by Bob Mitchell
“Yeah, can you believe it?” Kate says, welling up.
“Listen, Kate, you are the absolute best, don’t you know that? Best cook, best lover, best person in the world. Forget about Samantha,” Seth consoles, muttering “that little bitch!” again under his breath.
Kate’s anger melts, and she cracks up, puts her arms around Seth, hugs him tight, plants a smoldering kiss on his unsuspecting mouth.
“You’ll show ’em, babe, don’t you worry!” Seth says, raising his glass.
“I propose…,” he says, smiling at Kate wryly, milking the double entendre.
Kate glares at Seth, then, correcting herself, cracks up again and picks up her glass. She feels the warmth of the wine and of Seth, and a golden glow emanates from her face, like the one surrounding the angel’s face in Duccio’s painting Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin.
“…a toast,” Seth continues, “to the most beautiful, most intelligent, most talented, most loving woman I’ve ever known.”
Kate loses it, and a lone projectile tear leaps into her glass. She cracks up a third time.
Another simultaneous sip. Love is in the air.
“I know things are gonna turn out just fine, my sweet,” Seth says. “Speaking of which, you know that coffee mug you gave me?”
“You mean the one with Woody Allen’s quote ‘Eternity is long, especially toward the end’?”
“No. I love that one, but I mean the mug you gave me a while ago for my birthday. The one that says—”
“‘Everything happens for a reason,’” Kate interrupts.
“Yeah. Well, I’ve been thinking about that. A lot, actually. Do you believe those words?”
“Mmm…yeah, I guess. I mean, I do think that maybe out there somewhere, somehow, there’s a plan for us. Things don’t always work out as we’d like, or at least they don’t seem to. Then one day, they do, and everything makes sense again.”
Another synchronous sip, and now it’s Seth’s turn.
“I agree. Take this thing at the restaurant. Maybe Samantha’s not such a little bitch, y’know? Maybe she’s as good as Frédéric thinks she is. That doesn’t mean you’re not as good as, or even better than, she is. But objectively speaking? Maybe now’s not the exact time you’re supposed to be ‘the Chosen One.’ And maybe we don’t know now what that reason is, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, right?”
“I s’pose. Yeah, well, thanks for making me feel a little better.”
They kiss, take another sip.
“Sweetie, why are you thinking about this now? Something happen to you?”
“Nah. Well,” Seth answers, then, reflecting, “yeah, something did happen, a few times—”
“Wanna tell me about it?”
“Sure. It’s just that, well, Kate…I’ve been seeing…Papa Sol.”
Dead silence.
“You mean you’ve been dreaming—”
“No…well, maybe…I dunno. Yeah, probably in my dreams. But it all seems so real, and then there was the stub and—”
“Whoa. Slow down, honey. The stub?”
“A ticket stub, from a baseball game I think I went to and saw Papa Sol at—”
“So? It could’ve been—”
“It was to a game that was played before I was born—”
“But, honey, you could’ve found it at Elsie’s and—”
“Well, maybe. Anyway, I’m not sure if it was a dream or not, but I’ve seen sides to Papa Sol I never saw before. And I saw things happen to him that must’ve made him very sad. Sad enough to…”
Seth doesn’t ever remember crying as an adult. Ever. And he’s not about to start now. He takes a deep breath, collects himself.
“I love you, Seth Stein.”
“I love you, Kate Richman.”
“So,” Seth adds, “I’ve just been thinking lately about all these things and about how they must happen for a reason. Maybe we don’t see that reason, but it must be there. Because if it’s not, then life can be pretty damn sad or meaningless or desperate or—”
“I love you, Seth Stein,” Kate whispers again, placing her right hand behind Seth’s neck, massaging his nape.
“Aaaaah. You are goooood.”
Kate gets up, checks the flamande, stirs it twice, replaces the cover.
“About forty-five minutes till it’s ready, honey pie,” Kate announces, returning from the kitchen. Seth gives Kate that look. Kate returns it.
