Berkshire Bright Focus...

From The Reader’s Digest, April, 1946:

from In Humanity’s Name!

By Dr. Harlow Shapley

Astronomer; director of Harvard College Observatory

"To forget unpleasant realities, some people lose themselves in mystery

stories, moving pictures, even comic strips. I have found myself

using numbers in the same way. I turn with relief from headlines

about starvation in Europe or riots in Palestine to familiar digits

and symbols; they are impersonal things, that do not bleed."

          Is time something you count or is it something apart from reality, something that happens on its own and makes little sense relative to your own daily life? I have no sense of how long it was between seeing Freddy’s body on the roof down below and my waking up in the morning not screaming. It could have been the next day or the following week or a half a month or more. I just don’t know. I paid no attention to the workings of the world. I saw no one, talked to no one. I don’t think I went to her funeral - if I did I couldn’t recall it. There were no newspapers piled up in a corner of the living room. There was no mail on the hall table. In the fridge there was no milk grown sour or leftovers with mold. It was as empty as my life. Time had ceased to exist for me and the philosophical questions about reality had no resonance.

          What I knew was this: I had lost my parents, my lover, my friend and my enemy. I had lost them all together somehow. There was nothing but me and I didn’t believe I existed any longer. I couldn’t see myself in a mirror. I couldn’t feel myself in my clothing. I couldn’t find evidence of my being in the daily trod from room to room. I had ceased to be, to belong, to beware, to be anything. For the first time in my twenty-eight years - and somehow that number rang true to me, I had no reason to believe in myself.

          It was 1974. Cher was divorcing Sonny. Patty Hearst had been kidnaped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. President Gerald Ford had granted a full, free and absolute pardon to former President Richard Nixon. I knew these things somehow. That was the sum total of my knowledge.

          I couldn’t look out my windows for fear of what I’d see. I couldn’t answer my phone for fear of what I’d hear. I think I watched television: Merv Griffin’s talk show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Carol Burnett. Nothing real, nothing with news of the day, just comedy and gossip, comedy and gossip. Those were the foods I lived on. I was in mourning like I had never been in mourning before. And I dreamt.

          My dreams were the worst of it. They brought back the people I missed the most, even the ones I hated the most. Sometimes at the center of my dreams there would be a light shining, a dimmed bulb under a dark shade, but a light nevertheless and that gave me a false sense of hope. I remember that feeling of hope and of helplessness tied together in a bow around my throat. I wanted to untie the string and to toss it away, but my hands could never find the place where the loops met and the knot constricted. I would wake up coughing and gagging from the sensation and that dim light would be gone again and I would fall back on the damp pillows and lie there staring at the blankness of the ceiling and of the day ahead.

          Time, how long, how often, with what frequency...I do not know. Once, in the dream, I reached the lamp and snatched away the shade and in place of a lightbulb I found my grandmother, Granny Elaine. She was sitting there, cross-legged like she sometimes did when she was alive, her arms across her ample bosom and her hair just a little bit out of place. She smiled at me the she way she always had and made me feel like there was a life buried somewhere inside me. When I woke up that morning things felt a bit different, brighter, more hopeful. I wondered what day it was for the first time in a long time and got out of bed with both feet forward and lightness in my heart. Mourning, such as it was, was over.

          It wasn’t such a long interval after all, I discovered. A week. That was all. It had been one week since Freddy’s funeral, attended by distant cousins, I learned, and a few old friends and colleagues, but no one who loved her. I hadn’t been there and I was the only left who had truly loved that woman. I tried to make myself believe that having loved her once was enough, but I knew that I was wrong. Freddy hadn’t needed the extra burden of my adoration. She was carrying too much on her shoulders without that.

          I asked myself what Elaine would have done in my place. Would she have showed her face if her lover had leaped to his death from her bedroom window? I think she would have, and I felt ashamed when I thought that, not for her but for myself. I hadn’t the courage that woman had possessed.

          I thought about Tooie and knew without even asking the question that she would have been there, dressed in violet and spangles and sitting up front. Even Vinnie Compton would have put in an appearance, and it seems he had.

          "Get dressed," he said to me when I opened the door. "We’re going out."

          "I don’t go out anymore. I’m not in that business."

          "You mind your speech, young fellow," he said to me harshly.

          "Mr. Compton, I’m not going anywhere."

          "Max, you can’t hide in your room like little boy. You have to face things."

          "I’ve been doing nothing but facing things, thank you. I’m tired of it."

          "Max, you’ve had a bad run of luck, that’s all."

          "A bad run of luck? Are you crazy? Look at the death toll mounting around me. I’m a disaster area."

