A Robin Redbreast in a Cage

by R.P. Burnham

Jeremy’s friend Josh Gilbert couldn’t sit still. With nervous energy driving him like an overheated engine, his body was worn down to skin and bone and sinews. He seemed to be always self-conscious of his nose in the same way Jeremy used to be aware of his acne, which now had finally cleared up. But Josh’s nose couldn’t clear up. It was long and thin and slightly crooked after not healing properly when he broke it as a boy. He wore thick glasses, had a small chin, sunken cheeks and nondescript brown hair worn in a crewcut. All these things added up to one double-edged fact: Josh looked like a nerd and acted like a nerd. But Jeremy had come to see that nerd was just a name. Maybe he was one too, but there were worse things to be called. Here in early May of his senior year at Courtney Academy, he had just found out that he had been accepted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His grandmother’s second husband, the one who led him astray years ago by telling him he was the man of the family, was much involved in Wisconsin alumni activity and was very helpful in getting him a full scholarship, though he modestly said that it was Jeremy’s academic excellence that had earned the prize. He was very happy about that and remembered that his mother had pointed out to him that “nerd” was merely a term that described a serious student. Many of the students who laughingly called a good student a nerd, she said, were going to wish they had been one when they later ended up in dead-end jobs.

  But right now, not some time in the future when many fellow high schoolers would be filled with regret, he and Josh were certainly acting like nerds as they ate their lunch. What they were doing was engaging in a game of one-upmanship by quoting passages from Thoreau and Emerson, whom they were currently studying in American literature class. Josh started it when he cited a passage from Walden: “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” Jeremy had countered with a famous old saw from Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” For a while they paused and discussed just what was meant by “foolish,” but then after picking at the meatloaf, powdered mashed potatoes and peas, Jeremy brought up a passage he particularly liked from Thoreau’s essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” where Thoreau says that under “a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” Josh didn’t like that one, however, and let it pass without comment. “I am not alone if I stand by myself,” he quoted, and added that he liked that one about hitching your wagon to a star too.

  By this time several students in the neighborhood were rolling their eyes and whispering snide remarks to their pals. Josh’s eyes flashed, indicating that he had noticed their reactions. He took a spoonful of his pudding, then made a face. “This is inedible.” He looked around, forcing some of the students to drop their eyes, and said, “ ‘A man who is right is a majority of one.’ That’s something the herd never understand.”

  “We certainly never understand you, Josh Gilbert,” some neighboring wiseacre said while one of his pals lowed like a cow, but Josh regally chose to ignore them.

  He had spoken without any attempt to hide his hostility. It was one of the ways they were different. Where Jeremy, shy as ever, spoke softly, Josh flaunted his superiority. But the contemptuous reference to the herd pointed to another, deeper, difference. While Jeremy was attracted to Emersonian self-reliance and individualism because it helped validate his lack of popularity and social insignificance at Courtney Academy, he still didn’t like to belittle other people. Josh did. He was a right-wing fanatic who took individualism as an emblem of superiority which he felt was unrecognized. Actually, Josh’s position had confused Jeremy at first until he talked about it with his mother. The confusion came from the appeal: individualism, strong, superior. But his mother had poked holes where necessary in that trinity. She reminded him of some of the things she learned from Buddhism. The four noble truths could be summed up in one: selfishness or self-absorption was the cause of human misery and the way out, nirvana, was selflessness. It was a call to compassion and squared with everything he had ever learned from his father. So they were friends, but iron bars separated them from complete communion.

  Poetry was another barrier. Josh fancied himself a poet and was so confident in his abilities that he made no secret of the fact he planned to stand with Whitman, Keats and Shelley in the times hereafter. The ambition was a noble one. The trouble was, Jeremy thought, he wasn’t a very good poet, and Josh was so sensitive and so insecure that he could never accept criticism. His poems were too self-absorbed and too consciously poetic in a free verse kind of way. Many of his pieces dealt obliquely and obscurely with his troubled family life and his father’s desertion. At a party for the honor students last year after Josh read one of his poems there was an embarrassed silence before people found things to praise. Jeremy began, saying that he liked the image of a “tree-shrunken rain,” even though he thought it would make more sense to have written “the tree-shrinking rain.” “I like that image,” he said. “I could see the tree drooping from the weight of all the water that it had absorbed.” Joan Hiram said that it reminded her of a poem they read in French class by Paul Verlaine, “Il pleure dan mon coeur.” Others more generally murmured that they liked it. But of course the insincerity was too palpable to ignore, and Josh was sullen for the rest of the party. He felt like a misunderstood genius.