Now the two are lying in the bed, their warm bodies pressed together. Seth slides the fingertips of his left hand down Kate’s soft, arched back, slowly, stealthily, luringly, lustily.
Fade to black.
“Ladies and gentlemen…”
“Dr. Stein…”
“Today, as advertised, we’re going to be discussing the historical concept of passion. Now, you all know what passion is, don’t you?”
General tittering and nodding, except for Libby Frank, who shakes her head, and exchange student Sylvie Corbière, who turns red as a betterave.
“Okay, settle down, guys. Now, to begin with, we’re not talking about the kind of passion you might experience in, say, the backseat of a Honda. Or screaming at Fenway when you’re rooting for the Bosox. Does anyone know where the word passion comes from?”
Predictably, Stephanie Lowell’s arm zooms skyward.
“Yes, it’s from the Latin pati, to suffer.”
“Also from the Greek pathein, same meaning,” Bronson Larrabee IV adds.
“Excellent!” Seth says. “And so, we’re talking about the fact that passion, in a historical sense, is about the suffering of the past, the struggles and toil and travail that are the crucibles for action and achievement. I’d like to read the quote from Churchill I gave you to think about last class, just to refresh your memories.” Seth assumes a close-lipped, dropped-chin, lower-register, upper-crust British accent:
History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.
“Ostensibly, Churchill was speaking about his just-deceased predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, in an attempt to soften his Hitler-appeasing stance, with which Churchill so vehemently disagreed. But on a deeper level, Churchill, who had lived through many historical events himself, must have been thinking of something a lot more profound. So, what do you suppose he was getting at, and what do you think he meant by passion?”
The class is pensive, soaking it all in, delaying the signal between left brain and right arm. Finally, it is Donna Hemming, a bright, athletic young lady with short brown hair and intense green eyes, who is the first to respond.
“I think he’s basically saying that History is a failure. I mean, he says it ‘tries to’ reconstruct the past and that it ‘stumbles along.’ The past is sort of like a photo you take, and when it’s new, it’s clear and colorful, but then as time goes by, it fades, and History can’t really put back the color in it.”
“Well said,” Seth says. “And passion?”
“Wait just a second,” Libby Frank protests. “I’m not sure he meant that History is a failure. After all, wasn’t he a lifelong student of History? Didn’t he live it, write about it? I doubt he wanted to diss History altogether. Maybe he was just being modest?”
“Could be,” Seth agrees. “Yes, I don’t think Churchill would see History as a total failure. So then, what do you think he meant by passion?”
“I think he meant the same thing as Whitehead meant by ‘nerves and vitals.’ That is, what really went down, the inside story, what people were feeling,” Stephanie answers. “And like Donna said, this passion tends to fade in time, and the historian has a bitch of a job putting the flame back.”
“Okay, good,” Seth says. “So now, let’s be more specific. Can you think of some passion of the past—deep feelings that defined a historical event—that once burned bright and that now we, as historians, have to try to ‘reconstruct,’ ‘
revive,’ and ‘kindle’?”
Seth’s mind takes a momentary sabbatical from the class, wandering back to his visits with Papa Sol. Churchill’s quote has inspired him to reflect on how he, and he alone in the history of mankind, has been able to walk down “the trail of the past,” to reconstruct some of the key scenes of Papa Sol’s existence, to revive the echoes of his mute calls for help, to kindle the true passion his grandfather felt toward life and baseball and that, during his life, he had revealed fully to no one.
“How about the Holocaust?” the usually timid Josh Greenfield answers, jolting Seth from his reverie.
“The Holocaust,” Seth echoes, coming to.
