As it happens, Dorothy and my mother were both born in 1921,
Dorothy in Washington, D.C., my mother in New York City. And both grew up in
genteel circumstances: in Dorothy’s case, thanks to her father as a pivotal manager
at the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation in Pittsburgh; in my mother’s
case, owing, at least in part, to relatives of her widowed mother who were
munificent toward a dear niece. Both had—especially
in the economic circumstances of the late 1930s—the privileged experience of
going to fairly exclusive colleges: my mother to Wells College in Upstate New
York; Dorothy to Oberlin College in Ohio. Curiously enough, both chose to major
in chemistry, certainly not commonplace for women college students of that
time. And both were to marry rather temperamental men of sharp intellect, and
neither was to pursue a professional career.
Unlike my mother, however, Dorothy did make use of her
college training for a while. During the time that her husband, Bob, went to
Harvard, as an undergraduate and then in the graduate English program, Dorothy
worked as an assistant in the lab of Robert B. Woodward, who came to be regarded
as the foremost organic chemist of his time and who was to win the Nobel Prize
for chemistry in 1965. Woodward knew how to share credit; when he published
papers, he listed as coauthors his assistants, including Dorothy, a matter of
great pride to her.
At the time that I got to know Dorothy and Bob, I was in
graduate school here in Chapel Hill in comparative literature, along with my
friend Michael Mellin, who was to become Jane Voitle’s husband. By that spring
of 1974, the Voitles were famous for hosting dinners for UNC colleagues, a wide
range of friends, and Bob’s students in the English Department. At their house
on Country Club Road, the candlelit dining-room table was the intimate arena
for Dorothy’s carefully crafted meals. Although she drew upon her extensive library
of cookbooks, she was hardly slavish in following recipes. More than capable of
improvising and working out variations, she had the touch of an Elizabeth
David, one of her favorite authors, for whom specifics regarding temperature
and amounts were secondary to sensing the right combinations.
You could see the same flair and inventiveness in another of
Dorothy’s notable skills, knitting. She never tired of making scarves,
sweaters, and shawls of radically varying patterns—some a little loud, some subdued,
some with striking geometric patterns, some of a seemingly random patchwork nature
that might well have a sly coherence. Some of the best colors of yarn in
Dorothy’s wide palette were of her own devising. She had a knack for creating
plant-based dyes that enabled her to produce shades of a heatherlike rainbow--rust,
umber, ocher, olive, and related earthen hues—reminiscent, I suppose, of the
landscapes of the Hebrides in northern Scotland, a favorite place of hers.
Despite the energy and wit that Dorothy brought to her
enthusiasms, she was incorrigibly self-effacing. It was predictable that she
would disclaim any special talent and portray herself as someone whose views
were perhaps not of much consequence. And
she could be maddening in failing to put herself forward, to act to her own advantage.
Yet in her quiet way Dorothy was as ingratiating and
charming as a person could be. Over the years, she and Bob acquired friends
wherever they went, friends who remained intensely loyal and were always eager
to see them, whether in Chapel Hill and on up the Eastern Seaboard, or in England
and on the Continent, or beyond to Jerusalem.
One of Bob and Dorothy’s great bonds was their enjoyment of
travel. They relished the prospect of going to new places, while they also
delighted in returning again and again to locales that had given them pleasure
the first time they had visited. So it was, for example, that they journeyed
back any number of times to Ravello on the Amalfi Coast of Italy, not far from
Naples. And they were always amused and gratified by how the staff of the hotel
where they stayed graciously honored their well-recollected wishes.
The avid desire for new vistas and the treasuring of the
comfortably familiar may account, in part, for the durability of Bob and
Dorothy’s friendships. They were genuinely engaged by life; they never ceased
to be curious; they made people interested in what they did and had to say.
They were, in the best sense, memorable.
What had first taken Dorothy and Bob to Ravello was Bob’s
decades-long research into the life of the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, the
eighteenth-century English moralist and philosopher of aesthetics whose life
came to an end in Naples. Like Bob,
Dorothy became deeply enamored of Italy—its culture, its cuisine, its language.
In midlife, she made what might have been a dabbling interest into a course of
study: she enrolled in the UNC masters program in Italian and earned her degree
by translating F. T. Marinetti’s Cucina
futurista (The Futurist Cookbook),
hardly a conventional account of how to entertain, more or less, with notions
of food.
No less than Bob, Dorothy had a catholic taste in literature
and like their daughters, Jane and Nancy, a compulsive love of reading. She
could turn with equal relish to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf and a Patricia Cornwell mystery,
to Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa (a
book she reread numerous times) and any antic little volume by Edward Gorey.
One reason, perhaps the
reason, Gorey captivated Dorothy was his anthropomorphic characterization of
cats. Anything that played up the quirky, mischievous side of felines would
bring a smile to her. She would stock up on cocktail napkins with cat cartoons
and chocolates in foil shaped as plump pusses. But the real thing mattered
most, of course. Of all the cats in her life, none captured her heart more than
Tina, who lived seventeen years and whose sculpted effigy stayed with Dorothy
to the end.
Dorothy readily acknowledged that she was more than a bit
timorous around big dogs; so she was not altogether enchanted when Jane and
Michael delivered to Country Club Road their German shepherd mix, Prunella, to
be kept there when they departed Chapel Hill. But Dorothy soon discovered that
Prunella was the most companionable of guardian spirits, and she was glad to
have her as a permanent resident. Even in her last days, Dorothy spoke fondly
of how Prunella would suffer having her tail swatted by cats she could have devoured—and
even amiably licked their little heads.
If Tina and Prunella
were almost like family to Dorothy, family itself was her anchor. Again and
again, she looked to her roots in southern New Jersey. Both of her parents, of
Welsh and Dutch extraction, came from Tuckerton and had strong ties to the Shore
and the Pine Barrens. The powerful affinity that Dorothy had for her father was
written in their physical resemblance. In
retirement, Bill Morris served as mayor of Brant Beach on Long Beach Island, where
Bob and Dorothy long kept a summer home, sojourning there annually, often in
the company of children and the steadfast of friends.
As the years went by, I was aware of how profoundly affected
Dorothy was by the passing away of, first, the oldest of her friends from
Pittsburgh (who happened to live in Long Beach Island), then her parents (who
moved down to Chapel Hill), then several other deeply regarded friends, then
Bob, whose death inevitably marked a dividing line, a before and an after. It was
heartening, though, to see how Dorothy lived reasonably happily with memories
of Bob and beyond them, fashioning a life on her own that was blessed with modest
pleasures and continued friendships. Not
the least of what sustained her was the bond that she felt with Jane and Nancy
and with the youngest link in her life, her granddaughter, Julie. At the
prospect of a visit from Julie, Dorothy’s eyes would literally light up—as was
the case earlier this year.
In spirit and in the way she conducted her life, Dorothy
was, in the truest sense of the word, liberal. Perhaps that was nurtured in her
during the formative years she spent at Oberlin, a college that before the
Civil War had enrolled both men and women and had opened its doors to African
Americans. One overt sign of Dorothy’s liberalism was her sense of religion.
Fascinated though she was by biblical stories and traditions, doctrine per se
was anathema to her; she took pride in avowing her faith as a Unitarian, which
seemed to mean a faith in things spiritual without insisting on certain
religious convictions exclusive of any others. Above all, she had faith in
those she loved.
Dorothy lived nine full decades. One could suppose that each
decade was a chapter, a life of its own. I think she would have liked the
notion of having had nine lives.
