The Digger's Rest

by K. Patrick Malone

  But that all ended when Jack was offered the Director of Antiquities position at the Museum. He couldn’t really turn it down; he wasn’t getting any younger and it was a power and prestige position, so a desk jockey he became.

  The move worked out for both of them. A year later he gave Mitch his own department where they could both stick to spending the Museum’s money to expand the Museum’s ancient art collection by acquiring some of the world’s greatest examples of classical sculpture with Mitch finding his feet by concentrating on what he loved most, pre-Renaissance western art; but alas, not allowing them to play in the dirt together anymore.

  The next time Mitch worried him wasn’t his fault. It was nothing that he’d done, but something that was done to him. He came stomping into Jack’s living room one evening about seven years before having just come back from giving a lecture to the undergraduates from Harvard at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and threw a crumpled magazine on the table in front of him. “Look!” was all Mitch could spout. The expression on his face spoke the rest; anger, hurt, betrayal, like the scar over an old wound had been ripped open again violently, pain mixed with…shock, mixed with…hate. His eyes burned with it. Jack picked up the magazine.

  “What is it?”

  “Just look!” Mitch repeated, shouting and pointing to the magazine in Jack’s hand, tears of anger welling in his eyes, which at that moment looked more like his mother’s than ever. Jack un-crumpled the magazine, looked at the cover, and understood immediately. The photo on the cover was of Julian Bramson, the third, sitting regally in a stately antique armchair with a handsome young blonde man, about Mitch’s age, standing behind him with his hand on the old man’s shoulder, Julian Bramson, the fourth. The larger caption read, “A Boston Dynasty Continues,” followed by the underlying caption. “Julian Bramson IV announces his candidacy for Congress.”

  By then Mitch was pacing back and forth across the room ranting and raving in a way Jack had never seen before, much less believe Mitch was capable of, and using language Jack had never once heard come out of him. “Mother-fucking, son-of-abitch. Stinking lousy rotten…rotten. I hope you fucking die, die, Die!” he screamed at the top of his voice, pointing violently at the cover of the magazine, tears starting to stream down his face. “My mother is dead and that son of a bitch is going to try and make that fucking idiot president when I never even got a fucking birthday card…like I never existed. He comes down to the Village and drops a bundle on a poor flower child then runs off pretending it never happened, then tries to convince himself and the world that that…that vapid, pointless creature is his first son! You’ve gotta help me, Jack. Help me hurt him…like he hurt my mother and me, please,” Mitch pleaded as he sat down close by him on the sofa, putting his head in his hands.

  Jack didn’t even have to think about what to do, his father’s instinct told him exactly what was needed. He needed to stand up for his boy, and he did.

  He spent the next two weeks on the telephone pulling in every favor he was owed from all over Europe to get the most important work of medieval art in the world on loan to the Met, the Bayeux Tapestry, for Mitch to stage. It would be the biggest art exhibit to hit New York since King Tut was there in the ‘70s. Then he pulled in every favor he was owed in New York to make sure the press coverage would be extraordinary, so that spring, when the Met opened the Gala with The Bayeux, Mitchell Bramson’s name was on the lips of everyone who was anyone in the international art world.

  The crowning achievement was when Time magazine asked for Mitch and the tapestry to be their cover for the next month. The photograph was glorious. A radiantly handsome, young Dr. Mitchell Woodward Bramson, daring and fascinating with his long chestnut hair, feline green eyes and gold earrings, standing boldly against of the astounding background of the tapestry, his arms folded, his expression triumphant. The caption read, “Dr. Bramson’s Bayeux.”

  Even more compelling was the interview and photo array inside featuring the same lovely photo of Melanie Woodward sitting with her guitar on a park bench in her hippy clothes that was run with her obituary, and when the interviewer asked Mitch if he was in any way related to the Bramson’s of Boston, he cleverly deflected it by responding merely that his “. . .mother was Melanie Woodward Bramson and that he was very pleased to announce a collection of her best and most famous songs was due to be released shortly in a three CD set, with interviews from some of her closest musical contemporaries,” and left it at that.