  So his friend was difficult and had to be handled with great care. But where would he be without him? They first met when Josh transferred from Portland High to Courtney Academy in his Junior year after his mother got a new job in Waska. Never having outgrown his freshman shyness and social awkwardness, Jeremy was often lonely throughout his years at C.A. His three pals from grade school all got girlfriends and began traveling in different circles. They were still good guys and were always friendly when they saw him, but on Friday nights and weekends they were always busy. The only social events Jeremy attended were parties some of the teachers gave each semester for their honor classes. Occasionally he would go to a movie with Joan Hiram, always with the mutual understanding that they were just “friends.” Joan was a very serious student who got straight A’s and studied constantly. Jeremy could tell that his mother wished he had more of a social life, but she never pressured him. The result was most weekends he just hung around the house. Then in the fall of his junior year he saw in history class that Josh was a lot like him. He was bright, inquisitive, and had an interesting mind. He knew things that weren’t in the textbook, showing that he read. Jeremy was impressed but too shy to initiate any friendship. It was only after the first exam and they both received 99 out of 100 points and tied for the highest marks in the class that they became friends. The exam was half essay and half two-point fill-in answers. Both got half credit for putting Locke down as the answer to a question about who was the thinker behind many of the ideas in The Declaration of Independence. The teacher was looking for John Adams as the correct answer, but gave them half credit for thinking of the English political philosopher.

  After class that day they had talked for a long time and discovered their similarities. Before long they were spending a lot of time together. Both had gotten their drivers licenses as soon as they were sixteen and after taking Drivers Ed. No longer was Jeremy homebound on Saturdays. Josh collected coins, a hobby that offered them an excuse to go on outings to estate sales whenever he learned on the internet that coins were for sale, or to antique stores in Portland and other towns. Josh had money to buy these coins, some of which were pretty expensive, because after years of being a scofflaw, his father was finally forced by the courts to pay child support, and he got the princely sum of forty dollars a week for an allowance. Other weekends they would do stuff on the computer or just hang around and talk. Jeremy was very grateful to have a friend, and he genuinely respected Josh’s mind and intellectual independence. Different they were, but no one else at school was interested in ideas in the same way he and Josh were. Most of the other kids in the honor classes were motivated by specific career goals, esp
ecially medicine, law and engineering. They were good students and intelligent, but they were not intellectuals, even in embryonic form.

  That is why Jeremy put up with all the ways they were different and with all the things that bothered him. Consider the alternative, he would tell himself: alone and lonely. No, he wished that Josh wasn’t so contemptuous of others, that he was quieter and less aggressive, or that he was more politically progressive, but on earth nothing is perfect and an imperfect friend was enough.

  Josh had not really ignored the kid who made the wisecrack. He only pretended to, for after the kid spoke he grew quiet for a while. While Jeremy finished his lunch and thought about their friendship, Josh looked through their American literature textbook. He ate like a bird and much of his lunch remained uneaten. With a sudden jerk of his head, he looked up from the book. “What do suppose Emerson meant by ‘Beauty through my senses stole/ I yielded myself to the perfect whole’?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jeremy said. He looked up and smiled at Tony Dibella as he walked by carrying a tray with his and Gina Chute’s lunch. Tony smiled back and raised his eyebrows, pointing with his eyes and a slight toss of the head to indicate that he couldn’t stop and couldn’t talk because it was his duty to listen. Gina was saying something about a new pair of shoes that didn’t fit. She was quite the talker.

