Becoming Duchess Goldblatt

by Duchess Goldblatt

Obviously, answering it was out of the question. Let me be perfectly clear: I love him and he’s my favorite of favorites, but even on my best day, even when I’m wide awake, I’m in no way emotionally coherent enough to handle a phone call from Lyle Lovett at 3 a.m.

Not until people start seeing typos eating out of their garbage cans at night will they regret hunting proofreaders almost to extinction.

I wanted there to be a home in this world where I could walk in the front door without knocking. What an unimaginable intimacy it would be to be welcome to walk into someone else’s home without knocking.

I’m thinking about auctioning off my handwritten journal of grave misgivings to benefit the Crooked Path Community Orchestra.

“There are some specific things you can do to bring about the most positive long-term outcome possible,” my consigliere told me. (Technically, she wasn’t a consigliere; she was a child psychologist, but I figured she was as close as I would ever get.)

“The best possible outcome is that he gets through this intact and healthy, and if that happens, it’s going to be because you’re the one who sees to it. Do you understand? You can say nothing negative to him about other people in his family, and I mean nothing. Never, ever, ever.”

“When you have to say something, say something kind. Say something helpful. Dig deep.”

I remind myself that this has always been a refuge for the brokenhearted. If any of you need a friend today, let me know.

When someone you love dies, you lose them in pieces over time, but you also get them back in pieces: little fragments of memory come rushing back through what they cared about, what brought them joy. If you’re lucky, you get little pieces back for the rest of your life. Some loves you don’t recover from.

But whenever Duchess Goldblatt mentions the choir of angels and saints cheering her on, she’s counting Elmore Leonard first among them. All the lights are dimmed in Crooked Path tonight, friends, and every house a house of mourning. We have said goodbye to one of our dearest.

A fun summer activity in Crooked Path is to pack a picnic basket and a bottle of wine and come out to watch me write on a clay surface.

Don’t let anyone shame you for your love of an imaginary friend. Religions have been founded on less.

Some of them actually did; they gathered at her portrait and took their pictures there, and then had lunch together, I think. One of them wrote to her about it: “I believed that for me there would never again be friends, or love, or trust, or joy. I thought my life was a matter of waiting for it to stop. The Duchess, her joinings, her faith, her words, her friendship, her insistence I not surrender—she has made a miracle and I can never, ever repay her. Thank you, your grace, for all this love and light you have brought to me.”

“Why do people call her ‘your grace’?” Chuck asked me, reading this over my shoulder. “They think she’s a real duchess,” I said. “They think she’s real?” “Oh, no. They know she’s not real. Not real-real. They think she’s a fictional character who’s supposed to be a duchess. Or they think she’s a fictional character who thinks she’s a duchess.” “But she’s not?” “No. She knows Duchess is only her first name. I told you I named her after the dog.” “Why don’t you correct them?” “She won’t let me,” I said. “She loves being called ‘her grace.’” “I think you need more medication,” he said. “Oh, there’s no question,” I said. “Trouble is they don’t make enough.”

Whenever two or more of you are gathered, you must raise a glass and cry out with one joyful voice, “LONG LIVE DUCHESS GOLDBLATT!”

It bothered me because it wasn’t the yarn I was spinning. There must be a contract between us, storyteller and listener: I will do the work of telling the tale as long as you do the work of believing in it. We all must agree to believe that Mr. Darcy is rich, or Pride and Prejudice falls apart. We have to agree that Owen Meany is tiny, that Jane Marple is knitting in a small village, that hobbits live in shires, and that Duchess Goldblatt is a gorgeous elderly woman in love with the world and everyone in it.

How do I save myself, Duchess? I keep trying to tell them Duchess doesn’t exist beyond what can be put on the page, a tidbit at a time. That’s all there is or ever can be. It’s a grab bag of love and friendship and hope, as much as you can carry away in 140 characters, and it’s there for everyone who wants it, but behind the curtain, I’m a regular person standing by myself, and I don’t have anything else to give. Some of you have been coddled too long. I’m not cutting the crusts off these sentences for you anymore.

