Epilogue
From The Reader’s Digest, April, 1946:
From: Collected Letters of John Q. Public:
"In Hastings, Nebr. the Chamber of Commerce
got a simple, heartwarming request: ‘Please send
me all the information you can. Thank you.’
- Time
In the spring of the year that followed I went back to school. I was the oldest one in the place, other than the teachers, and I didn’t care. The open pathways across the common areas at Columbia, buildings in the distance, gave me a thrill every day. I felt at home there, where I had started twice before to learn life, to earn a place in the future. It was comforting to find the familiar among the new and the strange. My studies started out to be general interest, character building things but in short order I discovered an aptitude for the law. Here was something that had never occurred to me before, that I might find a place among the adjudicators of my world. There was a bit of irony in that decision and that decided me once and for all. I turned my attention to the study of all things legal and not so legal.
One aspect that fascinated me about the law was the inequity of the process as it affected "working girls." You know, by now, what I mean I hope. The early acceptance of those engaging in the ‘oldest profession’ followed by the wholesale denigration of them as a class had sadly affected their position in modern-day America. I spent the summer in Europe where I toured the red-light districts of Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague and Rome. I went to Paris for a week and met with two women there who had tried to form a guild, an association of prostitutes, but who had come up against a rigid set of restrictions imposed by the current government that prevented them from organizing. I returned to New York without a stop in London. I didn’t want to see Drew.
What I had seen and heard and learned on this trip excited me. There was a chance, I thought, to create a new wave of respect for the women, and men, who worked in this way. There was a way to clean-up this profession that had created me and kept my family going. I would endeavor to find it.
Late in September I got word that Vinnie Compton had died. I had almost forgotten that letter he’d entrusted to me the year before at Schraffts. I had been too busy to take notice of it on the mantle in the living room of the apartment. When I placed it there it had been the best place, I thought. I’d be aware of it, have it at hand when I needed it. I’d pretty much forgotten it, half hidden behind the mantle clock and a photo of Freddy and me when we were young.
I fished it out, dust-covered and oddly discolored on one end, on the day of his funeral and pocketed it before I headed out to the funeral parlor. There were lots of people there, young men and boys I’d never seen and, naturally, my imagination dragged me in one direction when the truth lay in another. These were the boys he had worked with, worked for and helped to a better life at the St. Jason’s home. This was what he had spent himself on, exhausted himself doing. I knew that, on the one hand, but had never really examined it with the other. This was a tribute, this collection of men who all seemed to have their futures firmly in their hands. A flush of pride informed this truth and I was glad that I had come.
His wife Susanne, whom I had never really gotten to know, delivered a simple, soft-spoken eulogy about Vinnie’s belief in the people he knew being greater than his belief in himself. There was a disconnect there that felt wrong to me. I wondered how well she really knew him. But then she said something, just at the end of her speech, that changed that perception for me.
"It wasn’t that he didn’t love all of you," she said, "but that he loved you all too much. His first love, Lainie, and his first wife, Tooie, understood more about him than I ever did when he was alive. They understood his morality and his firm assurance that love could not conquer everything. What his love could conquer for them, for him and for me - and maybe for you as well - was misunderstanding. Vinnie could come to believe in the people he cared about no matter what they believed. He could quietly support, through his love and his willingness to be there when needed, every ideal that was cherished by the people he cared about. He certainly did that for me. Maybe he did that for you as well. If he did, then you’ll miss him more in a few months or a few years than you do right now. I know I will."
She sat back down and I waited to see if anyone else would speak. A young man about twenty years old, got up and went to the podium. He cleared his throat a few times, seemed about to cry, then he gripped the lectern with both hands, gripped it so hard you could see the veins in those hands begin to emerge. He nodded to Susanne and then he started to talk about Vinnie in much the same way.
I reached into my pocket and took out his letter to me. I quietly, or as quietly as I could, opened the flap and took out the crisply folded piece of paper and read it to myself. I don’t make quick decisions, as you know, but this one was instantaneous. When the boy finished I stood up and walked forward, hoping that I wasn’t usurping some order of business, but when I reached the front and turned around I saw that I was the only one making this move. I stood behind the podium and smiled at everyone before I spoke.
"Pardon my smile, please," I started, "but I’ve known Vinnie most of my life and I know that he would be smiling to see so many of you here." There was a titter in the crowd. "Susanne, we’ve never been very close and that may have been due to my many absences, or to my long-standing devotion to Tooie and to my grandmother. Thank you for your kind words about them."
She smiled up at me and nodded twice. I don’t know why, but I stepped out from behind the lectern, moved down the two steps off the platform and went to her. I kneeled down and took her hands in mine and kissed them. She began to cry softly and quickly returned to the speaker’s spot I had just abandoned.
"I’m not good at this," I said next, "but Vinnie would have wanted me to say something and he actually provided me with the script." I held up his letter. "He handed me this about a year ago when he was helping me to get over the immense losses of my parents and my best friends, all of whom died within weeks of one another. I wasn’t sure..." I choked back a sob. "I wasn’t sure I could live on after all of that, but Vinnie took me in hand, perhaps he’s done the same for some of you, I don’t know, but he took me in hand and set me on a different road. He showed me the value of not mourning, but of regaling. He taught me the value of an ice cream soda. He taught me that the past is never away from us, so to mourn it is only to bury it. He taught me to move forward, not away but forward. He was a special man.
"He handed me this letter which I wasn’t to read until he was gone. I just read it, here, a few moments ago and although it is personal and private it seemed to me that not to share it will everyone he card about would be a mistake. May I read it to you?"
There as silence throughout the room. No one moved, no one spoke and I was about to say something else, apologize for my effrontery, sit down and hang my head when a voice piped up from somewhere in the parlor.
"Please read it. This silence is killing me."
