Trent Bell for The New York Times
Joan and Robert Parker each had their own apartments in their home, using some spaces, like the first floor living room, to entertain. More Photos »
By JOYCE WADLER
Published: July 7, 2010
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
Trent Bell for The New York Times
The couple’s Victorian home in Cambridge, Mass.
AND now, the Ballad of the Sad Chair and How It Was Tamed and Returned to Happy Domestic Life. The teller is Joan Parker, the widow of Robert B. Parker, the best-selling mystery writer who died in January.
Ms. Parker is more than a widow, of course: she is a powerhouse fund-raiser for people with H.I.V. and AIDS, a former professor of early childhood education, a woman so bold and fit that this spring, at age 77, she ascended to the top of the Big Apple Circus tent in a trapeze harness for a charity event. One cannot read a story about the Parkers without learning that Ms. Parker was the model for the independent and brainy girlfriend of Robert Parker’s Boston private eye, Spenser, or that she stays fit by running the stairs at Harvard Stadium.
But we are talking about the hole that appears in one’s life after the death of a partner — in the case of Ms. Parker, after 53 years of marriage — so widow it will be.
The Parkers had an unconventional marriage. They lived together, but separately, he on the ground floor of their Victorian house, she on the second floor. They had separate kitchens and bathrooms and, to a great extent, led separate lives. She was at charity functions most weeknights; he preferred staying in and watching baseball games with his German shorthaired pointer, Pearl. Mr. Parker had three German shorthairs named Pearl; when one Pearl died, he replaced it with another.
Ms. Parker liked to tell him, “When I go, just find a woman my height, with my color hair, call her Joan and I will live on.”
After Mr. Parker died this winter at his desk, following a heart attack, there were those who told Ms. Parker she was luckier than most, that the separate accommodations were a rehearsal for widowhood. They were partly right, Ms. Parker says. She does not have to adjust, say, to not seeing her husband puttering about the kitchen because she had her own kitchen.
Still — and we are trimming some of what comes out of her salty mouth — it has been extremely painful. Which brings us to the last months of Mr. Parker’s life, when Ms. Parker could see that, despite sticking to his 10-page-a-day writing schedule, he was failing; the heart disease he had had for years was taking its toll.
“There was one chair in his kitchen, a leather wingback chair,” she says. “I would go downstairs and feed the dogs in the morning, and in the last couple of months he would sit in the chair and stare at me. He would be sort of hunched up and looking glum. I would say, ‘Bob, you’re just staring at me, hon,’ and he would say, ‘I know.’ I’d say, ‘Do you want to talk to me or something?’ He’d say, ‘No, I just want to look at you.’ After his death, that chair was so symbolic of a sad Bob that I would think, ‘What am I going to do with this chair?’ ”
Ms. Parker began to think of it as the Sad Chair. Then one day, an architect friend showed her how to tame it. Beginning with the chair, he rearranged the furnishings that were bruising her every time she entered a room. Because even in unconventional relationships, possessions have power — particularly after a death. You take control of them, or they control you.
SOME people are more the marrying kind than others. Joan Parker, coming of age in New England in the 1950s, did not want to marry. She wanted to work. This may have been because her own experience of family life, growing up in the Boston suburb of Swampscott, had been oppressive. Her father, after she showed some athletic ability, kept her on the golf course from dawn to dusk.
She met Robert Parker at a freshman dance, when they were at Colby College in Maine, and she did not like him one bit. He was much too fast, and as they danced, his hand drifted down to her behind. Nonetheless, they became good friends.
It was not until their senior year that he told her he had loved her from the moment he saw her. Ms. Parker was reluctant, as she feared ruining the friendship. But Mr. Parker was the smartest man she knew, and she could talk to him. They married, settled in a Boston suburb and had two children, David and Daniel. Mr. Parker worked in advertising, and Ms. Parker was an extremely unhappy housewife.
Today, sitting in her second-floor dining nook, wearing form-fitting black yoga clothes, with Pearl the dog never far away, she recalls vividly how miserable she felt as a young mother, sitting on the sofa with a screaming baby while her husband went to work.
“Bob could be very emotional,” she says. “I would see Bob, in his suit and hat, crying as he goes to work, because what he wants to do is stay home and take care of baby David. I’m crying along with baby David, because all I want to do is be in the car, going to work.”
One suddenly notices something entirely unrelated to the conversation in the doorway behind her head.
Is that a chinning bar? the reporter asks.
“Yes, it is,” Ms. Parker says.
Eventually, she earned a graduate degree in childhood education and became a professor of child psychology at Endicott College and the director of curriculum and instruction for public schools in northeastern Massachusetts.
Mr. Parker, who had left advertising to get his Ph.D. in literature, began teaching at Northeastern University, and published his first Spenser novel in 1973, introducing the wise-guy private eye, a onetime boxer deeply in love with a psychoanalyst named Susan Silverman. Ms. Parker had breast cancer, then a double mastectomy. Then, in 1982, with both sons grown and out of the house, the couple separated.
A great part of the problem was that Ms. Parker felt smothered.
“I’ll give you an example,” she says. “I’d be going to the store to get some bread. He’d say, ‘Can I come with you?’ I’d say, ‘But I’m just going to buy bread.’ He’d say, ‘Yeah, but can I go with you?’ And never mind working late, never mind the overnight trips, there were a million things to explain.”
Husband and wife separated, each went into therapy.
But they missed each other, and after two years embarked on what they called their second marriage. In 1986, they bought this 14-room Victorian, paying $850,000. Ms. Parker took the third floor, which had a separate entrance at the side. Mr. Parker took the second floor, setting up his office beside the front door. The big question from most reporters involved sex.
“Are you intimate?” Mr. Parker was asked on a British talk show.