  Jeremy watched them for a moment, then turned back to Josh. “But in the introduction the guy said Emerson was bothered by the fact beauty is, you know, like spiritual, but the senses through which we experience beauty are materialistic. I think it’s saying that he’s just going to yield to the sensation and live in the moment and not worry about it. Somehow he felt he had communed with the Oversoul even if he wasn’t sure how.”

  “Yeah, that’s kinda what I was thinking. If you ask me, though, Emerson doesn’t go far enough by just stopping being a clergyman.”

  “You mean the bit where he says he stopped being a minister so that he could preach?

  “Yeah. He didn’t go far enough. He should have thrown out all that crap.”

  Josh was an aggressive atheist, so Jeremy knew what he meant, and since most of the students who had heard them earlier quoting Emerson and Thoreau had finished and left, he was not self-conscious when he said, “God, you mean.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, God. How people can believe that crap is beyond me. God has a son, does he? Another part of him is a spirit, one that sometimes fancies he’s a dove. Oh, really? If that second member is a spirit, what the heck is God? Meatloaf?”

  While Jeremy didn’t like Josh’s sarcastic tone because he believed in respecting other people’s beliefs, he didn’t have many objections to the actual thought. He too had trouble believing in an all-controlling God who answered prayers and looked out for us. Would such a god have allowed his dad to die? So he grinned at the face Josh was making and said, “Yeah, it’s quite a stretch. A Catholic friend told me they were told that the trinity is a mystery that remains a mystery even when it’s explained. I like that!’

  “I had a mystery explained last night. You know that passage where Emerson quotes some saint saying that God is a circle whose center in everywhere? Well, I was watching Nova last night, and according to Emerson and that saint, God is the Big Bang. Or vice-versa.” He paused to watch the effect this inscrutable statement had on Jeremy.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. How is the Big Bang, which Emerson never heard of, the same thing as God?”

  Josh waited a moment, savoring the suspense; then he grinned. “The question was raised on the show, where is the Big Bang’s location. You know, if something explodes and expands in every direction, the forensic guys can figure out where the explosion originated. But the Big Bang is different. The Cosmic Atom before the explosion was the entire universe. So the answer to the question is—”

  “I get it, Jeremy interrupted. “The answer is everywhere. The Big Bang happened everywhere.”

  “That’s it. Good go! I didn’t see it until the guy said so. So isn’t that a great one to tell to those people who believe the Bible is literally the word of God.”

  He saw Jeremy frowning and knew why. He rose and gathered his books together. “Come on, we’d better get to class.” After they had emptied their trays and were outside, he resumed. “I know you think that Charlie Harris is a nice girl, but really the things she believes are just ridiculous. The trinity is nothing compared to believing that every word in the Bible is literally true.”

  “I don’t think that’s fair to her. I’m not positive, but I don’t think she’s happy. She was forced to live with her fundamentalist uncle, you know. I’m not sure she thinks the Bible is literally true. She told me once that she thought evolution was correct, and another time she said she thought the men who wrote the Bible were interpreting belief in terms of their day.”

  “So is she a Christian?”

  “I think so. I’m sure, in fact. I just meant she isn’t some robot being controlled by the Bible.”

  “Or her uncle?’

  Talking about Charlie in so personal a way was starting to make him uncomfortable. “I don’t know,” he said in a way that cut off further discussion.

  He was uncomfortable because of a plan he’d formulated and shared with no one—not his mother, not Josh, no one—to ask Charlie Harris to the prom. In many ways it was insane and impractical and almost surely doomed to failure because her strict uncle was not very likely to allow her to go to so profane an event. But he wanted to do it for another reason. The prom was the most important social event in high school, something that many people remembered vividly for the rest of their lives. He’d heard his mother and aunts talking sometimes about their proms with a sort of hushed reverence. His high school life was socially a failure; here was a chance, slim as it was, to redeem the failure. In this context, even asking would become a kind of victory. Because even if she said no while her eyes showed she wanted to say yes, he would take away from that a kind of joy. Nor was Charlie chosen from mere propinquity, nor from perceiving she was shy like him, nor from any other convenient consideration. He wanted to ask her because she was the only girl at Courtney Academy to whom he really felt attracted. It had to be Charlie he would ask. She was pretty, intelligent, and nice. Under those ridiculous dresses her uncle forced her to wear he could see she had a voluptuous body which he had often fantasized about. More importantly, he was quite sure she was attracted to him as well. He had watched other boys talking to girls and had observed the way girls became nervous and slightly flustered when they were attracted to the boy talking to them, and he’d seen many of these encounters lead to relationships, so he was quite sure the behavior he saw meant what he thought it meant. Charlie acted just like those girls when he talked to her. She too would become flushed and flustered sometimes. So even a no would still put the subterranean feelings they both recognized out in the open. That could at least be the start of something.

