Elegies for the Brokenhearted

by Christie Hodgen

  You think I’m sick? you said. I’m the one who’s sick here? You never even see your own kids. Your own flesh and blood and you never see them.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Here I am busting my ass to keep a roof over their heads.”

  Bullshit, you said. You’re out all the time with Rabbi whatsisname who’s so important.

  “The kids are fine,” she said.

  No they’re not, you said. They look like shit. They got no friends at school. Alls they eat is spaghetti from a fucking can and they look like shit.

  “Malinda could give a shit less,” my mother said, “where I am or what I do. And Mary,” she said, “is tough. Mary never cries.”

  You have no fucking clue! You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about! Your own kids!

  Until the neighbors started banging on their floor and calling down to us, “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up or we’re calling the cops! There’s a baby trying to sleep!”

  And the irony got to both of you, you started laughing and couldn’t stop, you were bent over with it, and while you were laughing Malinda and I slipped off to the living room and sat on the couch holding hands watching Tom and Jerry. In that world, which we loved, characters suffered one fatal blow after another and yet sprang up, every time, unharmed.

  When you recovered my mother said, “I think pretty soon you better find somewhere else to live.”

  Fine with me, you said. My fucking pleasure.

  A few nights later we were up together as usual watching TV, a football game, when Howard Cosell cut in with a voice that said something was happening. This had better be big, you said. Middle of the goddamned game. And it was. It was big. John Lennon had been shot.

  Holy shit! you said. Then, eyeing me, Sorry. ’Scuse me. Holy smokes. Holy fucking smokes. You got up and changed the channel, as if this would change the news. On another channel a blond woman stood on a street corner and behind her was gathered a throng of people, some moving about and talking excitedly, some crying, some standing facing the camera with blank expressions, behind her sirens wailed and cars slipped past in the night, behind her was New York. We lay in bed as if in prison, stunned to think that somewhere else people were awake and walking around, driving, reporting, somewhere else someone had been shot and here we were on a foldout couch, missing everything.

  I gotta go there, you said, as though something important had been taken away from you, that an injustice had been done to you personally. This man, this John Lennon, suddenly he was a friend of yours: someone who understood you, who stood for the same things you did, someone who had gone crazy for a girl and lost his mind just like you had, someone who had been one thing and then turned into another to the horror of previous fans. Already news had spread and people were standing in front of the hospital in which he’d died. I gotta go there, you said. I gotta get there.

  I said the thing I always said, the only phrase I knew. In those days I was a joiner, a follower, a disciple. I said, “Me too.”

  You looked at me and raised an eyebrow. The next day was a school day. “We’ll pretend you’re sick,” you said. “We’ll say you were up puking all night. First thing tomorrow, we’ll drop Malinda off and then we’ll go.”

  What I remember best from that trip isn’t the long drive, how John Lennon was playing on every radio station and how this made us feel like a part of something; it isn’t the thrill of the city approaching, approaching, and finally appearing, tall and glimmering; it isn’t the sight, from Michelle’s window, of so many things I’d never seen before—a car entirely covered with bumper stickers, a man with a Mohawk so spiked it looked like weaponry, cars without tires abandoned in the street, dogs in sweaters, two men holding hands, taxicabs by the dozens, and the people, people, people, so many people everywhere it didn’t seem possible to me that they could all have been born. It isn’t even the Dakota, grand and towering and spooky, or the adjacent crowd in Central Park, the hundreds of people standing together in a massive huddle, most of them motionless in reverence but some wandering about, one red-haired woman sobbing and sobbing, talking to everyone and no one in particular, saying: “He’s not dead, he’s not dead, it isn’t true, they’re just saying that.” It isn’t the way people were singing his songs, wobbly and slow, in a rueful key. It isn’t even the stupefying notion that a person, one single person, had mattered so much to so many.