“Enough to make you blush,” Mr. Parker said.
And yes, monogamy was part of the arrangement.
In 1998, after Mr. Parker had knee surgery, there was a $1 million house renovation. Mr. Parker, an enthusiastic cook, moved down to the first floor, where he had a large kitchen. A devoted baseball fan, he decorated his bedroom with a wall-size poster of Ebbets Field that he had found and framed — one of the few decorating efforts Ms. Parker can recall him making. (If you wonder why a Bostonian cared about a Brooklyn ballpark, Ms. Parker can explain: When her husband was a boy in Springfield, Mass., the New York radio signals were the ones that came in strong, and he was passionate about the Brooklyn Dodgers.)
During baseball season, Mr. Parker fixed himself dinner and sat at his kitchen counter, watching television. The first floor, which had a large dining area adjoining Mr. Parker’s kitchen and a small living room, was where the Parkers entertained.
Ms. Parker’s second-floor apartment had a much smaller kitchen, a large bedroom made into a walk-in closet and a silver bathroom with stainless steel vanities and tub. The third floor was for guests.
Their second marriage, Ms. Parker says, was great. They pursued their own interests on their own schedules. Mr. Parker wrote, met with his trainer and stayed in. Ms. Parker rose early, did power yoga, Pilates or the stadium steps, then had fund-raising meetings. Both their sons are gay, and Ms. Parker became very involved with organizations dealing with gay rights and AIDS. The couple spent weekends together, meeting friends for dinner or entertaining.
In the last year, Mr. Parker began to have health problems: there were concerns about asthma and allergies, and around New Year’s a change in medication caused him to faint and he fell, bleeding on his bed. There were also the episodes in the kitchen, when he stared at Ms. Parker as if he knew time was short and he was trying to drink her in.
One day in January, she popped into his office at 9 a.m. as usual, before heading out for yoga.
“Bob was at his desk,” she says. “I said, ‘How are you today?’ He said, ‘Good, good.’ I came back, and I found Bob still in his chair. I went through the motions of C.P.R. and 911, but I knew he was gone.”
In the weeks that followed, Ms. Parker tried to adjust to a house that was now entirely her own. Her husband’s office, to her surprise, did not fill her with the awful sadness she felt in much of the rest of the house, maybe because it was the place where her husband had been so productive.
But his bedroom and kitchen brought pain, as did the ground-floor dining room. The Ebbets Field poster in his bedroom made her so sad she could not cross the threshold, and seeing the wingback chair in his kitchen never failed to depress her.
One day, about two months after her husband’s death, when her architect friend Adam Schoenhardt was visiting, she erupted. “I said, ‘See that chair, I can’t bear it,’ ” Ms. Parker says. “All I see is Bob sitting there glumly and staring at me.”
She did not want to get rid of the Sad Chair, so Mr. Schoenhardt removed it from her sight, to a corner of a little-used sitting room. Then, over a few days, he rearranged the rest of the house.
In some rooms, like the garden-level dining room, it was as simple as changing the position of the furniture. In Mr. Parker’s rooms — with the exception of his office, which remains unchanged — it was more extensive. The butcher-block counter where Mr. Parker ate was taken to the basement and replaced with a small dining table. His basement workout room, with punching bag, became a guest room. Mr. Parker’s bedroom was redecorated. His bloodied bed was replaced with a pine bed that had been in storage. The Ebbets Field poster went to a guest room in the basement.
The changes were disturbing to some. A man who had worked for the Parkers for several years at first refused to take the poster out of Mr. Parker’s room. Ms. Parker understood.
“When these cataclysmic events happen, you have no idea how you will react,” she says. “You can’t rehearse ahead of time. A couple of friends are widows, and I’ve tried to be supportive of them as they go through the grieving process, but in one case in particular, she grieved by creating a shrine out of the house. God forbid her husband’s shoes were not lying under the bed the way she wanted — she wanted everything to be exactly as he had left it. That was such an anathema to me. I was exactly the opposite.”
Later, in another conversation, she adds: “The struggle is, how do you find a way to be respectful of that person? To have the memories and still make it bearable, so I can live without shutting a bedroom door or burning a chair.”
The Sad Chair, after a few moves around the house, is now in Mr. Parker’s old bedroom, where its appearance has been changed with an orange throw and a pillow. Showing a visitor the room, Ms. Parker doesn’t even mention it. When the reporter calls her attention to this, she says she thinks it is because the chair, in its new place, has been “desensitized.”
“I can see that chair, and I don’t see him sitting in it, slumped,” Ms. Parker says. “It no longer has human qualities, and it no longer looks like Bob’s place to sit in misery as he would watch me feed the dogs.”
Mr. Schoenhardt’s redesign — which, Ms. Parker stresses, did not cost a thing, because it was simply a rearrangement — has lifted her up.
“He made me feel that I am not in this house of death, where such a sad thing happened, but a whole new house, a whole new landscape,” Ms. Parker says. “When I had to walk in the house the way it was, it was to sort of walk into the gray cloud. I would just feel pulled down. Now it’s transformed.”
She adds playfully: “I feel like I could be in someone else’s home altogether — although I love the furniture this person has and what good taste she has.”
A few days later, she sends a follow-up note.
“My epiphany was, it was all about CONTROL,” Ms. Parker writes. “I was powerless to prevail over the turmoil, fear, grief and uncertainty following Bob’s sudden death. Still am, to a lesser extent, but I can control, with the help of my gifted friend Adam Schoenhardt, the inanimate objects inside my house. So I move, lift, re-use, re-recycle, drag, discover things and in so doing actively transform my physical living space. And hope to Christ it empowers me to transform my emotional living space — at least, I can control this part of my new life.”
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