Some Memories of Cathi in the '80s
Cathi Chitwood: Soror, Ave atque Vale
Cathi and Marianne. (Courtesy of Shelley Chitwood)
I first met Cathi Chitwood in the third-floor "bull-pen" office in Taliaferro Hall to which I had been assigned during my first semester (Fall 1985) as a grad student at University of Maryland, College Park. Cathi was an MA student in English, and her desk sat next to mine. To everyone in the room that first day I was an utter stranger, and I spent my first office hour there in a mope. Yet no sooner had Cathi noticed me sitting in her vicinity than she began our acquaintance as cheerily as if she were a kind of office greeter to newcomers.. I don't remember what we talked about, but she made a definite impression. Her dark eyes, short dark hair, and voluptuous figure were arresting enough. Her vitality, both physical and psychological, was little short of amazing. She moved quickly, as if daring the world to keep up with her; and her conversation was volatile but correct in form and distinct in pronunciation.
In those days, Cathi lived in a “group house” with several other graduate students: Pat Noone, Dave Meng, Jade Gorman, Becky Spracklen, and a young woman whose first name was Josie (her last name escapes me). Since there were sundry celebrations at the house, I was over there more than once, and these people became my “crowd.” On one of my first visits, Cathi took me on a tour of the place. She also showed me her own room. I didn’t know what to expect, but was surprised to see how orderly and neat she was. Everything was in its place, and everything seemed essential to the room’s very existence. No other person in the house had that sense of ownership and pride in nice things. For all her interest in people, it occurred to me that Cathi was not an instinctive communard. Her room, with a long shelf of books stretching above her bedstead, spoke of her uniquely.
I recall Cathi best as a great talker--and her talk was always an adventure. She seldom prefaced what she was going to say by explaining a situation or introducing you to the people she talked about. Her method was to dive in at the point at which she was thinking about a subject, leaving you to make connections where and when you could. I heard her talk about "Bobby," for instance, for nearly a week before figuring out that he was her current boyfriend. Later, as I knew her better, I came to appreciate her conversational style as her way of inviting the listener into her world: the deeper you entered into it the less trouble you had picking up the thread of her talk.
One of Cathi’s favorite topics of conversation was her students, especially the foreign ones. She must have had a wonderful time in her ESL classes, but her relationship with these students seemed more personal than academic. Each student had a story to tell, and Cathi was invariably there as his or her sounding board. She knew all about this one’s troubles and that one’s interests, and could talk about them all in a detail that suggested a nearly faultless memory. I'm sure she was exactly the kind of teacher her foreign-born students needed at that point in their academic careers--someone who cared for them in an academic environment where it was easy even for American students to get lost. They visited her often, and she advised them about everything from how to go about finding a new apartment to who would make a good date on Saturday night. I don't believe she ever turned a student away. She treated each with respect, as an equal--maybe because she was only a little older than many of them. I doubt if they had ever met a teacher like her.
But teaching wasn't all that interested Cathi. She was also intrigued by all the office romances that came to light in the course of a semester. She always knew who was going out with who, who wanted to go out with who, who was breaking up with who, and who was thinking about breaking up. She analyzed the characters of the various couples, decided that X was serious and Y was not, and had advice to give if the parties wanted it. And usually she was so correct in her estimates of these affairs that I took to calling her, to her amusement, "the Sherlock Holmes of love." She had the instincts of a psychologist, and I wonder if she ever thought of that line of work.
In the affairs of her friends, she could be direct, especially if she sensed an injustice. At one time I was having a troublesome time with a young lady I liked, and in a fit of anger had broken off all communication with her. Cathi was also the young lady’s friend and had obviously heard about my lack of gallantry. At a party, she broached the subject, and told me plainly that I was in the wrong. After thinking about it for a while, I could see that she was upset for good reason, and the next day I dropped my stony posturing. Such was Cathi’s persuasive power in the bouts of love. Actually I changed my approach more for her sake than for my own or the other party’s. I simply didn’t want to look like an ogre in her eyes.
Another outlet for Cathi’s energies was dancing. Every so often a group of us teaching assistants would get together and drive off to some College Park nightspot like the 94th Aero Squadron where the music was loud and the music videos were projected on large screens. The music wasn’t particularly impressive—unless you consider the Bangles a super-group--but Cathi was a pleasure to dance with; she moved easily and didn’t mind much if her partner had two left feet.
I do remember taking her once to a very different affair, a concert at the Tawes Building, which was then the campus center for the performing arts. The performers included the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin and a rising young star on the same instrument, Joshua Bell. Unfortunately the program was not that appealing, at least not to someone who, like me, prefers the Romantic period in music. I wasn’t sure what Cathi liked in the way of the classics, but I sat there very painfully as our famous violinists went through several pieces by Bartok. I know that Cathi must have been bored; I was bored myself. But she never let me know it. It was her gift to humor friends, meeting their good intentions with graceful attention.
At school, Cathi threw herself into her studies, and was very sensitive about how others perceived her academically. I recall a report she gave in the only class we ever took together--a Shakespeare seminar. The report was a little talk on the progress we were making on our seminar papers; afterwards, students made criticisms and offered suggestions on what they had heard. Cathi’s report revealed that her project was in a state of disrepair no worse than anyone else’s, but she was convinced that her presentation had doomed her in the course. Later I found her in our office, sobbing. “It was terrible, terrible,” she said bitterly. I tried to make her see that the report wasn’t all that important, but she was hard to convince. She wanted to shine in the class and felt as if the luster had gone off her academic reputation that night. Of course, it had done no such thing.
