It’s a Wonderful Life
It was the ring that made me think of him--the $200,000 diamond ring from the Paris jeweler that, during the weekend of Princess Diana’s funeral, we were told Dodi Fayed had given to her shortly before the accident. I’d promptly visualized this ring, and to my extensive repertoire of imagined scenes from the tragedy had added several involving its presentation (waiting on Diana’s plate during that last dinner at the Ritz? Given chez Dodi earlier in the day? Her gasp, her relief, her wistful realization that she’d worn that sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring from Charles for an awfully long time after their separation. . . .) And always, in these scenes, the ring assumed a particular appearance. It was in the Harry Winston style--an impressive central diamond set in platinum, a few oblong baguettes raying out to either side: that is to say, flashy yet austere.
Even when it developed that my image had been completely wrong--when the ring turned out to be a chunky gold, diamond-studded cocktail number Diana had picked out herself--my prior mental pictures refused to alter. I kept seeing the small, elegant shopping bag on Dodi’s foyer table or the black velvet--no, tooled leather--box in the center of the hotel-crested service plate . . . . And that was when I thought of Dr. Ellwood.
Dr. Ellwood had phoned me in late ‘96--actually, the receptionist from this magazine had called to ask if a Dr. Howard Ellwood* from Van Nuys could contact me. A few weeks before I’d had a short piece in the magazine celebrating our endearing consecutive springer spaniels. According to the receptionist, Dr. Ellwood, who’d recently lost a beloved springer of his own, wanted my advice about finding a new puppy.
Dr. Ellwood was, he told me, a pediatric oncologist from Boston out here on sabbatical, trying to recover from the death of his wife earlier in the year, at age 35, from ovarian cancer. “You can’t imagine what it was like,” he said bleakly, “to have these skills, yet be able to do nothing for her. Nothing . . . . “ But he had been incredibly lucky: Recently, through the alumni office of his Minnesota alma mater, he had reconnected with his college girlfriend. By coincidence, Liisa (with two I’s, he emphasized) had just gotten divorced (her ex-husband, repeatedly in legal trouble, was currently in jail for embezzlement). Dr. Ellwood had flown to Minnesota, where Liisa still lived, to see her, and one thing had led to another, and now they were engaged.
And really, he said, he owed it all to Mary, his secretary out here, who was sort of a surfer-type, though she didn’t surf anymore, having broken her back in a wipeout a couple of years before. She’d been the one to say, “Dr. Ellwood”--(he’d asked her many times to call him Howard, but she didn’t feel comfortable with it)--”Dr. Ellwood, I know it may seem too soon, but I think it’s time you started dating again.” And that’s when it had occurred to him to make the call.
So it was actually Liisa he wanted to find the puppy for, as an engagement present. To be sure, up until now she’d been a cat person, but she loved all kinds of animals, as did he--back home he was on the board of directors of the Boston Zoo--and he thought jointly owning a dog would be a wonderful start to their life together. The wedding, he said, was to be in the spring, in Minnesota. There was a famously charming chapel in Fair Cloud that Liisa had her heart set on for the ceremony, and though, when they’d first gone to look at it, they’d been told they’d have to wait a full year and undergo pastoral counseling, by another coincidence, as he was taking his complaint though channels, who should be the bishop of Minneapolis-St. Paul but yet another alum, who’d volunteered to waive the rules and perform the service himself.
To tell the truth, Dr. Ellwod confessed, he’d already arranged one animal-themed engagement present for Liisa that had not worked out so well. Not long ago he’d put in a call to Catherine Roberts, director of the Minnesota State Zoo, in Apple Valley, to find out if any young were about to be born there; he’d wanted to know if, as a kind of professional courtesy, she might be willing to name one of the newborns in honor of his fiancee. Catherine had been ever so gracious about it, he said, and when it turned out that the zoo was expecting a litter of snow monkeys, he was ecstatic--after all, in college the snow monkey had been Liisa’s favorite primate. But when, on the day after the birth, he’d called to tell her the news--waiting until 5:30 a.m., though he usually gets up at 4, mindful that Minnesota’s only one time zone away--she was extremely abrupt with him. In fact, she’d said, “You called me at 6:30 in the morning to tell me that?” and hung up the phone.
So he wanted to make sure that everything about the gift of the puppy went smoothly, to which end he wondered if he might call me back later, after he’d seen about getting his mother, whom he was visiting, some dinner.