  Jack had done his boy proud and Mitch had made Jack proud of him. That Boston Monthly rag and its cover were no match for either of them. Julian Bramson the fourth may have gotten a congressional seat bought for him by his father, but Jack had made Mitch an international sensation with dozens of magazine articles and television interviews. Let Julian Bramson the Third take that and shove it up his tight fucking ass.

  So what if Mitch was a little wild at times. In Jack’s eyes he could never really do any wrong and had proven himself to be the biggest draw the Museum had ever had, in terms of dollars and reputation. His exhibits never failed to bring in the press and celebrities from around the world vying to stand next to him to add a little intellectual cachet to their auras.

  He had become a force to be reckoned with in the museum world, taking it out of the stuffy and inaccessible and putting it back where it belonged, in the hands of everyone and anyone who wanted to appreciate it. And even though he’d hit the big time with the Bayeux and again later with his Joan of Arc and Six Wives of Henry the Eighth exhibits, his own personal pride came from a much lesser known program he’d forced down the throat of the board of trustees, taking himself on a small lecture circuit to the poorest high schools in New York City to teach the most impoverished of inner city kids how even their world could be touched and brightened by the beauty of art and the riches of knowledge. He was his mother’s son, after all.

  Jack’s own payoff came in a way he could never have envisioned. His heart gave a muffled thump as he thought of it. Eighteen months before when he was taking his usual five mile run around Central Park, he got a sharp pain in his arm, then another, and another. He couldn’t breathe. His chest exploded into a raging fireball. His arm went completely numb and he was suddenly engulfed in a darkness where he no longer existed.

  The next time he opened his eyes, it was like looking through frosted glass. He was being rushed on a stretcher through a cold white corridor by men and women dressed in green smocks and white coats, their heads and faces covered; tubes in his nose and arms.

  The last thing he felt before the drugs overtook him completely had been a firm squeeze of his hand, the last thing he saw being those feline green eyes filled with childlike fear, the last voice he heard whispering to him, “I love you, Jack.”

  When he woke up what could have been days later, groggy and otherworldly, the first thing he saw was a large-breasted, middle-aged brunette nurse with gentle dark brown eyes, a soothing voice and a name tag that read, “C. Lynne, R.N.”

  “You’re a very lucky man, Dr. Edgeworth, but don’t worry. The surgery went very well. You’ll be back on your feet, or digging in the dirt, in no time,” she said smiling at him sincerely. “And that son of yours is really something else. You really must have done something right with that one,” she said as she picked up his wrist to take his pulse. “He’s been here since you were brought in, worrying and pacing like he’d wear out the carpet. He didn’t leave you for a second, not even to eat. The girls and I have been feeding him coffee, sandwiches and doughnuts. He’s outside sleeping on a couch in the waiting room now. We should all be so lucky. And he’s a handsome one, too, just like his father,” she said and gave Jack’s hand a squeeze. “You just rest now and let us take care of everything.” Then he floated off to a safe comfortable place within himself, content in the knowledge that he hadn’t been alone. Mitch had been with him the whole time.

  In the weeks of recovery that followed, he clung to that thought and found the security in it
that he needed to heal. It was proof, not that he ever needed any. His investment of himself in that sad, scared boy had been his salvation, and strangely enough, he found that it didn’t matter a bit to him that neither Annette nor either of his daughters had even bothered to send a card. He had Mitch.

  Then, just as he’d finished wiping his eyes with his neatly folded and starched handkerchief, he was startled out of the comfort of his nostalgic haze by the noise of the buzzer on his intercom followed by Alida’s voice.

  “Dr. Edgeworth, there is a yentleman here to see you.” A primal instinct shot up through him like a lightning bolt, raising his hackles and making the hair on the back of his neck stand up straight. Alida never says ‘yentleman,’ he thought. It’s always, ‘There is someone here to see you. Dr. Edgeworth.

