Extra Innings by Doris Grumbach

broken its neck, and fallen a few feet to the roof of the screened porch.
    The thought of resurrection and an afterlife is central to my faith. I have always been able to grant those supernatural certainties to the Christ whose entire life, from his virgin birth on, was so extraordinary. But I’ve had some trouble assuming they would be part of the end of a life as ordinary and sin-ridden as mine.
    Still, some wise unbelievers have granted the possibility of these occurrences to themselves. On his deathbed, the brilliant cynic and atheist Voltaire saw a lamp flare up. ‘What, the flames already?’ he asked. When agnostic Disraeli lay dying, the mourning widow Queen Victoria proposed to visit his bedside. ‘Why should I see her?’ he told his attendant. ‘She will only want to give me a message for Albert.’
    And another: One of my recent correspondents, one of those who scolded me for my pessimism, sent me a sentence, said to be Goronwy Rees’s last words, in 1979, to his son Daniel: ‘What shall I do next?’
    She did not tell me who Goronwy Rees was.
    Telephone report from Ron King about the Down East AIDS Network walk last month. Six thousand dollars was raised, many people participated in Ellsworth, the food that Sybil solicited from area merchants and two groups of friends gathered was sufficient for the walkers and volunteers, and very good. This success marks a significant change in awareness of the need for concern and care on the part of a hitherto indifferent community.
    I have finished Hard Times and moved on to Bleak House . My cherished set of Dickens, in many volumes because each novel is separated into three or four small books, bound in blue cloth with bright gold stamping, once belonged to a woman named Mary S. White. Her name is neatly stamped on the flyleaf of every one of the thirty-six or so books. I think she read them all, for there are minor blemishes on some pages, here a light thumb mark, there a trace of tiny bits of food that have dropped into the gutter.
    There is a pleasure in reading books that belonged to someone else. Clearly, Mary S. White enjoyed these books before me. I fantasize about her life: She was an elderly spinster, a New Englander (I found the books in the Owl Pen, a bookstore outside of Greenwich, New York) who lived alone after the death of her parents, whom she cared for during their long lives. Delicately built, she favored small books that fit comfortably into her tiny hands. I see her seated alone at five in the evening, in an upright chair at her small, round dining-room table, drinking tea and eating a buttered scone, a few crumbs of which have dropped into the margin of, say, Pickwick Papers . When I get to it, I will surely find them.
    Out of volume three of Bleak House falls Mary S. White’s posthumous gift to me, a yellowed clipping. It is undated but seems to be from a New York daily newspaper at the turn of the century:
    A lady lately visited New York city, and saw one day on the sidewalk a ragged, cold, and hungry little girl, gazing wistfully at some cake in a shop window. She stopped, and taking the little one by the hand led her into the store. Though she was aware that bread might be better for the child than cake, yet desiring to gratify the shivering and forlorn one, she bought and gave her the cake she wanted. She then took her to another place, where she presented her a shawl and other articles of comfort. The grateful little creature looked the benevolent lady up full in the face and with artless simplicity said, ‘Are you God’s wife?’
    BEAUTIFUL INCIDENT is the story’s headline; it is a sentimental little tale that might be written today, made linguistically contemporary, if the little girl were to ask the kind lady: ‘Are you God?’
    The plea for the use of plain words when writing English prose is common, not limited to William Strunk’s popular The Elements of Style . Among