  What I remember best isn’t any of these things, but a small moment that took place in Harlem, a world away from John Lennon and those who mourned him. We’d started for home and the driving was hard for you at first, so many cars, so many pedestrians, so many one-way streets, so many flashing lights, so many signs with symbols and names unfamiliar to us, so much peripheral noise and motion (the air was alive with horns and sirens and shouts), but then you seemed to give in to it, you seemed to stop looking for whatever it was you meant to find, and you were just driving, looking, wandering, going from street to street and neighborhood to neighborhood, each different from the last, each suggesting a million different lives. This was what we were doing when we wandered into Harlem, and suddenly it seemed we’d wandered into the shadowy remnants of a lost city. In this place there had once been businesses but many of them—most of them, it seemed—had failed. In this place people had bought and sold all manner of goods, the signs were still hanging above the doorways but the doors themselves, the windows through which one might have looked, intent on some treasure, the glass to which one might have pressed one’s nose, which one might have fogged with one’s lusty breathing, now these windows were boarded up, gone, so many purveyors of secondhand clothing, big-and-tall formal wear, hardware, used books and records, toys, typewriters, electronics, all of them gone. In these falling-down brownstones people had been born and had died, had been married, had made love, had slept and worked and eaten, had lived and breathed, but now these buildings were boarded up, abandoned, many of them were doorless and looked like dead men with their mouths hanging open.

  We took the first nervous breaths of people who find themselves outnumbered for the first time in their lives. We saw that everyone, everyone, everyone was black. We saw two girls with their hair in pigtails and between them, holding their hands, a woman with a red mouth, a full-length fur coat, a fur hat slanted on her head. We saw clusters of people imprisoned in puffy coats, hooded, their faces completely obscured. We saw a man dressed up in a colorful suit and shiny shoes, a long camel-colored coat, a wide-brimmed hat, high-heeled boots. Look! you said, as he walked past. Look how he walks! It was like no walk I’d ever seen. The way we walked at home was all business but this, this was expansive, exuberant, this was like a barely contained dance.

  Mostly people were going about their business, coming home from work, carrying paper and plastic bags, carrying purses, intent on dinner, their families, wondering what the kids had done at school, or turning over some problem between them and a lover. On the face of each passerby was a look of isolation, of distraction, of such familiarity with their surroundings that they might just as well have been blind. We were stopped at a red light when we saw a man walking down the sidewalk, toward us—he was wearing a woolly plaid jacket and brown slacks, a gray fedora—and as we watched him someone called out to him from across the street. We watched his face light up like a child whose birthday cake, flickering with lit candles, had been set before him, we watched him wave to his friend. “Shut up, fool!” he called, by way of greeting. Watching him you had a hungry look, your eye narrowed like an eagle’s, and it was clear in that moment that what you wanted from life was for someone to say the same to you, you wanted to be a part of something like that, to have friends you might meet on the street, friends calling out to you and you answering in mock rage. New York, Harlem, what you saw there you wanted to become, what you saw there was some long-forgotten dream brought back to life. What I remember most from our trip is this, this the moment we lost you.

  You hung around th
rough spring, working long hours laying carpet in the new houses being built at the north end of town. You were saving your money. When we saw you all you talked about was New York, your dream of moving there. You never seen, you’d say, so many people in your life. And the buildings, a million of ’em, and people in all of ’em, you’ve never seen anything like it, you’d say. Right, Mare? and you’d look to me for confirmation, you’d wink. It was something between us, something unknown to others. New York, you’d say, to bartenders, to your sisters, to people in line at the grocery store, is where everything is happening. You’re not in New York, you might as well be dead.

  All that season you were hooked on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. You filled the house with it, played it start to finish over and over and over again, sang it in the shower. I sat for long stretches looking at that album cover, all those faces, that collage of the brokenhearted—Marilyn Monroe, W. C. Fields, Marlene Dietrich, Albert Einstein, Shirley Temple, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Marlon Brando, Stephen Crane, William Burroughs, Karl Marx, Bob Dylan, Fred Astaire. I knew their names, or didn’t, it didn’t seem to matter, what seemed to matter was their faces, their expressions, those far-off looks, those joyless smiles. Your favorite line from the album was something eerie and cold, and you sang it all day long, in the shower, over breakfast, in the car, during commercials, in the booths of restaurants and on the swiveling stools of diners, in the library, in waiting rooms, in bars, over and over and over again you burst out with it: He blew his mind out in a car.

