The Pursuit of Happiness (2001)

by Douglas Kennedy

  Or you could just walk - which I did endlessly, obsessively. Huge walks - from my apartment on Bedford Street all the way north to Columbia University. Or across the Manhattan Bridge and up Flatbush Avenue to Park Slope. What I discovered during these walks was that New York was like a massive Victorian novel which forced you to work your way through its broad canvas and complicated sub-plots. Being an impatient sort of reader I found myself compulsively caught up in its narrative, wondering where it would bring me next.

  The sense of freedom was extraordinary. I was no longer under parental supervision. I was paying my own way in life. I answered to nobody. And thanks to my brother Eric I had a direct entree into Manhattan’s more esoteric underside. He seemed to know every arcane resident of the city. Czech translators of medieval poetry. All-night jazz disc jockeys. Emigre German sculptors. Would-be composers who were writing atonal operas about Gawain … in short, the sort of people you would never meet in Hartford, Connecticut. There were also a lot of political types … most of whom were either teaching at assorted colleges around town, or writing for small left-wing journals, or running little charities that supplied clothes and food to ‘our fraternal Soviet comrades, valiantly fighting the forces of fascism’ … or words to that effect.

  Naturally, Eric tried to get me interested in his brand of left-wing politics. But I simply wasn’t interested. Do understand - I did respect Eric’s passion for his cause. Just as I also respected (and agreed with) his hatred of social injustice, and economic inequality. But what I didn’t agree with was the way his political friends treated their beliefs as a sort of lay religion - of which they were the high priests. Thank God he left the Party in ‘41. I’d met a few of his ‘comrades’ when I’d visited him in Manhattan during college - and, my God, talk about dogmatic people! They really thought that theirs was the true way, the only way … and they would not broach any dissenting views. Which is one of the many reasons why Eric got fed up with them and left.

  At least none of his political friends ever asked me out … which was something of a relief. Because, by and large, they were such a grim, glum bunch.

  ‘Don’t you know any funny Communists?’ I asked him one Sunday over a late lunch at Katz’s deli.

  ‘A “funny Communist” is an oxymoron,’ he said,

  ‘You’re a funny Communist.’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ he whispered.

  ‘I really don’t think J. Edgar Hoover has agents stationed in Katz’s.’

  ‘You never know. Anyway, I am an ex-Communist.’

  ‘But you’re still pretty hard left.’

  ‘Left of center. A Henry Wallace Democrat.’

  ‘Well, I promise you this: I’d never go out with a Communist.’

  ‘On patriotic grounds?’

  ‘No - on the grounds that he wouldn’t be able to make me laugh.’

  ‘Did Horace Cowett make you laugh?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes.’

  ‘How could anyone with the name of Horace Cowett make anybody laugh?’

  Eric had a point - though, at least, Horace didn’t look as preposterous as his name. He was tall and gangly, with thick black hair and horn-rimmed glasses. He favored tweed jackets and knit ties. At twenty he already resembled a tenured professor. He was quiet, bordering on shy, but intensely bright, and a terrific talker once he was comfortable with you. We met at a Haverford/Bryn Mawr mixer, and went out for all my senior year. My parents really thought he was a splendid catch - I had my doubts, although Horace had his virtues, especially when it came to talking about novels by Henry James or portraits by John Singer Sargent (his favorite writer, his favorite painter). Though he didn’t exactly exude joie de vivre, I did like him … though not enough to let him take me to bed. Then again, Horace never tried very hard on that front. We’d both been brought up far too well.

  But he still proposed marriage a month before graduation. When I broke it off with him a week later, he said,

  ‘I hope you’re not ending it because you simply don’t want to commit to marriage now. Maybe, in a year or so, you’ll change your mind.’

  ‘I do know how I will feel about this matter a year from now. The same way I am feeling now. Because, quite simply, I don’t want to marry you.’

  He pursed his lips, and tried not to look wounded. He didn’t succeed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I finally said.

  ‘No need.’

  ‘I didn’t want to be so blunt.’

  ‘You weren’t.’

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘No, really - you were just being … informative.’

  ‘Informative? Direct is more like it.’

  ‘I’d say … instructive.’

  ‘Candid. Explicit. Frank. It doesn’t really matter, does it?’

  ‘Well, semantically speaking …’

  Before this exchange, I’d had a few nervous little qualms about rejecting Horace’s marriage proposal. After this exchange, all lingering doubts had been killed off. To my parents - and to many of my friends at Bryn Mawr - I had bucked convention by rejecting his offer. After all, he was such a safe bet. But I was certain I could meet someone with a little more sparkle and passion. And, at the age of twenty-two, I didn’t want to buy myself a one-way ticket to wifehood without stopping to think about other options along the way.