  “Who is it, Alida?” Jack spoke back suspiciously into the intercom. Alida’s voice came cautiously through the box on his desk.

  “His card says his name is Mr. Yulian Bramson, the tird, Boston, Massachusetts.”

  Chapter V

  JULIAN

  When the moon is in the Seventh House And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius The age of Aquarius Aquarius! Aquarius!

  Age of Aquarius

  …….As performed by the Original Broadway Cast of “HAIR”

  Annabelle Bramson had raised her son like she raised the flowers in her hot house, well-fed, well-trimmed and firmly under her control every moment of their lives. From the time he was old enough to talk, she’d sensed that he was a weak-willed child, easily manipulated by material things and she used that to her advantage.

  She gave him everything he ever wanted, after all he was her fair-haired boy, but the second he went against her she took it away to prove her point. Whether it was a toy truck when he was three or a Corvette convertible when he was seventeen, she made sure he knew that his comforts came from her beneficence and hers alone.

  While he was alive his father was rarely at home and never took an interest in his upbringing. That was his mother’s job as far as Julian Bramson the Second was concerned, and of course she was content with that, knowing that she held the heir to New England’s second greatest family fortune firmly in her grip. She even had dreams of the White House dancing in her head when he was born. But that soon vanished when she discovered what an unambitious, disinterested and not particularly intelligent child she had borne.

  For his part, he had everything he ever wanted, and so he sought to achieve nothing. As a young man he was tall, blonde and handsome in a hot-house flower sort of way, add rich to that and he never had to lift a finger. Had he not been a Bramson, Harvard would have never given his less than stellar academic achieve-ments a second look, but that never really posed a problem for Annabelle.

  He lived a charmed life of privileged inertia, floating along on a cloud of his family’s greenbacks. He was so contented with his self-absorbed life that it never even once occurred to him where all that money really came from. It never even dawned on him that his grandfather, the original Julian Bramson, was a shameless robber baron who not only raped the environment, but also ravaged the region’s human resources, paying pennies for wages, and creating dangerous and often deadly working conditions. Worry about the health of the workers as if they might actually be human beings? Perish the thought. They were there to be exploited. It was their lot in life, lost limbs, lung disease, cancer, and under-the-radar child labor.

  The unmitigated greed of Julian Bramson the First was so unrepentant, his disregard for anything living other than his own small circle of family so undiluted, that he practically had horns and a tail. The only thing that stopped him in the end was the advent and growth of a little thing called Workers’ Unions, and even then, more than a few limbs and lives were lost through the use of nameless, faceless union busters with Bramson dollars in their pockets.

  When his father took over, he was a chip off the old block, as they say. The only difference between the First and the Second was that the Second knew enough to see that the good old days of exploitation with reckless abandon were over, and was smart enough to hire people to sanitize what they had done while he continued to do it. He changed the company name to Bramsco and hired a PR firm to put an all-American smile on the underlying greed, but the horns and tail were still there.

  The only difference was now they wore Brooks Brothers suits, had Pepsodent smiles and developed slogans like, “Bramsco, building America’s future with our own two hands,” and “Bramsco, giving back is our middle name,” when in fact the only thing he was giving back to Americans was the back of his hand; ushering in the era of the unassailable, squeaky-clean modern image of the corporate cannibal. But Julian the Third was either too stupid to see it, too gullible to believe it, or simply too comfortable to care one way or the other, unless his own boat of dollars were to be somehow rocked. Then something unexpected happened.

  While he was in graduate school, he got in with a bunch of young men who had inquiring minds and actually knew how to think for themselves. He started taking weekend trips with them into New York City, daring to disobey his mother’s orders to keep aloof from those spawned from the working classes. He saw “HAIR” on Broadway, smoked pot in Washington Square Park, went to places where there were hippies and beatniks, listened to folk music at the clubs on Bleeker Street…and met a pretty, chestnut-haired girl singer from Ohio named Melanie Woodward and actually felt something, or thought he did, as much as he could feel anything that didn’t revolve around his own comforts.