“I mean,” Josh says, with feeling, “there were six million Jews eradicated, and five million others, and yet the passion of that experience is fading a little bit every passing day. How can people ever forget the ‘passion’ of that monster Hitler? How can they forget all the human suffering and despair? The families torn apart? I lost my great-grandfather at Auschwitz, so the memory of his ‘passion’ lives on in our family. But for most people, the Holocaust was horrible, yes, but it has become a distant memory. And some people, fanatics like that Iranian piece of crap, Ahmadinejad, are just in denial that it ever happened! Listen, thank God for the Simon Wiesenthals and the Elie Wiesels of the world, who have kept reminding us that, even though time can make our memory of these events fuzzy, we can’t allow ourselves to forget. There’s a Hebrew word, nizkor, that means ‘we will remember.’ And we have to. ‘The passion of former days’ cannot die. If it does, we’re totally screwed.”
Wow.
“Beautifully expressed, Josh,” Seth says to his flock, piercing through the awed silence of the lambs.
Jamaal Crosby makes the same point about remembering the civil rights movement, Libby Frank tosses in feminism, Maria Lopez makes a plea not to forget the good works of César Chávez.
Just now, Seth Stein has a nearly uncontrollable urge to scream out his confession, like the narrator at the end of Poe’s harrowing tale “The Tell-Tale Heart”:
I admit the deed! ’Twas I who visited Papa Sol in his past; ’twas I alone who walked along the dusty trails of the past, a true historian, seeing things not with a flickering lamp, but with a flaming torch! Yes, just as you suspected… ’twas I!
Instead, Seth says to his minions, “I guess the question here is not whether History deserves to be remembered, but whether it can be. Yes, Sylvie?”
Drop-dead, sultry beauty Sylvie Corbière, the exchange student from Nantes with the impeccable pseudo-British accent, opines, “I have to agree with the great writer Marcel Proust here. The present dies the minute it is born, and it cannot be recaptured easily, if at all. I do not think that History can do this job adequately. As Proust thought, only art, in the form of the carefully written word, can reconstruct the past.”
Seth’s entire professional future on the planet is in imminent danger of collapsing.
“I agree to a certain extent with that thesis,” he responds, “but writing is only words, beautiful words perhaps, but words nonetheless. Has anyone heard the Latin expression facta non verba?”
“Deeds, not words,” Bronson Larrabee IV translates.
“Yes. The two are quite different, of course. It is the deeds of the past that we, as historians, are interested in, not just describing them, but reliving them.”
Phew. Close call, but Seth’s career is back on track.
“Karen?”
Karen Fink, the stately, articulate blonde sitting directly across the table from Seth, speaks. “I was just going to agree with Sylvie.”
Oy.
“We studied the poem ‘Ozymandias’ last week for an English course, and I think Shelley would agree with Proust,” Karen says, reading from a book she has removed from her backpack.
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed…
“I think the poet was saying that statues and objects and anything that becomes the past will naturally decay and disappear—in the poem, he mentions ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone,’ a ‘shattered visage,’ and ‘the decay of that colossal Wreck’—and that the only thing that endures forever is ‘passions,’ in this case the spirit of ruthlessness of the king, Ozymandias, that the sculptor captured beneath the stone of the statue. These passions survive even the sculptor’s hand, and it is art, like Proust’s writing, that alone can attempt to resuscitate the past.”
Seth is imagining that he will be eternally damned to a life of unemployment.
Mercifully, the bloodbath is saved by the bell.
“This has been a very stimulating discussion, guys,” he says. “Whether art and literature alone can preserve the past, or History, with its attempt to put the pieces of what really happened together—the answer to this burning question will sadly have to wait until the next time we meet. Thank you, all.”
A warm round of applause, and the students rise and begin to file out.
Seth is envisioning Papa Sol in his old armchair, his anthology of Romantic poems clasped in his carpenter’s hands. Perhaps he is reading “Ozymandias”?
Seth collects his index cards, pen, and books, tosses them in his briefcase, puts on his parka and, finally, his baseball cap.
Stephanie Lowell is the last student to leave. As she passes Seth, she pirouettes, looks at him, and says, “Great class. New haberdasher?”
Huh?
Seth turns the key in the door of his town house, enters, takes off his parka and cap, throws them on the floor.
So where did Stephanie learn the word haberdasher? And what did she mean by her remark?