After we’d worked together for a while, he started saying, “Yeah, you’re smart, all right. I can’t deny it, but boy, only in certain areas, right?” “I don’t know what you mean,” I’d say. (I knew what he meant.) After another six months or so of working together, Bill started sighing at me and rolling his eyes. He’d shake his head and say, “No question that in some ways you’re brilliant. But wow, there are definitely gaps. We have to acknowledge there are gaps.” “We don’t have to acknowledge any such gaps. I acknowledge no gaps.” “But how do you account for it?” he asked me, his eyes wide. “I mean, has there ever been an actual diagnosis?” “A diagnosis of what?” He waved his fingers in a fluttering motion near my head. “Whatever it is you have. Your brain coupled with the rest of it. I mean, I guess you’d call it—what? Would you call yourself an idiot savant?” “No, I would not call myself an idiot savant,” I said to him, my voice as cold as I could make it, but then I had to start laughing. He was a good egg. It’s his voice I hear whenever people tell Duchess she’s a genius. Would you call yourself an idiot savant?

I try to keep my abiding love for all humanity in one place, but somehow it always ends up in piles on the dining room table.

knew exactly what he was asking. He wanted me to do what he had always done: love the people we had been given, and not just my brother, but the rest of the family of origin. Love them with no hope of reward, recognize that they are inherently worthy of love, accept that they’re ours whether we like it or not; love them for whatever they are, forgive them for whatever they are not. Keep them alive. Keep them going.

“If I leave school now, I’m afraid I might not ever finish,” I said, although what I meant was: I knew if I quit I wouldn’t ever finish. I’d been raised to be a servant of the family, as had my grandmothers and great-grandmothers before me. An object in motion stays in motion, and an object at rest stays at rest. If I stopped moving right then, I knew I would stay home, taking care of my brother and the rest of the family, forever, and that would be the end of the line for me.

But it would have taken everything I had, and I didn’t want that to be my life. I wanted to finish school, and not only that, but finish growing up. I wanted a home and a family someday: a regular family with nobody sick and nobody addicted, a real family where everybody wants to be together, in the kind of home where friends could come visit. I knew someday I’d want a child. Maybe someday I’d even write a book. These weren’t such big ideas, really, in the scheme of things, but to me they were visions I’d only glimpsed through other people’s windows. How do you make yourself a family out of thin air and good intentions? Where do you begin? My brother was greatly afflicted with alcoholism and addiction and debilitating mental illness and I was not; with all the great gifts I had been given, I could not find enough compassion in my heart to carry the one who had been given less.

was only a teenager, but I saw what was in my father’s mind: of us two children, I was, in that moment, the greater disappointment. Nobody expects anything from the prodigal son, but the one who’s steadfast has been given greater gifts. We know the dutiful child can do better, and we need her to.

People often ask me what fictional people see in their dreams. We dream of you.

Last winter, a friend, Bridget, invited me to lunch, which seemed like a good idea at the time.

Bridget was an old friend, and if you were raised in an alcoholic home like I was, you might understand that we tend to put an inappropriate premium on longevity in relationships. Someone could be a terrible friend to you, they could do real and lasting damage to you, but if you’ve considered them a friend for a long time, that could be enough. You’re not going to let them go.

Sure, she was criticizing me and my ideas, but that didn’t bother me. That’s mother’s milk to me. I expect it. But Lyle Lovett: no. I could bear no criticism of anything he loves.

She shook her head. “Stupid waste of time.” Look for the patterns. People will show you who they’re going to be.

An ordinary, perfect summer day like today, a woman looks around and asks herself: Where’s my Ethel Mertz?

Duchess is such a unifying force of nature. That’s your book, as I’m sure you’ve already considered: how we can all be connected, how we all are connected by the most basic and most powerful of all, love, and the acceptance that comes with it.

