics, it’s all theater, especially when it comes to funeral masses. Priests like to take advantage of the final send-off to roll out all the mystery and mysticism they love so much. Here’s something you probably didn’t know, those wisps of smoke from the burning incense—they’re supposed to connote the freeing of the soul from the body as it ascends towards heaven? Bullshit like that I don’t need."

 

Noonan’s policy of non-attendance at funeral rites seemed to broaden beyond his critique of Catholicism when he managed to avoid the memorial service for a former president of Windham College. In that instance, he used as an excuse a scheduling conflict he had with a visit to his ophthalmologist to prepare for his upcoming cataract operation. Polly couldn’t very well object to that, but then, two weeks later, Noonan didn’t even offer an excuse for his absence at the funeral of a Beacon Hill resident who had labored so diligently to stop the development project that presented a threat to the Public Garden. Polly wasted no time in asking Noonan if this was his way of honoring the memory of a neighbor who had financed the shadow study that helped to get the project somewhat modified.

 

"Au contraire," Noonan said. "I expressed my thanks and appreciation many times to my old friend and neighbor. But I did so when he was alive, and that’s what’s important. It’s by far the best time to let people know that you care about them."

 

That’s when Polly said she didn’t know why she kept trying to talk sense to someone who was, in her exact words, pigheaded and stubborn and ignorant too.

 

"Why is it so hard for you to understand the simple, straight forward idea of respect?" she said. "People all over the world, people from dozens of different cultures, all have ways to show respect for the dead. Why, there are even indications that animals seem to follow various forms of ritualistic behavior associated with grieving for the dead."

 

"Oh, paying one’s respects," Noonan said. "Please explain to me, in fifty words or less, what this ‘respect’ stuff is all about. To me, it’s just feel-good talk, greeting card sentimentality at best. Or is it transactional, a debt that must be paid? And does that mean you can expect respect in return? Hey, maybe you’re one of those people who take seriously the cautionary warning of Yogi Berra, who’s supposed to have said, ’You don’t go to your friend’s funeral, he’s not going to come to yours.’"

 

Polly didn’t think that was funny, and the thought that Noonan would try to rebuff her with a Yogi Berra joke made her all the more determined to attend various funerals and memorial services, and even to offer up vague excuses, on Noonan’s behalf, for why he was unable to accompany her. Then each time she returned home she would explode in anger, letting Noonan know that she was tired of making excuses for someone who was an ill-mannered oaf. Noonan didn’t usually put up much of a fight except to repeat his bromide about how he preferred to let people know he cared about them when they were still alive.

 

Noonan’s repugnance at funerals and memorial services eventually extended to his amusement at various kinds of obituaries. He liked to irk Polly by reading some of them out loud to her and then adding his comment about how the obituary failed to include some piece of information about the deceased that might have been embarrassing. He specialized in singling out the death notices of people who were known cheats and liars, corrupt politicians, for instance, whose family members were sure to include some comment in the obit about—felonious behavior aside—what a generous, giving soul this person had been. He could be even harsher in his judgment of friends and acquaintances whom, he knew from personal experience, didn’t measure up to all the claims made about them in their published obituaries.

 

Death, he liked to say, was the great erasure of inconvenient facts. In his view, no sooner was the last breath taken than the process of divination began. His voice filled with anger, he would wonder how someone who was an out-and-out sinner could be seen as, yes, someone, if you really knew him or her, was deep down—so deep nobody ever noticed—a wonderful human being, a person of honor and integrity. Such schmaltz, he would say, such absolute and utter nonsense, it was enough, he often said, to make him gag. It was his contention, mentioned repeatedly to Polly, that if half the people who died were as kind and generous and loving as depicted in their death notices, the world would become a paradise overnight.

 

"You can be a lousy, stinking son of a bitch," he often said, "but die, and overnight you become, courtesy of the obituary writer, caring and self-effacing, the living embodiment of sainthood."

 

Most of the time Polly ignored him, but now and then she wondered why it mattered so much to him that people, confronted with death, found some comfort in focusing on the good qualities of the deceased. She herself didn’t feel there was any harm in glossing over a few peccadillos of the deceased if that helped survivors to grieve.

 

Once, she said to him, "Look, if you’re so intent about more honesty in obituaries, why don’t you set an example? Write one about yourself that’s unsparing. No punches pulled, no shortcomings left out. Put it in the first person. Say that you want to be remembered as the author of the world’s first, truly, one hundred percent honest obituary. Oh, wouldn’t that be something? Note, I said honest. No cheating. So, here it is folks, for your edification and delight, the obituary of a man who’s prepared, as his farewell, to boast of having been selfish, petty, uncaring and egomaniacal to the nth degree."