He goes to the bathroom for a pee and a quick washup, dries his hands, walks back to the study, and settles into his La-Z-Boy.
He sits and mulls, and his eyes drift over to the pile of clothes on the floor next to him, particularly to his baseball cap. Something is different. He wears his trusty cap virtually every day of his life, and something is definitely different.
He looks at the back of the cap, and he realizes that its color is not the familiar navy blue of his Red Sox cap, but a lighter blue, a…Dodgers blue. He picks the cap up, studies it, turns it around. On the front, he discovers not the familiar red B of his Bosox cap, but an orange NY, the letters interlocked, the font pilfered from the old Giants. He is holding in his trembling hands not his Boston Red Sox cap, but a New York Mets cap, the kind you might buy at the ballpark.
Egad.
First the stub, then the mustard stain, then the sunburn, now the Mets cap. Screw Shelley and Proust. Long live History!
Seth had had a melancholy walk back home from Robinson and his two o’clock class. Thinking of the holes Sylvie and Karen had poked in Seth Stein’s Grand Theory of History. Thinking of Grandma Elfie and hoping she wasn’t too sad today. Thinking of Papa Sol and all the conflict he must have endured during his life. But now, because of this mounting pile of evidence, he feels validated, energized, optimistic, cheery. In fact, this calls for a victory cigar.
He opens the humidor sitting on his desk, selects a stogie he’s been saving for just this sort of occasion—a large, 178-millimeter Cohiba Esplendidos. He clips the tip and lights up.
Ahhhhh.
Like savoring Balvenie, appreciating primo cigars is another treasured baton Papa Sol had passed on to Seth. How to clip them. How to light them. How to hold them. How to draw in the smoke, roll it around his mouth, exhale it smoothly. How to blow smoke rings, big ones, small ones, still smaller ones that can be expelled through their predecessors.
Seth is fashioning exquisite little smoke rings while Fred Astaire croons the old classic “The Way You Look Tonight” in the background. The Jerome Kern music, the Dorothy Fields lyrics, and the mellow, high-pitched
genius that is Fred’s magical voice all make Seth think of his lovely Kate, and the way she’ll look tonight, too.
Feeling debonair, Seth hauls his behind out of the La-Z-Boy and onto the dance floor. He floats around the study, his feet light as a feather, with an imaginary Kate who is impersonating an imaginary Ginger, the fingertips of his right hand barely grazing his invisible partner’s bare upper back—his cigar is wedged between the index and middle fingers—and those of his left delicately resting on her right hand, holding it tenderly, as they would hold a Riedel wineglass or a Stradivarius.
As Fred croons about wrinkled noses and foolish hearts, Seth dances gracefully around the coffee table, then the desk, and gives Kate an affectionate, imaginary peck on the cheek. Now he sways back and forth with Kate’s ghost, and they do one of those Fred-and-Ginger shoulder fakes, change direction, circle the desk again, and, out of the corner of his left eye, Seth spies Papa Sol’s carved wooden box.
The music continues, but the dancing stops.
Seth releases invisible Kate, picks up the box, and returns to his La-Z-Boy.
Now, more than ever, he wants to go back again to visit Papa Sol, to see him once more, to put an end to the mystery and the secrets, to answer, once and for all, all the questions.
He opens the box, removes the ball, grips it tight. He leans back in his La-Z-Boy, puts his cigar in its ashtray, places his arms at his sides. He is ready for liftoff.
Nothing.
Seth squeezes the ball again, but still nothing. Huh? What’s up? Did I do something wrong? How come nothing’s—
¡Ay, caramba!
Room spins, Dah-de-lah-de-lah, calm, Beatles, Slide Show.
The invention of coins by the Lydians and Caesar’s assassination and the Hundred Years War and Joan of Arc being burned at the stake at Rouen and Gutenberg’s printing press and Newton studying gravity and Grant and Lee at Appomattox and Marie and Pierre Curie discover radium and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the UN is formed and the fall of the Berlin Wall and Dolly the sheep is cloned…