  And so, when I reached New York, the idea of finding a boyfriend was low on my list of priorities. Especially as I had so much to grapple with during that first year.

  The family house was sold by Christmas - but almost all the proceeds went on Mother’s medical bills and residential care. Eric and I greeted 1944 in a grubby hotel in Hartford, having rushed back on New Year’s Eve afternoon when the nursing home called, saying that Mother had contracted a chest infection which had suddenly mutated into pneumonia. It was touch and go whether or not she’d pull through. By the time we’d reached Hartford, the doctors had stabilized her. We spent an hour at her bedside. She was deeply comatose, and stared up at her two children blankly. We both kissed her goodbye. As we’d missed the last train back to Manhattan, we checked into this slum of a hotel near the railway station. We spent the rest of the evening in the hotel bar, drinking bad Manhattans. At midnight, we sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with the bartender and a few forlorn traveling salesmen.

  It was a grim start to the year. It got grimmer - as the next morning, just when we were checking out, a call came from the nursing home. I took it. It was from a staff doctor, on call that morning.

  ‘Miss Smythe, I regret to inform you that your mother passed away half-an-hour ago.’

  Oddly enough, I didn’t feel an overwhelming rush of grief (that came a few days later). More a sense of numbness, as the thought sank in: my family now is Eric.

  He was also caught off guard by the news. We took a cab to the nursing home. En route, he started to sob. I put my arms around him.

  ‘She always hated New Year’s Day,’ he finally said.

  The funeral was the next morning. Two neighbors and our father’s secretary showed up at the church. After the cemetery, we took a taxi back to the railway station. On the train back to New York, Eric said, ‘I’m certain that’s the last time I’ll ever set foot in Hartford.’

  There wasn’t much of an estate - just two insurance policies. We ended up with around five thousand dollars each - quite a bit of money in those days. Eric instantly quit his Theater Guild job, and took off for a year to Mexico and South America. His portable Remington came with him - as he was planning to spend twelve months writing a major new play and maybe gathering material for a journal de voyage about travels in Latin America. He said he wanted me to come along - but I certainly wasn’t going to quit my job at Life after just seven months.

  ‘But if you come with me, you’ll be able to concentrate on writing fiction for a year,’ he said.

  ‘I’m learning a great deal at Life.’

  ‘Learning what? How to write five-hundred-word articles about the Broadway premiere of
Bloomer Girl or why chokers are this year’s fashion accessory.’

  ‘I was rather proud of those two pieces,’ I said, ‘even if they didn’t give me a byline.’

  ‘My point exactly. As that editor guy told you, you’ll never be assigned the big stories - because they all go to the senior male writers on the staff. You want to write fiction. So, what’s stopping you? You have the money and the freedom. We could rent a hacienda in Mexico with the money we have between us … and both write all day, unencumbered.’

  ‘It’s a lovely dream,’ I said, ‘but I’m not going to leave New York having just arrived here. I’m not ready to be a full-time writer yet. I need to find my way first. And the job at Life will also give me some necessary seasoning.’

  ‘God, you’re far too sensible. And I suppose you’re planning to do something ultra-practical with your five thousand dollars.’

  ‘Government bonds.’

  ‘S, really. You’ve turned into Little Miss Prudent.’

  ‘Guilty as charged.’

  So Eric disappeared south of the border, and I stayed on in Manhattan, working at Life by day and trying to write short stories by night. But the pressures of the day job - and the vicarious pleasures of Manhattan - kept me away from the Remington typewriter in my studio apartment. Every time I sat down at home to work, I found myself thinking: I really don’t have much to say, do I? Or that same doubting voice in the back of my head would whisper: There’s a great double-feature at the RKO 58th Street: Five Graves to Cairo and Air Force. Or a girlfriend would ring up, suggesting Saturday lunch at Schrafft’s. Or I’d have to finish a story for Life. Or the bathroom needed cleaning. Or … I’d find one of the million excuses that would-be writers always find to dodge the tyranny of the desk.

  Eventually I decided to stop fooling myself. So I moved my Remington off the dining table and into the closet. Then I wrote Eric a long letter, explaining why I was putting my writing ambitions on hold:

  I’ve never traveled. I’ve never seen anywhere south of Washington, DC … let alone the world. I’ve never been in mortal danger. I’ve never known anyone who’s gone to prison, or has been indicted by a federal grand jury. I’ve never worked in the slums, or in a soup kitchen. I’ve never hiked the Appalachian Trail, or climbed Mt Kathadin, or paddled across Saranac Lake in a canoe. I could have volunteered for the Red Cross and gone to war. I could have joined the WPA and taught school in the Dust Bowl. I could have done around a thousand more interesting things than I’m doing now - and, in the process, found something to write about.