  But it wasn’t going to be easy. He had planned on asking her after class on Monday, only to chicken out. Today was just about the last day he could ask her and allow for a decent interval before mid June when the prom was scheduled. He had not slept well last night thinking about it and didn’t want to go through that again. He was resolved to face the unknown.

  The trouble was that now that the thought of asking her was in his mind, he was inattentive in class and actually daydreaming when Mr. Tibbett’s question to him shocked him into a confused awareness. “Sorry,” he said in a low voice as he felt his face growing red, “could you repeat the question?’ Fortunately the question concerned Emersonian individualism, a topic he knew a lot about, and his answer led to a lively discussion that filled most of the rest of the hour.

  Then after saying good-bye to Josh the heavy dread descended upon him as he headed across campus to his American Government class. It was the last class of the day and the only one he had this semester with Charlie. In little over an hour he was to confront his fate, whether in victory or defeat. Either
way the thought caused his mouth to go dry and a weight descend to his belly.

  Charlie was already in her seat when he entered the classroom. She wore a long dress faintly yellow (for she never wore bright colors) and square dark shoes. Her reddish-brown hair was no longer worn in pigtails, but rather was cut short, hanging just over her ears. She hadn’t been in the sun enough to have any golden highlights. He sat behind her, where through the semester he had seen her many times pull at her bra quickly and surreptitiously so that he knew she was uncomfortable in those awful clothes her uncle made her wear. He thought of that as he sat down, feeling the presence of the fundamentalist minister as an oppressive barrier. The thought occurred to him that he had better not ask her. But that was only an cowardly excuse—

  But she heard him coming and turned. “Oh, hi, Jeremy. How are you?” she asked pleasantly and with a quick little smile.

  “Pretty good,” he said, still dry-mouthed. “How has your day been?”

  “Good.”

  “You took American lit last year, didn’t you?”

  She nodded as she leaned down to pull her bookbag out of the way as two girls came down the aisle.

  “What did you think of Mr. Tibbett’s teaching method? I mean teaching the nineteenth century by genres instead of chronologically?” Speaking of academic stuff, he found himself relaxing and noticed that Charlie did too. He saw her breathing became more shallow as he wondered if he was as transparent as she was.

  “At first I thought it was strange, but seeing ideas from Emerson and Thoreau in Dickinson and Whitman and Melville gave a different perspective when we actually read Emerson.”

  “Yes, that’s my reaction too. Mr. Tibbett said beginning with Emerson, the students tend to find him dry and abstract instead of an original and brilliant thinker. Did you like him? Emerson. I mean?”

  She looked doubtful. Yes, but…”

  “He was a minister, you know.”

  “But very independent.” She spoke wryly, as if she was laughing at herself.

  “I think he said something about leaving the ministry so that he could preach.”

  “Yes, strange sermons, though. But he was very interesting.” Now she seemed wary.

  “He believed in self-reliance and stuff like finding God right now, not just in the Bible. Perhaps your uncle objected?”

  But before she could answer Ms. Jose strode into the classroom carrying a heavy briefcase. She was an intense young woman who had worked in Washington for a few years as a Senate intern before turning to teaching. She knew a lot about the inner workings of government. She was at her best when she talked from experience, Jeremy thought. When she lectured she tended to be boring.

