Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall Page A

Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair, the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat. By the time I was sentient, in the 1930s, only my eccentric cousin Freeman was bearded, and even he shaved once in summer. Every September he endured a fortnight of scratchiness. Many men, after trying a beard for five or six days, want to claw off their skin. They pick up their Gillettes.
    Despite the itch, I persisted until I looked something like a Mathew Brady photograph, or at least not like a professor of English literature at the University of Michigan. The elderly chairman of the department was intelligent and crafty. When he spoke in well-constructed paragraphs, with inviolate syntax, he sounded like a member of Parliament—except for his midwestern accent. He always addressed me as “Hall,” and used last names for all his staff. The summer of the beard I dropped in at the department to pick up my mail. I wore plastic flip-flops, sagging striped shorts, a Detroit Tigers T-shirt, and a grubby stubble like today’s male models in
Vanity Fair
. My chairman greeted me, noting my rank: “Good morning, Professor Hall.”
    Dinner parties and cocktail parties dominated every Ann Arbor weekend. Women wore girdles; the jacket pockets of men’s gray suits showed the fangs of handkerchiefs. Among the smooth-faced crowds of Chesterfield smokers, I enjoyed cigars, which added to the singularity of my beard and rendered living rooms uninhabitable. When I lectured to students I walked up and down with my cigar, dropping ashes in a tin wastebasket. The girls in the front row smoked cigarettes pulled from soft blue leather pouches stamped with golden fleurs-de-lis. As the sixties began, if I was sluggish beginning my lecture—maybe I had stayed up all night with a visiting poet—I paused by the front row and asked if anyone had some of those diet things. Immediately, female hands held forth little ceramic boxes full of spansules or round pink pills. After I ingested Dexedrine, my lecture speeded up and rose in pitch until only dogs could hear it.
    When I was bearded and my mother visited me, she stared at the floor, addressing me without making eye contact. Why did she hate beards so intensely? She adored her hairy grandfathers and her cousin Freeman. Her father Wesley, of the next generation, shaved once or twice a week. On Saturday night before Sunday’s church, Wesley perched on a set tub. Looking into the mirror of a twenty-five-hour clock, he scraped his chin with a straight razor.
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    In 1967 my marriage, which had faltered for years, splintered and fell apart. As Vietnam conquered American campuses, I hung out with students who weaned me from cigars to cigar joints. “Make love not war” brought chicks and dudes together, raising everyone’s political consciousness. Middle-class boys from Bloomfield Hills proved they belonged to the Movement by begging on the streets for spare change.
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    I signed the last divorce papers while anesthetized for a biopsy of my left testicle. The tumor was benign, but divorces aren’t. I shaved because the world had altered. Although my mother fretted about the divorce, she looked at my face again. My sudden singleness and my naked skin confused my friends. I was still invited to dinner parties, and therefore gave dinner parties back. I invited eight people for dinner. When I noticed that I had no placemats, I substituted used but laundered diapers, which I had bought for drying dishes. For dinner I served two entrées, Turkey Salad Amaryllis and Miracle Beans. I bought three turkey rolls, cooked them and chopped them up with onions and celery, then added basil and two jars of Hellmann’s Real. It was delicious, and so were Miracle Beans. Warm ten cans of B&Ms, add garlic, add basil again, add dry mustard, stir, and serve. My friends enjoyed my dinner parties. I served eight bottles of chilled