 

No need for that, he told her, since he didn’t care to have an obituary. Then, for the first time, but not the last, he said that he intended to pass from this world without attracting any more attention than when he had entered it.

 

"Yeah," he said, "to me, funerals are overdone and unnecessary, and I have no use for obits since they so rarely tell the real truth about anyone."

 

There were people, some of Noonan’s relatives for example, who eventually took note of his lack of attendance at funeral rites, but it wasn’t as though they were going to press Polly on whether the excuse she offered for Noonan’s absence was valid. The few times anyone chose to comment to Noonan himself for missing a particular funeral, he chose to slough it off by citing one ailment or another, but in some instances, particularly with close friends, he would admit that he didn’t care much for what he referred to as the "death business."

 

There was an instance, when it seemed as though Polly’s attending various funerals on Noonan’s behalf might come to an end. The son of one of her cousins, a young man just 30 years old, died in a mountain climbing accident. It happened that his mother, a widow, was also undergoing treatment for breast cancer. When Polly returned from that funeral, her anger was such that she seemed as if she was about to attack Noonan physically.

 

"I’m a fool and an idiot," Polly said, when she began telling Noonan how once again she had to lie for him. "Here’s this woman, grief stricken, just devastated. She’s also so weakened by her chemo treatment that she was shaky on her feet, but she found it within herself to ask about you. And what was I supposed to do, tell her that this great tragedy in her life mattered so little to you that you stayed home because you were suffering from a tummy ache? How do you think that would have made her feel? So I told her you were suffering a severe GI problem, one that left you miserable and in great pain. Is it any wonder, then, that I see myself as a fool and an idiot? Why, I ask, do I debase myself in this way? Then again, do I have any other choice? What am I supposed to do, admit that I was stupid enough to marry someone who is insensitive and unfeeling?"

 

"Okay, here’s the new policy," Noonan said. "You are free, at any funeral you attend, to say whatever you want about me. Say that you’re married to a lout, a no-good bastard, someone so self-centered he doesn’t care about anyone but himself."

 

"Gladly," she said, "and before I’m through I’m sure I’ll come up with a few more adjectives to describe what a jerk you can be."

 

Then, as a coda to that exchange, she reiterated the vow she had made to him years before, that if he passed away before her, she was going to hold a three-day festival of music, dance and entertainment in observance of his death.

 

"And then, to put a little frosting on the cake, I’m going to top it all off—I don’t care what you say—with an obit, a real lallapalooza, no whitewash, no glossing over facts, just a vivid, unsparing account of how selfish and self-absorbed one person can be."

 

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The funeral issue Polly and Noonan occasionally argued about seemed to lessen in importance once they were facing issues that were more pressing and immediate than how their deaths were to be observed. Until Noonan turned seventy, his many complaints about his health seemed like so much background noise, but that began to change when six months after his seventieth birthday he suffered a heart attack his doctor called a "warning." Although Noonan recovered, and for the first time in his life acquiesced to his doctor’s advice to lose weight and exercise more, his chronic back problem, along with a bothersome hip and his on-again, off-again stomach issues, all became so pronounced that Polly no longer needed to come up with excuses for why he failed to attend various funerals or memorial services.

 

At the same time, Polly was facing an enormous question that hovered over her career, specifically, what would happen if, or when, Endicott, now in his mid-seventies, decided to retire. Not that Endicott ever felt any reason to discuss that matter with anyone, including Polly. But then, a year or so after Noonan’s heart attack, Endicott, at age 76, had a similar experience, but he shrugged off his doctor’s advice that he should retire. He likewise ignored similar pleas, more ardently expressed, by his wife and his two daughters, neither of whom cared at all about the advertising business.

 

Within Boston’s advertising community, there was always gossip and speculation about the future of Endicott’s firm, but Endicott himself remained steadfastly silent about what he might be thinking. Then, one day, without any warning, he called Polly into his office and handed her a press release that was about to be issued in fifteen minutes. That’s how she learned that Noonan had sold his firm to a large New York agency.

 

Polly barely had a chance to react before Endicott informed her that, as a condition of the sale, she would be named head of the new firm’s Boston office. Or as he put it, "I wouldn’t have done this unless I knew that you’d still be running things around here."