  “Would you,” my mother and Malinda would say, everyone would say, “shut the fuck up?”

  All that February and March our mother was home. She had broken up with her boyfriend and suddenly she was around all the time, talking on and on about the limitations of the Jewish race. “They’re a closed society, the Jews,” she said. “Very selfish, very judgmental. Real superior. If you’re not one of them, forget it.” All of the interest she’d taken in him she turned on us. Nightly she had us lie on the kitchen counter with our heads in the sink and she washed and conditioned and brushed our hair, she washed and ironed our clothes, in the morning she inspected our teeth and fingernails, wrapped scarves around us and pulled hats down over our heads. Before we left for school she took our faces in her hands and stared into our eyes. “I love you,” she told us. “You’re my true loves, my only true loves.” She hugged us and we clung to her like fools.

  When the weather broke you put an ad in the paper and sold Michelle to a guy with a handlebar mustache. He showed up at the door, head down, hands in pockets. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, no coat, a green Celtics cap with a well-grooved brim. He was wearing, also, cowboy boots, and it was hard to imagine Michelle going off with a man in cowboy boots. But you gave him the keys and he went for a spin around the neighborhood. People did this back then—they’d give away their keys to a complete stranger and simply trust the stranger to return. Which he did. Runs good, he said, nodding. And you said, She’s been good to me. She could break down tomorrow, though. Who knows. I hope she doesn’t but she might.

  “I trust you,” said the mustached man. And you shook hands. There was a trading of money and documents. The man climbed into Michelle and drove off. We could hear her engine roaring long after we had lost sight of her, and then we couldn’t even hear that. She was gone. And the next day, before anyone woke, off on a Greyhound bus, so were you.

  We went for a walk after you sold Michelle, and this was the last I ever saw you. I seemed to sense it would be. I was kicking a rock up and down the street and in a trance—this was the kind of thing I did, age eight and already a mope, a loner, a drag, a slouch. You walked beside me for a while and I went through the same struggle I always did around people, tight in the throat, the struggle of wanting to talk but not knowing what to say, not knowing the first word. But it was you who spoke. I want to tell you something, you said. You were kicking a stone of your own now, and sometimes our rocks crossed paths, bounced and leapt over each other.

  I know you don’t see much of your father, you said, and I wondered who you were talking about. Mike Murphy, who came around drunk from time to time and pulled me and Malinda to his chest, who sobbed in our hair, who talked in a strange voice—ILOVEYOUMYBABIES. Or were you talking about Michael Collins, who had been our father for three years but whom we never saw anymore? (In fact I would only see him again once in my entire life, in the cereal aisle of a grocery store, where my mother had sent me to fetch a box of Special K. There he was, poor Michael Collins, bald now and thinner than ever, a small, sad collection of food in his cart, there he stood in a blue windbreaker with the name of his old high school scrawled across the back, its mascot beneath, a ferocious hornet, and the loneliness was coming off him in a wave that nearly knocked me over. Then we saw each other, and when he asked about her, my beautiful mother, it was clear that he still loved her, that she had ruined his life.)

  I didn’t know who you were talking about, but it didn’t matter. I bet it’s tough without a dad and I’m glad I was around some. You can always write me, you know, you said. I’ll write you and you can write me back. I wanna know how you’re doing in school.

  I nodded, said nothing, kicked and pursued that fat gray stone. You’re a pretty tough kid, you said. You’re gonna be just fine.

  When you said this it was all over. I bawled like a baby, held my face in my hands and sobbed, gasped. I stood on the street shaking and you held me, held my head in your hands. I’d never cried like this and was lost in it, hot, salty, the sorrow itself and the shame of having collapsed into it. Don’t cry, buddy, you said, your voice cracking. Don’t cry.