And he did call back, and he left a number for now and a Minnesota number where he could be reached in 10 days--and a rambling and disjointed message about the desirability of our collaborating on a series of articles, not that many magazines were worth reading these days, but The New Yorker, he felt, was quite good. . . . And, of course, when I called the Boston Zoo, they had never heard of him, though they’d gotten a number of recent calls about him, including one from the L.A. Zoo, to whom he’d evidently represented himself as the director of the sister institution; and there was no Howard Ellwood, M.D., in the Boston-area phone directory--although there did turn out to be a Howard Ellwood who, according to the alumni office of the college he’d mentioned, had graduated in 1966 and gone on to get a Ph.D. and was listed with an address more or less identical to his parents’, in Van Nuys. They’d received numerous calls from this alumnus over the years, most lately a series in which he’d identified himself as a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty (they’d checked; he wasn’t listed) and had pursued inquiries about getting married in the campus chapel.
Bishop James Moran--indeed a fellow alum--did vaguely recall a phone conversation some months back regarding regulations at Fair Cloud, but he’d corrected the caller about the waiting period and definitely hadn’t volunteered to perform the wedding. And although the Minnesota Zoo was in fact in Apple Valley, and a Catherine Roberts was its director, she had no knowledge of any arrangement to name a snow monkey baby in anyone’s honor--primarily because no snow monkeys had ever been born at the zoo.
When I first learned these things I was awe-struck and more than a little envious. What incredible powers of invention this man had! What mastery of the throwaway detail! It was not so much even the dramatic outlines of the story that had compelled, but the small inclusions: Mary’s broken back! How could anyone think to make that up? The double I in Liisa’s name! Her embezzling ex-husband! How could they not be real? They were already real to me--they’d become real, in fact, during the description of that early-morning phone call, when I’d been able to see the light starting to outline the edges of the windows and feel the combination of cold air and warm, stale bedcovers peculiar to the time before the sun comes up.
And here is the point. It was in that moment of imaginative participation that Dr. Ellwood achieved palpability for me, so much so that discovering the inaccuracy of my information made no real difference to my mental picture: I simply conjured up a sort of second version of Dr. Ellwood--a sad-eyed, middle-aged man speaking urgently into the wall telephone of his mother’s fluorescent-lit kitchen in the Valley--and set him beside the fussy, eccentric physician I felt I’d come to know. After all, Dr. Ellwood had told me the names of his springer spaniels! Penny I and Penny II! . . .
It was as if the sheer accumulation of this much specificity--whether or not it had any basis in fact--had been enough to create a three-dimensional sense of someone’s existence, a feeling of intimacy impervious to reality. And it seemed to be the act of imagination itself that created the attachment; it was in the process of forming the images that they had become indelible. Perhaps this is what accounts for the world-at-large’s weirdly intense identification with Diana--we knew (or thought we knew) so many things about her that, over time, we created our own emotionally charged meta-reality, in the face of which Diana’s distance from any actual relationship with us was entirely immaterial.
Perhaps, too, it explains why for me, all these years later--a devourer in fifth grade of the royal governess’ memoirs--the Queen herself, still nicknamed Lilibet, still only a princess, will be frozen forever early one morning in front of Crawfie’s door, dressed in daffodil yellow, her left hand extended shyly to display her sparkling new engagement ring. And it helps explain why, lost in my admiration for Dr. Ellwood’s inventiveness, his uncanny incorporation of the factual, it didn’t occur to me till long afterward that anything other than skill--any involuntary element of delusion, say--might be involved: Was there a fiancee at all--had there ever been a wife?--or was all of it a wistful fantasy?
Which in turn may be why Liisa--or whoever her real-life counterpart might be--continues to float ephemerally in my mind, not quite fully resolved or realized, and thus remains somewhat less vivid to me than Princess Diana. Although Diana herself is slightly less vivid to me than Dr. Ellwood, whose Minnesota number, when I returned his call, turned out to be nonworking, who didn’t respond to the message I left with his mother (“Hel-lo-ow,” she’d brayed, “I can’t look for him now--you’ll have to call him back”) or on his own clipped, John Houseman-toned answering machine (“Hello. Dr. Ellwood here. Please leave your name and number”), whom I never heard from again and whom I’ll never forget.
*
* a fictious name
