In Memoriam Dorothy M. Voitle

I first met Dorothy in the spring of 1974, not long after my mother died. It was only much later that I recognized a kind of crossing over from one relationship to another, not exactly akin but still deeply meaningful, almost familial.

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.