It was worse, somehow, to be somewhere I didn’t belong on Thanksgiving, with other people not my own, than to stay home by myself and pretend the holiday wasn’t happening.

“Well, what’s Duchess doing on Thanksgiving?” Chuck asked. “Hosting some big gala dinner party?” “I don’t know. We’ll see. Her daughter’s in prison, so she doesn’t do a holiday dinner.”

After a certain point, people lose patience with your grief. They just want you to move

Duchess Goldblatt Holiday Hours (please note for your records): at dawn, just before dusk, uncomfortable silences, and Tuesdays, 7–9 a.m.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Did you ever hear that?” “I have no desire to be this strong,” I said. “I’d rather let it kill me.”

What else can you say in the face of a neighbor with four kinds of cancer? What do we gain by measuring my grief against yours? Other people have it worse than you. Chew up your sadness and swallow it. Smile. Bring a dish to pass. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Lots of people lose lifelong friends, lose their families, their husbands, their jobs, their money, their homes, their footing, their sense of self, their place in the world. They don’t go running around town sprouting extra personalities.

Everything hurt except being Duchess. I remember how often I kept thinking, I want to go home, but then I’d remember there was no home anymore. I had a roof overhead but no soft place to land, and no one anywhere who had to let me in. I could retreat only into my own mind for relief. Only Duchess Goldblatt was the salve to my open wounds.

I do wonder about you, you know: what your homes and friendships look like, what you whisper to yourself when you think I’m not listening.

I sat in my empty house, dark out already at four o’clock, looking at the pictures of people’s dinner tables and the pies their husbands or wives or brothers-in-law had made, or those they’d picked up at neighborhood bakeries. People on Duchess’s timeline commented on each other’s offerings and wished each other a happy day. It was a party that Duchess had thrown together at the last minute, and everyone was invited to her imaginary table in the ether. It wasn’t a real party, but it was almost as good, wasn’t it? We were together, sort of—in our thoughts, which is all there ever is anyway—and we all belonged there.

The thought that leaps into my mind unbidden is Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday when I was alive, and I have to pause and remind myself that I’m still alive—oh, right; yes, of course I am; I know I’m alive—and I remember again the words John Irving wrote in A Prayer for Owen Meany: “Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who’s not home.” The trick is to be very still, and th...

John Irving has a book of essays on writing and wrestling—I don’t recommend it; it’s VERY John Irving, by which I mean if you don’t love him already, it’s not going to help—but he gets at the same idea of practicing over and over, in writing or in wrestling. Or pie crust, I guess.—DG

Duchess Goldblatt’s Writing Advice: Use all the letters, not just vowels. Spread them around the page until you get the look you want.

But I decided there was some truth to what the man was saying. Addiction and mental illness thrive in darkness. Why should I hide it? So what if my people had problems? I decided I’d go forth telling the truth without embellishment or embarrassment. The trouble with that strategy was that whenever I told the whole truth, straight-faced, everyone assumed I had to be joking.

Are children still taught to diagram sentences? Are sentences allowed in schools, or is it all smiley faces and snuffling about for treats?

“I understand exactly what you’re saying,” I’d say. “I understand you have strong feelings, and I can see why. You’re entitled to have your feelings. Your heart belongs to you. Nobody else gets to decide who lives inside your heart. You choose who you want to love.”

“You don’t have to love everybody. But if you can start to feel your heart turning hard against someone, I hope you will try to find three good things you can say about that person.”

It would have been easier to tell a different truth: Yes, son, I agree with you. Some people are monsters. There are people in the world who do not have your best interests at heart. Not everybody will be loving and loyal to you. But you know what? He’d learned that, already, the hard way, at four years old. He didn’t need me to reinforce it. He needed me to point him toward the light.

My heart was brittle and broken, but Duchess stepped forward and put words of kindness and beauty in my mouth.

Now that the lightweights and barflies have cleared out and I have the place to myself, I’d like to sing a few numbers from my first album.