 

Endicott then disclosed another provision of the sales agreement, one which, he said, was framed in a legal contract. That guaranteed Polly handsome compensation for the rest of her life even if she was fired by the new owners, or decided, on her own, to leave the agency. Two potential buyers of Endicott’s agency had refused that demand, and the firm that finally purchased Endicott’s agency did so only after he reduced his asking price by a significant amount. Thus, Endicott, in his own way, managed to provide Polly with a share of the proceeds from the sale of his agency.

 

More importantly, Endicott’s foresight proved to be extremely valuable to Polly because two years later, she lost out in a power struggle with the New York office and was replaced by someone who was twenty years younger. Polly was allowed, however, as per another clause in the sales agreement, to keep her title and even to keep her office. Unfortunately, the new owners were under no obligation, legal or otherwise, to acknowledge the existence of their highly-paid shadow employee.

 

Noonan sympathized with the drastic change in Polly’s career, but by then he was dealing with a botched hip surgery that left him unable to walk without the assistance of a cane. That imposed some difficulty on him because the condominium he and Polly bought when they were younger was two flights up, on the top floor of a building that was located at the apex of one of Beacon Hill’s steepest streets. That provided them with an unimpeded view across the rooftops of Beacon Hill towards the Charles River, and for many years an invitation to summertime cocktail parties on their roof deck was so highly prized it became an unofficial but meaningful indication of social status among their neighbors.

 

Noonan’s situation grew more dire a year after his operation when, for the sake of his stability, he began to use a walker. That’s when he retired from Windham because it became too difficult for him, particularly in the winter, to negotiate the broken, irregular brick sidewalks of Beacon Hill even for the short distance between the doorway of his building and a waiting taxi cab. Those sidewalks, incidentally, had also caused Polly by then to give up wearing her high heels when coming and going to her office.

 

Polly and Noonan had always known that they would have to move to a safer, more convenient location when they grew older, but it was devastating for both of them when they sold the condominium they so loved. The bland box-like apartment building they moved to in downtown Boston was without any steps or other hazards, but that did little to improve Noonan’s downcast mood once another health issue, an incipient lung condition, became more serious. At the same time Polly was trying to adjust, without much success, to being treated by the agency’s new owners as if she were just another piece of office furniture.

 

Noonan, in particular, was semi-serious when he claimed that the view out his apartment windows of new buildings rising up all over the city were a form of revenge visited upon him by the Gods of Ugly Architecture because he had so strongly objected to new development in Boston. Otherwise, he watched endless hours of British mysteries on television, followed much too closely each day’s news developments and read only novels he had read before because he considered them so superior to any contemporary works. That still left him with enough time to obsess (and complain) about his various health problems.

 

Polly at least went regularly to her health club and two or three times each week had lunch with old friends. She also made a point of dropping by her office for brief periods each day in much the same way as a religious devotee would visit a site associated with the sect’s founder. She still looked when she entered her office as if she was busily following through on a directive from Endicott even though she did little more while there than catch up on her personal email or take a quick (but furtive) stab at solving a crossword puzzle. She was perfectly groomed, of course, with her hair tinted so that it remained as dark as it had always been, but neither the minor surgical procedures she had had done to her face, nor the colorful scarves and clothing with high collars she favored, offset other obvious signs of aging.

 

That both now felt as though they had been cast aside and rendered irrelevant seemed to take the spark out of the barbed comments and snippy exchanges that had characterized their relationship from its earliest days. They grumbled and complained as always, but Noonan’s distaste for Boston’s new skyline was treated by Polly as stale news. Noonan, likewise, was unmoved by Polly’s distress at seeing Endicott’s legacy being subsumed by the flash and glitter that was a hallmark of his agency’s new owners.

 

But however bereft Polly was at having become a person of little consequence, she was more alarmed at the effect Noonan’s lassitude was having on his health and well-being. Consequently, with the same energy and vigor that made her so indispensable to Endicott, she began badgering Noonan—they hadn’t completely given up on badgering each other—about how this was an ideal time for him to revive his work on behalf of Melville’s poetry. Noonan evinced little interest in that at first, claiming that he didn’t have the strength it would take to engage in such a monumental task. But Polly, persisting, sounded much like the Noonan of past years when she kept reminding him that he was the one person who could right the injustice done to Melville by all those people who refused to acknowledge his poetry, let alone read it.

 

Within a few weeks Noonan began to respond to her goading, but when he finally did take out his Melville material and began reviewing it, he did so with the air of someone who was leafing through photos and keepsakes from some long ago vacation trip. His interest did seem to quicken somewhat when Polly began talking about how with the passage of time some publisher might see the value of a critical study about Herman Melville that didn’t focus on Moby Dick. That caused him finally to begin some serious editing of his dissertation, mostly to shorten its length.