  Then you were gone. This was life. This was the lesson we kept learning over and over and over, the lesson our mother was best capable of teaching us. Love—whatever else it might or might not be—was fleeting. Love stormed into your life and occupied it, it took over every corner of your soul, made itself comfortable, made itself wanted, then treasured, then necessary, love did all of this and then it did next the only thing it had left to do, it retreated, it vanished, it left no trace of itself. Love was horrifying.

  We didn’t hear from you for almost four years, during which time we often wondered aloud, Where were you? Where the fuck were you? And when were you coming home? Would you come knocking on the door, like you’d always done, and if so, when? Now? Was that you knocking right now?

  It wasn’t that anyone cared. No one would admit to that. It wasn’t that we missed you. The phrase with which you were summed up went something like: “Hey, if he wants us, he knows where to find us!” It was just that Pop Beaudry could die at any moment and this was—not that it really mattered but in a way it did, you certainly could say it did, in a way when you thought about it, it mattered more than anything else—your father; you were, in fact, Pop’s only true family, his only true blood, and what if he died, just up and died? This was possible. Pop was diabetic, he was hypertense, from time to time he suffered from shingles and gout. What your sisters couldn’t get past was that Pop could die, your own father would be dead, and you wouldn’t even know it. That was the thing. It was disgusting. It was unforgivable. It was, they said, something only you would do.

  Finally Christmas 1984 you sent a card, and inside a picture of yourself, grown hairy as Björn Borg, your arm around your girlfriend, a pretty black girl with a red mouth, your newborn daughter held between you, swaddled. The card was full of exclamation points. Look what I went and did! This is my kid! Meet my girls, Mary and her mother Kim! Though we could hardly see her face amidst all those blankets we said the baby took after you. Around the mouth, we said.

  Malinda said, “Which one’s the baby’s name? Kim?”

  “Mary,” I said. “Jesus.”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “Look,” said my mother, “she has his eyes.”

  “No she doesn’t,” Malinda said. “His eyes are gray.”

  “Yeah, but the baby’s are sad like his
. Look how sad. Look at that face.”

  Your return address was a Brooklyn hotel. The aunts said:

  “He lives in a hotel?”

  “Fancy!”

  “He must’ve got a good job or something.”

  “Too bad he doesn’t invite us down, let us stay for a while.”

  “And to think all those nights we put him up!”

  “He could at least invite us for a weekend!”

  “It’s the least he could do!”

  They sat for quite some time imagining the luxuries of the Ritz-Carlton. They imagined a maid in a black dress coming through each morning with a feather duster, they pictured mints on the pillow, a doorman in a dark blue suit with brass buttons, a blue cap, your mail and messages waiting for you in a gleaming wooden cubby behind the front desk. They had never been to New York and didn’t know what it meant to live in a hotel, a dark room at the end of a dark hallway, a mirrorless bathroom shared with a dozen other people.

  That Christmas we were fool enough to expect you. On Christmas Eve Aunt Lily called my mother to read your horoscope: A TRIP TO VISIT OLD FRIENDS WILL BRING YOU MUCH JOY AND CONTENTMENT! But you never showed, and soon enough we forgot about you again. My mother kept moving us every year or so, kept falling in and out of what she considered to be love, and with all of this going on we stopped speaking your name, stopped thinking about you even in the privacy of our minds, indeed for some time it was as though you had never existed. And yet when the phone rang that day (it was a Sunday in November, just after we’d turned back the clocks, and we felt ourselves to be standing at the mouth of a cave, the upcoming months of dark and cold, the long season awaiting us, we were going to have to pass through it again), somehow there was the sound of you in it, later we would each confess that we had known from the first ring. My mother had been making meatballs—she was married again and trying to be a good wife—and she’d told me to answer. “It’s for you,” I said, and she held up her fingers, slick with meat and egg, wriggled them.