          "Your old lover died. He probably should have died years earlier - you kept him going. Your parents died - that was a freak accident - nothing to do with you, Max. Your old friend Mikky died, and rightfully as I understand it. He was despicable and he treated you badly. Freddy died - that’s a tragedy all right - but what choices she made were her own, not yours. Face it Max. You’re not responsible."

          "I haven’t a friend left in the world, Vinnie. Not one except you."

          "I’m unreliable, Max. I’m married. I’m older than even your grandmother. Do you know how old I am?"

          I shook my head. I really had no idea and he never looked much different to me than he had when I was a child.

          "I was 29, Max, when I met Lainie. You figure it out. Do the numbers."

          I tried not to use my fingers to tote up the figures, but I had to resort to at least two or three digits.

          "You’re 78?" I asked him.

          "Seventy- seven, but not for much longer."

          "I wouldn’t have believed it."

          He put his hand on my shoulder and I stood there waiting for the "pass" that never came. Instead he slowly pulled me into a gentle, fatherly embrace and patted the back of my head.

          "I hope you’ve cried, Max. There’s nothing wrong with a good cry. Most men do have them, even if they won’t admit it. It’s a healthy reaction to the bad things."

          "I’ve cried."

          "Good. Now put on some nice clothes and let’s get some sunlight into you again."

          I nodded and went back to my room to find something to wear.

          We ended up in Schraffts. I had read that it was finally going to close and Vinnie thought I should have one more ice cream soda before that happened. As we sat there, him drinking tea and me indulging in more ice cream than I really needed, he told me about his afternoon there with my father waiting to meet the woman who would change his world forever. I hadn’t known that story. No one had told me.

          I told him about Lainie and me and our afternoons here. We both cried a bit, remembering our stories, hearing one another’s. When we were done, had said our farewells to the old soda shoppe, we walked across the street to Central Park. We sat on a bench overlooking the small pond at the south end and we talked. We talked about so many things and so many people that at the end of the conversation, as we said goodbye, I felt lighter than I had in a long time.

          "I won’t be seeing you much more, Max," Vinnie Compton said as he shook my hand warmly.

          "What do you mean?" I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

          "I’m pretty old, Max, and I’ve seen and done a lot. It’s probable that I’m the next one you know who’ll be off the map."

          "I don’t want to think about that," I said.

          "Well, I need you to. My wife will be lost without me. At least I think she will. You won’t be able to help her, but maybe I can help you both."

          "I don’t understand."

          He took an envelope out of his inner coat pocket and handed it to me.

          "You’re not to read this unless you hear I’ve died, Max. Do you understand me?"

          "What is it?"

          "It’s not my will. My lawyer has that. This is a letter I want you to read. It’s personal and it’s secrets. I want you to know some things but not until you need to know them."

          "I’m really confused here," I said.

          "I know. I’m sorry. You have to promise me you won’t read it now."

          "What if I don’t promise?"

          "I’ll take it back, Max."

          "But I’ll get it, somehow, when you’ve died."

          "No. I’ll take it back and destroy it. You’ll never know what I wanted you to know."

          I considered that for a moment, then looked him straight in the eye and put my free hand on his shoulder. Man-to-Man. A gesture of support.

          "Whatever you say, Vinnie. I’ll do it just like you said."

          "Thank you, Max. God bless you."

          He released the letter and watched me put it into my own inner jacket pocket. Then he pulled me to him and hugged me hard.

          "I’ve loved you like the son, or grandson, I never had, Max. I know I slipped up once, but that was something else, something I can’t really explain. You remind me of Lainie, I guess. You always did."

         "You really loved her."

          "She made me the man I am," he said, and he straightened up, his back stiffened and he looked even younger than he normally did.

          "And I know she loved you. She told me."

          There were tears in his eyes as he turned and walked away, down the street toward Sixth Avenue. I watched him for a moment, watched him strong and steady and young again. Then I turned toward Fifth Avenue and started on my way home.

          The air was brittle suddenly and there was a chill in it. A peculiar dampness that only happens in a big city descended. I could feel it hit my brow, then my cheek, then my hands. Weather, season, whatever it was, it felt refreshing and it opened up my senses. I was hearing noises through the traffic, sounds of children playing, babies cooing in their cribs. I could smell bread baking and the yeasts made my eyes tear. Through the foggy dampness I could see lights in far-off Queens across the East River, more than a mile in the distance. I was experiencing everything at once and it wasn’t overwhelming at all. It was liberating.

          I started back to the apartment, but knew that wasn’t my goal. I was heading off to discover me and who I might become. My history was all behind me. There were no markers set for me, no predetermined destinations. My mother had been wrong about that and so had Brianna. I was young enough to voyage out, discover the new lands within me and explore the world that had been left for me to find.

          Small ironies that had always informed my life in place around me, oddities that bore no resemblance to logic, I unfurled myself like a tightly wound flag and waved at the future.