 

By then, Polly, on her own, had already formulated a plan to get Noonan’s dissertation turned into a book. Her first step was to seek advice from two of her former Beacon Hill neighbors who once held executive positions in book publishing. Neither were particularly optimistic about the prospects of the book she outlined to them, but one of them helped her to get in touch with a publisher in Toronto who specialized in books of narrow and limited appeal.

 

Simultaneously, Polly had begun, along with Noonan, to research possible publishers for Noonan’s book. In doing so, she had come upon, she claimed, a publisher in Toronto who seemed as if he might be interested in Noonan’s book. Noonan had no idea, of course, that Polly had already been in contact with that publisher. In that initial conversation she had with him, the publisher had expressed some interest in the book Polly told him about, but he was far more intent in explaining to her how difficult it was to turn a profit from books that were written by academics to be read only by other academics.

 

Polly listened patiently to the publisher, but finally she interrupted him to say that this would not be the case with the Melville book because she was amenable to buying however many copies it would take to cover the costs associated with its publication. Indeed, with her purchase, he could anticipate that his profits on this book would be far greater than what he earned from any of the other books he published.

 

"Oh, let me tell you something," the publisher said, "we may be a small house, but we are not a vanity press."

 

"I’m not talking about vanity publishing," she said. "But what’s wrong, say, if you receive enough advance orders—all from me, of course—to cover all your costs and more, much more I should add. Look, I’ll be frank with you—what I’m looking for is to get this book, as soon as possible, into my husband’s hands. Did I already mention to you that he’s not in the best of health? Of course I did. And yes, his health problems are such that at any time they could worsen. So, think of this as a humanitarian gesture, but one for which you will be nicely compensated."

 

The publisher didn’t answer right away, but after taking a moment to absorb Polly’s offer, he agreed to her proposition. He was adding Noonan’s book to his spring list, he said, which meant it would be available in four months.

 

"Three months," Polly said, "and you’ll earn yourself a bonus."

 

In the meantime, Polly, with Noonan’s help, also prepared and sent the manuscript of Noonan’s book to several publishers connected to universities, but it was Polly’s assumption, rightly, it turned out, that none of them were likely to express any interest in Noonan’s book. In fact, by the time Noonan had begun to receive letters of rejection from those other publishers, he was already talking daily to a publisher in Toronto who was quite excited about publishing a book that would focus on a sadly neglected aspect of Melville’s career.

 

But within a month after his book had been accepted, Noonan suffered a setback when he came down with pneumonia. This had happened to him the year before, but his recovery this time went more slowly and it left him in a weakened condition. Polly was concerned enough to contact the publisher and offer him another bonus if he could get the book to her within the month. By then, Noonan, who would have been deeply involved in dealing with last-minute details before the book went to press, had willingly ceded that function to Polly.

 

As soon as copies of the book were available, Polly hosted a publication party, and as she expected, on the day of the event, Noonan seemed to have turned twenty years younger. That same opinion about Noonan’s appearance and manner was frequently expressed by the invited guests, which included some of his old neighbors from Beacon Hill and former colleagues from Windham, as well a number of those allies who had worked with him to stop, or at least slow, Boston’s plunge into modernity.

 

Polly had planned a set program in which certain guests were going to pay proper tribute to Noonan, but somewhat prematurely Noonan seized the floor by saying he wanted to point out a serious shortcoming of his book. Then, holding up the book itself, he said that everything about it met with his satisfaction, except for the failure on its front cover and title page to list Polly as his co-author because without her the book would not exist.

 

That elicited loud applause, which Noonan responded to by beginning to detail how his book addressed the manifold sins of the White Whale cult, but after only a few moments his voice grew scratchy and began to fade. That’s when Polly, with a subtle clearing of her throat, told Noonan, in a light-hearted vein, that it might be a good idea to let people read what he had written rather than listen to him tell them about it. She then introduced the president of Windham, who announced that the school’s trustees, in gratitude for Noonan’s long and distinguished service, had voted to name the school’s library after him. More congratulatory remarks were delivered by several other guests, but the highlight of the event came when Noonan’s brother, fighting back tears, expressed his regret for never having fully understood, or appreciated, Noonan’s commitment to scholarship and learning. It was not lost on Noonan, or Polly either, though neither of them said so outright, that the comments made at the publication party resembled very closely what was likely to have been said at a memorial service.