  She was everything he wasn’t: working class, a free thinker who believed in change and dared to try and help bring it about. He knew from their first conversation that if she knew who he really was, who his family was, that she’d never have anything to do with him. They were everything she was fighting against and trying to change, so he lied to her in ever so many more ways than one. He told her that he came from regular people who’d done well for themselves, that he wanted to get a job after he finished school and make a life with her and that he loved her, which actually meant he loved her as much as he knew how.

  After about a year, he couldn’t go on with the charade any longer. He told her who he really was, but that he would leave his family to be with her and live his life her way. Whether she ever really believed him or not stayed in her heart and went with her to the grave in the end, but by then it was too late because she believed that she was in love with him too, and young people who think they’re in love can convince themselves of almost anything. So they ran off to Maryland and got married and within a month of his weekend visits to her apartment on Grove Street, she was pregnant.

  Innocently, or stupidly, he made the mistake of telling his mother about the marriage. The rest, as they say, is history. The one honorable thing he did in the situation was that, in a singular moment of clarity, he didn’t tell Annabelle that Melanie was going to have his child. Annabelle didn’t find out about that little fact until very much later when she saw the cover of Time Magazine with the caption “Dr. Bramson’s Bayeux.”

  She was sitting in her favorite chair that day at her Marie Antoinette writing desk when the maid brought in her mail. She’d always been an avid reader of all of the serious national magazines, Life, Look, Newsweek and Time, and had them all delivered to the house, of course.

  When she opened the mail that day and saw the cover of Time, that name, and that face, her mind scattered faster than she could control it. He had that girl’s hair and her eyes, but he had the Bramson chin and nose, just like her father-in-law, her husband and…Julian. There was no denying it; the young man on the cover of that magazine was Julian’s child.

  Her mind flew into a schism of three parts; he would come after his share of the Bramson Trust and take away tens of millions from her ‘legitimate’ grandsons, Julian the Fourth and Alexander; the fight he would put up to get it would create a furor, damaging the family�
�s reputation beyond repair. It would all come out, what she had done, how she had treated that girl and worst of all…the bribe; then all of it would ruin everything she had done to lay the groundwork for Julian the fourth’s political career.

  As Annabelle tried to grasp what she was seeing on that cover, her thoughts rocketed through her mind like a ricocheting bullet caught in a lead box. She felt the small capillaries in her brain begin to constrict, then seize, one after another until they joined into one last, great spasm. Annabelle Bramson died at age eighty-three with the last face she would ever see being the grandson she never knew and would have hated even if she had.

  After his mother’s funeral, Julian Bramson the Third tried to go on with life as if nothing had happened. He counted himself lucky at first that he was the one to find his mother’s body, clutching Time Magazine in her frozen, claw-like hand. So he took it. The last thing he needed was for that cover to get into the hands of a servant who might get it into their greedy little head to go to the cheap newspapers that specialized in spreading scandal with what had happened. He could see it now. “Boston Society Matron, Annabelle Bramson, Dies Clutching Photo of Unknown Grandson. Shock of Discovery Causes Fatal Stroke.”

  Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead whenever he thought about it. But then something happened. The night after his mother was buried, Julian Bramson the Third went to bed as he would any other night, his wife in a separate bed next to his, and tried to go to sleep. But every time he closed his eyes, he didn’t see the usual darkness of his closed lids. Instead he saw the twenty-three-year-old face of Melanie Woodward, the way she looked the last time he saw her, broken and alone. He got up every half hour that night to look at that magazine cover, He has her hair and her eyes, he thought to himself every time he looked at it. That was the beginning of the haunting of Julian Bramson the Third, one that would last for seven years, until he couldn’t stand it any longer and decided he had to meet their son after almost forty years of abandonment.