There is nothing so sobering as a funny man getting serious. Mike Royko proved it so with “A November Farewell,” the column he wrote of his wife’s death. New Yorker contributor Calvin Trillin does the same in this perfect little remembrance of his wife, Alice, who died five years ago.
Known to readers of Trillin’s humorous books as the stern, amusingly particular woman who ran his household, Alice emerges here as flesh and blood. Pretty, engaged, a terrific mother, she was apparently a little out of Trillin’s league in the looks department. Her beauty inspired Trillin’s best material. “I was like a lounge comic who had been informed that a booker from ‘The Tonight Show’ was in the audience,” he remembers of their first meeting.
Trillin never seems to have gotten over his own good luck – nor did his colleagues and cohorts. “At parties, she often attracted what I called ‘guys smoking pipes,’ who wanted to impress her with their suavity,” Trillin writes. “He wasn’t smoking a pipe, by the way,” she’d say, knowing which guy I was talking about when I mentioned ‘that guy with a pipe,’ as we discussed a party on the way home.”
In other words, Trillin didn’t rest on his laurels but tried to keep up the laughter – and as a writer he says “the sound of her laughter from the next room was a great reward.” There is nothing quite so hard as explaining why another person’s affection is the sunrise and sunset, but Trillin manages it here in remarkably few words.
Cycling through his memories, Trillin also helps us get to know this committed educator and outspoken woman. She was the kind of person who could ask New York Gov. George Pataki, after he delivered a passionate speech about his father asking the Yale dean of admissions how in the world he was supposed to afford tuition on a postal worker’s salary, “Why in the world are you a Republican?” In a city of chain-smokers, she was an ardent proponent of a smoking ban.
Alice Trillin came to this conviction because she grew up in a house of smokers, and she had her own first operation for lung cancer at 38 (without having been a smoker). She was incredibly unlucky – and then got a reprieve. As Trillin reveals here, chemotherapy bought her 25 more years before her heart gave out. It is clear from this beautiful, and elegant, remembrance that for her adoring husband, even 100 wouldn’t have been enough.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
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About Alice
By Calvin Trillin
Random House, 78 pages, $14.95