I looked around for the source of the voice.
"Who said that? Would you stand up please."
A two-beat pause. No one moved. Then a man, I’d say of twenty-three or four, sitting toward the back of the room slowly, almost reluctantly, stood up. He was holding a hat in one hand, much the way Vinnie used to do when he’d come to visit us. He was wearing a suit that just a size or two too large, also like Vinnie often would do. He was tall, taller than me at any rate, and he had light brown hair that was so straight it hung down and framed his face.
"Would you join me up here, please," I asked him. He shook his head. "Please. For Vinnie." He hesitated, then moved out of his row of seats and walked up to where I was standing. I shook his hand and his grip was firm and pleasant, a bit warm but not moist.
"What’s your name?" I asked him.
"Freddy," he said. I almost choked, but I restrained myself.
"Well, Freddy," I said, "this letter is for you."
He smiled at me, half turned to the audience, smiled again and blushed. I turned to face him, knowing that my voice would carry well in this space and I read Vinnie Compton’s letter looking at another Freddy.
"Dear Max, "it began, "I won’t have many more opportunities to explain life to you or to anyone else for that matter. So, I thought I’d put down these thoughts and let you read them when you no longer had any recourse with me. I learned what love was, and what it could do, when I was younger than you. I learned that lesson from two extraordinary women - you knew them both and that’s a blessing. Let me tell you what they never told me, but showed me. With any luck I’ve shown some of it to you, but now I’m telling you.
"Being dead, by the way, I cannot help you or Susanne in any other way than this. Share my thoughts with her, won’t you?"
I looked over at Susanne who was sitting upright and smiling at me. I knew she was hearing his voice as I read his words and she felt their honesty and their warmth.
"Max, love is not what you give to someone else. That is devotion. Love is what you get from someone else, not as a gift, not as a duty or responsibility. It is something that emanates from the soul. Your soul emanates it in many directions and so does the soul of anyone else who cares about you. You cannot give away something over which you have no control. All you can do is accept it when it comes your way and know that others are accepting what you are allowing to come from you.
"This may be hard to understand, Max. I know that. It took me a long time to understand it myself. Ironically, my dear boy, understanding it cannot change it. It cannot stop it. It cannot generate it. It can only help you to find ways in which to engage it. I found it in the St. Jason’s Home; I found it in Susanne. I always sensed it with you. You will find your way to utilize this gift from God, my boy. You will bring joy to more people than you will sorrow. I think it is rare in this world for the soul’s pure love to be exploited for the worst in our natures rather than the good. That was something I learned from Lainie, from your grandmother. If I had known this, or even sensed it when I was younger, my life might have taken a different path, but the path I’ve been on for so long is not one I have ever regretted. I had the grand good luck to always have Lainie and her children and their children in my life. If that wasn’t evidence of the soul’s giving nature, than I am a dunderhead.
"I’ve witnessed for years the greatness of those rays of hope and love that come from within you. You have valiantly fought to subdue them, without even knowing what they were, and you have failed and that failure is the greatest success in the world today. You radiate this soulful power, my dear. You need to know that what you share with me, with all of us really, is this potency for support. Learn to accept it and live with it and you’ll go far, find love for yourself and respect and support. I have. You will.
"I wish I had something to leave to you and to Susanne. I have never been wealthy, though I have been successful. What I can leave to you both, and to anyone else you wish to share this with, is the simplicity of living with the knowledge that you are good. Inside you are good. If I was able to do anything in this world it was to give the boys I helped that belief in themselves. They are good."
I turned away from young Freddy and looked at the assembled friends of Vinnie Compton.
"I’m going to read you that part again," I said. "Inside you are good. If I was able to do anything in this world it was to give the boys I helped that belief in themselves. They are good."
I turned back to Freddy and moved a step in his direction to embrace him. He looked right back at me, never moving, never flinching and he accepted my arms around him and my kiss on his cheek. Then I released him and finished Vinnie’s letter.
"There is a world of splendor, Max, that we can only see if we allow ourselves to see it. Find work that enthralls you. Find a partner who engages you in every way, mind, heart, loins. Find the world as it is and leave it a better place. That is what I hope I have done and will do for whatever time I have left to me.
"There are small ironies out there that sometimes make no sense, Max. You start off in one direction but the lane you wander takes a sudden and unexpected turn and you end up somewhere new, or somewhere you’ve already been and it can be confusing, but if you maintain an open mind you soon realize that you are where you need to be, where you should be. Not a detour, Max, but a road that shifts your world. The irony in this is coming to grips with it instantly. You think you can’t, but you can and you must. And at every turn you’ll find me, your parents, Lainie, Freddy, even Mikhael..." I turned to the group and explained quickly that this part only dealt with me and my history, then I continued. "everyone you ever knew waiting for you. Those shafts of light never leave you. They are your resources. They are what the simple mind calls love. Never forget to let their love shine through you as well."
I took Freddy’s hand and pulled him close to me at the podium.
"That’s his letter to me, his legacy to us," I said. "I wish I’d spent more time with him, gotten to really know him when that was possible, but he still gave me more of himself than I probably deserved when I was a kid. For now, there’s nothing else for me to say. Thank you for letting me read his words to you all."
I squeezed Freddy’s hand and let him go. I went my way to my seat and he went the opposite way to his own.
Two days later, working at my desk in the living room, creating a paper that would outline the first American Union for Working-Girls and Boys, with legal protections and health-care rights, my doorbell rang. It was an oddly persistent ring, three long pulses followed by a pause and then two more. I wasn’t expecting anyone, but I shoved my feet back into my shoes which were under the desk, and I headed out to answer the door.
As I put my hand on the doorknob I knew who would be on the other side. My second Freddy. Somehow, in my soul, I just knew it.
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