 

The party itself helped to lift Noonan’s spirits but did little to help him overcome the effects of the medication he was taking to cure his lung infection. Even more frustrating to him, he lacked the energy to carry through on his ambitious plans to promote his book. Then, three weeks after the party, he went off to take his afternoon nap, and later, when Polly tried to wake him, she found that he had passed away in his sleep.

 

Polly honored Noonan’s wishes about no funeral and decided after much thought to honor his wish that there be no published obit. She settled for sending out a large number of emails announcing Noonan’s death and then added that, at his request, there would be neither a funeral nor a published obituary. She did not follow through on her threat to hold a three-day celebration to mark his death, nor did she comply with the comment Noonan made after her father’s funeral—and repeated several times over the years—that it would be just fine with him if his ashes were put out with the weekly garbage collection. But, unable to decide what she should do with his cremains, she put the urn on a shelf in her bedroom closet. As her own very personal tribute to Noonan, she took up again her laborious reading of Clarel, but she still hadn’t finished when, a little more than a year after Noonan’s death, she too passed away.

 

Polly’s friends and family were always puzzled about the rapid decline in her health after Noonan died. She wasn’t seriously ill—she had no cancers and no signs of heart disease—but six months after Noonan’s death she had a bad fall when coming out of her shower, and though she suffered no fractures, she was badly bruised and quite shaken. After her fall she began to have dizzy spells, which kept her from going to her health club, and more significantly, her office. Also after the fall, she lost weight and developed a bothersome cough, and almost overnight, became quite frail. Then, eight months to the day she fell, she suffered an aneurysm in her brain that left her in a comatose state, and three days later she died. She still hadn’t made a decision on what should be done with Noonan’s ashes.

 

But right after her fall, she had outlined a plan for her own memorial service to Dorothea. The ceremony, she said, should take place at the Putnam family’s summer home, and it should be held on the last weekend in the fall, usually near Columbus Day, when the house was closed for the winter. She hoped that her brothers and her sister and their spouses and children would gather late in the afternoon on the gracious lawn that led down to the shoreline of their lake. She wanted a brief eulogy, one similar to the remembrance that Dorothea had given at their mother’s memorial service. She also requested that all the family members join in singing a selection of the old favorites they had always sung after their outdoor barbecues on summer nights. Finally, she hoped that her oldest nephew and oldest niece would row out a short distance into the lake, where they would deposit her ashes.

 

She had once told Dorothea that she had stored Noonan’s ashes in her bedroom closet because she had no idea what she should do with them. That’s when she also revealed to Dorothea, briefly and without much commentary, Noonan’s opposition to funeral rituals of any kind, which left her, she said, uncertain about exactly how to commemorate his death.

 

Then, with a laugh, she added, "Well, doing nothing was what he wanted, so that’s exactly what I’ve done."

 

It was Dorothea’s decision, then, with the permission of the executor of Polly’s estate, to take possession of Noonan’s ashes and to include its disposition in the ceremony she was holding for Polly. She made sure the urn was visible during the ceremony for Polly, but having heard of Noonan’s dim view of funeral rituals, she made only a brief reference to him in her remarks about Polly.

 

On the day of the service, almost as if ordered by Polly, it was a sparkling clear autumn day, with the sun shining brightly although it was cool enough by late afternoon so that everyone in attendance had put on sweaters and caps. In her remarks, Dorothea paid tribute to Polly as strong-minded, diligent, and filled with energy. Indeed, she said that if Polly could have been connected to the power grid, she could have lit up half of Boston. Her one mention of Noonan only backed up what she had noted about Polly’s sense of commitment and duty to her work.

 

"Leave it to Noonan," she said, "but in that inimitable way of his he once told me that if Harold Endicott called Polly at midnight—which was not that unusual by the way—with an idea for an ad featuring a live elephant, Polly would not only show up the next morning with the elephant, but would have walked into Endicott’s office carrying it on her shoulder."

 

Then, after the songs were sung, the niece and nephew who had been chosen to carry out the spreading of the ashes, got into a row boat. The nephew rowed, while the niece, sitting across from him, cradled both urns in her arms. When they reached their chosen spot, about fifty yards offshore, they stopped and rested for a few moments while looking out towards the setting sun. The lake was so smooth the boat hardly moved while the niece and nephew waited for the sun to reach a point where it began to fall behind the wooded ridge at the other other end of the lake. When that happened, both got to their feet, and at the precise moment the sun was about to slip completely from view, they lifted the urns up and poured Polly and Noonan’s ashes into the lake. When they had finished, everyone assembled on the grassy slope responded with a round of applause.  End of Story