  The class topic for the day was the checks and balances of the federal government. It became interesting and kept Jeremy’s mind from wandering when someone asked if a parliamentary system was better than our three-part government, and to everyone’s surprise Ms. Jose said it was. The founding fathers, she said, had a certain distrust of democracy. The checks and balances among the three parts of the government were really a way to insure that the upper classes always controlled the government. After that the rest of the class was spontaneous and interesting as they discussed democracy and the different ways the two forms of government, parliamentary and federal, would confront a crisis.

  Jeremy, scholar that he was, got lost in the safety and comfort of class discussion and only felt the return of nervousness when the bell rang. As he gathered his books and papers and prepared himself to follow Charlie out, Joan Hiram momentarily delayed him with a question about something he had said in class concerning people who had been imprisoned not being able to vote being an example of the way the government still showed antidemocratic sentiments. “Where on earth did you get that idea?” she asked with a smile. But in his nervousness and haste, he said curtly, “My mother read something about it and the Florida election in the paper to me just the other day,” and turned away quickly to catch up with Charlie, but not before noticing a look of surprise and hurt on Joan’s homey face. He knew he would have to apologize later.

  The curtness, he knew, came from an internal struggle. Joan was unknowingly offering him an excuse to not have to face Charlie with his question, but the impulse to yield to a serendipitous escape had to be stifled with an effort of will.

  Outside he saw her walking to her locker in Main Hall. Walking quickly, he came up to her.

  “Hey, Charlie, wait up.”

  She stopped and turned, her face appearing suddenly tense. She recognized something in his tone. Already he felt his courage failing him.

  “I forgot to tell you. Last weekend I found out I’ve been accepted at the University of Wisconsin with a full scholarship.”

  She relaxed. “Oh, that’s wonderful. Congratulations!”

  “Yeah, thanks. Interesting discussion on democracy, wasn’t it?” he stupidly asked. He remembered the remark made long ago at his first party when he started talking about school: “Hey, you guys. No talking about schoolwork. It’s the weekend.”

  “Yes, it was,” she said, appearing to be puzzled by the sudden shift in topics.

  They were at the foot of the stairs leading into Main Hall. He stopped. “Where are you going to school, Charlie?”

  “I’m going to a Christian college in Virginia. My uncle wants me to be a spokesman for the national church. He thinks that will be putting my scholarly skills to good use.”

  He noticed she spoke of herself in terms of her uncle, not herself. “Is that what you want to do?”

  She smiled nervously. “I don’t really know what I want. But if I can help the church that will be worthwhile and important work.”

  “What would your uncle…?

  “What?

  “Oh, nothing.” He knew he was defeated. He could smell the sweet aroma of the flowers the gardeners had planted on the sides of the stairs. The sky was a deep blue. The yellow and black striping of a bee hovering over the flowers caught the sun’s rays through the shade of a tree and glowed brilliantly. “Oh, nothing, it’s just that on such a beautiful spring day with flowers blooming and birds singing and the sky cloudless blue and with the senior prom coming up, I was just thinking you should do what you want to do.”

  He saw the look of panic in her eyes when she heard the phrase “senior prom.” He saw, too, that she conquered her fear enough to hide it behind a wry little laugh. “We have a duty to other things, you know. To other people and to God. I’m sure my uncle wants the best for me.”

  So it was over.

  But then came the remark that saved him from despair and showed that she understood him. It was subtle and indirect but unmistakable in tone. “I’ve got to get home, Jeremy, but…well, thank you. Thank you.” Then she turned and almost ran up the stairs with quick, nervous steps.

  For a moment he did not understand. He looked down at the ground, trying to interpret the way she had thanked him. She was grateful and yearning and sad and frustrated all at the same time. Then it came to him. She knew. She felt the same way. The joy felt like a volcano exploding out of his heart, but he refrained but shouting out loud and let the emotion level down to a quiet contentment. He would carry the treasure of that knowledge all the days of his life and believe in the possibility of love forever. Still tingling with a joy he knew no one else would understand, he vowed that he would never forget how he felt at that exact moment. Then something made him look up. At the top of the stairs she turned to take a quick look back at him. The emotion he could read on her face was a strange, strange mixture of the same joy and pain that accompanied her last words to him, and he knew she would not forget this day and time either.

  PART III

  CONVERGENCE