Cathi’s literary passion was the Medieval period, and she had a pronounced taste for the old Norse sagas. She also took classes in Latin from the Language department (as did several of the better English grad. students) in order that she might read the official language of the Middle Ages.
I puzzled for a time over her interest in the Norse sagas. They have always impressed me as a male domain—works written for warriors about war. But there is a good deal of magic in them, too: magic unalloyed by any other belief system, and this, I suspect, touched upon Cathi’s Neo-Pagan view of the world. I remember once buying one of these long poems at a used book store and showing it to her. It was apparently a rare find because it wasn’t in her collection. She talked to me about it, saying how lucky I was to have come across it. She looked at it as if it were an old friend who had suddenly reappeared after a long absence. After a while, admitting to myself how little I knew about Norse poetry, I gave it to her. I think probably I bought it for her anyway, though that wasn’t consciously in my mind at the time.
Concerning her Neo-Paganism, Cathi and I didn’t see eye to eye. Accordingly we seldom discussed religion, instinctively detouring around any topic that might cause a rift between us. Nonetheless I trusted her claim to intuitive powers, which she said was one of the benign faculties many Neo-Pagans possess. She could be uncannily right about certain things. At other times she spoke cryptically. I asked her once if there was anything in my future of which I should be especially aware. She thought for a moment, and came back with an answer: “Be careful of white cars.” When I asked what she meant, she couldn’t say. This was the message she had gotten, there was no more. So to this day, I have been wary of any white car, which keeps me quite busy since white cars are on the road everywhere.
Cathi’s voice can be heard now only in her letters and cards, of which I received my share. By the early ’90s, I was immersed in my dissertation, and Cathi in her relationship with her new husband, Dave Mapes, I was no longer teaching, so from seeing Cathi nearly every day, I went to seeing her only occasionally. Her calls and cards always cheered me, though. Here is a Christmas card from 1993, in which, with typical enthusiasm, she talks about her new puppy and how it got its name:
"As you can see, we got a puppy! He’s 18 weeks old, half Labrador and half Golden Retriever. “Lazarus” was the only name Dave and I could agree on. Dave thought of Lazarus Long from Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, Time Enough for Love and assorted stories. I also knew of a story, Lazarillo de Tormes, with an urchin who looks like an angel but acts like a hellion. That fits. Besides, Dave insisted on getting a Lab mix like his famous dog Skipper, so the Biblical Lazarus also applies. I like the name much better than car engine names (David’s ideas) and he likes it better than Hrothgar and Lancelot (my two main choices). You’ll have to come meet him!”
In a regular letter sent with a 1995 Christmas card, she talks about her daughter Marianne, and the child’s relations with this famous pup, now grown much larger:
“Marianne is growing (that’s what babies do best) and developing. She is now over 17 pounds!` Although she is not yet crawling, she is doing a marine crawl. She balances better standing than sitting. She wants so badly to be up with us on our level! So far, she can say Ma-Ma and Da-Da and “Hi!” We’re waiting for her to say “Lazarus,” but that will take some time. Her favorite thing (besides cuddling) is to play on the floor with all of her toys and her dog and her parents around her. Lazarus licks her ears and she laughs. They will play together nicely once she is more active. Laz is very gentle with the baby. Luckily we have found a decent daycare center (home-based) for her. Sophia has been wonderful with her. She feels like family! She has taught Marianne to take a bottle and now to take solid foods (she wouldn’t eat when Ma-ma was in the house!) We’ve enclosed some photos from when she was between five and seven months old. We’ll send more after we get pictures of her first Christmas.”
Such extracts could go on, but these are sufficient to give a sense of Cathi’s zest and humor and her easy articulation, for she was not only a great talker but a very precise one, and her writing reveals those qualities.
Cathi died in the spring of 2000 of liver disease. She left behind her husband, her beautiful young daughter, and her grieving family and friends. I had seldom been dealt such a direct blow as the news of her parting. With Cathi passed one of the sureties of my life. Until then I had little idea of how death, that terrible separation, could hurt. I was reminded, too, of an incident that happened in the ‘90s just before my graduation. Cathi and I were walking toward one of the campus parking lots when she suddenly stopped. She grew pale, told me she felt ill, and stretched out beneath a tree in an attempt to recover herself. In another moment the poor child was sick, and I did what I could to nurse her through the episode, which admittedly was not much, since I am only a clumsy male.in these matters. Afterwards she felt better. I offered to walk her up to the school infirmary, but she was determined to go home. I took her books then and we slowly made our way toward her car. “I won’t forget this,” she said, as if making a promise. And I believed her. Certainly I didn’t forget it, At the time of her death, I recalled what had happened with a particular pang of recognition and wondered if it was not a sign of the disease that was to take her.
I think about Cathi often now. After five years, her lively voice and graceful ways still flood into my memory on the least pretext, and sometimes on no pretext. They are just there, especially in the night when thoughts and memories come on their own. Sometimes then, with her features before me almost as they were in life, I ask a question, though I don’t know whether it is to Cathi or to my memory of her or to my own pained self. “Oh, Cathi,” I say helplessly. “Why couldn’t Life have held on to you with the same passion and devotion with which you held on to her?” I suspect I will never know the answer.