  Hell, E - I’ve never even fallen in love. So no wonder nothing happens when I sit down at the typewriter.

  I sent the letter c/o Poste Restante, Zihuantanejo, DF, Mexico. Eric was temporarily living in this corner of the Mexican tropics, having rented a house on the beach. Seven weeks later, I received a reply - scribbled in dense tiny print on a postcard, date-marked Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

  S,

  What you’re really saying in your letter is that, as yet, you don’t think you have a story to tell. Believe me, everybody has a story to tell - because all life is narrative. But knowing that is probably of little comfort to somebody suffering from writer’s block (a condition of which I have ongoing experience). The rule of the game is a simple one: if you want to write, you will write. And know this: if you want to fall in love, you will find someone to fall in love with. But take it from your older, battle-scarred brother: you should never set out to fall in love. Because those sort of romances always seem to end up as the stuff of cheap melodrama. Real love, on the other hand, sneaks up on you unawares … then gives you a kick in the head.

  I should never have left Mexico. The best thing about Tegucigalpa is the bus out of Tegucigalpa. I’m heading south. Will write again when I’ve unpacked somewhere.

  Love,

  E

  Over the course of the next ten months - as I worked hard at Life and spent every free moment roaming New York - I tried not to rue too much my stalled literary career. And I certainly met nobody with whom I felt like falling in love. But I did receive plenty of postcards from Eric, date-marked Belize, San Jose, Panama City, Cartagena, and eventually Rio. He returned to New York in June of ‘45, dead broke. I had to lend him two hundred dollars to see him through his first month home, during which time he moved back into his apartment and scrambled for work.

  ‘How’d you manage to run through all that money?’ I asked him.

  ‘Living the high life,’ he said, sounding sheepish.

  ‘But I thought the high life was against all your political principles.’

  ‘It was. It is.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I blame it all on too much sun. It turned me into a very generous, very dumb loco gringo. But I promise to resume wearing a hairshirt immediately.’

  Instead, he landed a job writing a few episodes of Boston Blackie. When he was fired off of that show, he talked his way on to The Quiz Bang Show, churning out gags for Joe E. Brown. He never mentioned the play he was supposed to be writing during his year away - and I never asked. His silence said it all.

  But he dropped right back into his wide circle of arty friends. And on the night before Thanksgiving of ‘45, he threw a party for all of them.

  I had already been invited to an annual soiree given by one of Life‘s senior editors. He lived on West 77th St between Central Park West and Columbus - the street where the balloons for next morning’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade were being inflated. I promised Eric that I would drop by his bash on my way home. But the editor’s party ran late. Thanks to the Macy’s balloons (and the crowds who had come out to watch them being pumped up), all the streets around Central Park West were closed, so it took over half an hour to find a cab. It was now midnight. I was dead tired. I told the driver to take me to Bedford Street. As soon as I walked into my apartment, the phone rang. It was Eric. In the background I could hear his party in full swing.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he asked.

  ‘Playing office politics on Central Park West.’

  ‘Well, get over here now. As you can hear, the joint is jumping.’

  ‘I think I’ll pass, E. I need to sleep for a week.’

  ‘You have the rest of the weekend to do that.’

  ‘Please let me disappoint you tonight.’

  ‘No. I insist you hop a fast cab, and present yourself tout de suite at chez moi, ready to drink ‘til dawn. Hell, it’s the first Thanksgiving in years without a war. Surely that’s a good enough excuse to destroy some brain cells …’

  I sighed loudly, then said,

  ‘Will you provide the aspirin tomorrow?’

  ‘You have my word as a patriotic American.’

  So I reluctantly put my coat back on, headed downstairs, hailed a cab, and within five minutes, found myself smack dab in the middle of Eric’s party. The place was packed. There was loud dance music on the Victrola. A low cloud of cigarette smoke bathed his tiny apartment in a fuggy haze. Someone pushed a bottle of beer into my hand. I turned around. And that’s when I saw him. A fellow around twenty-five, dressed in a dark khaki Army uniform, with a narrow face with sharply etched cheekbones. His eyes were also scanning the room. They suddenly happened upon me. I met his gaze. Only for a second. Or maybe two. He looked at me. I looked at him. He smiled. I smiled back. He turned away. And that was it. Just a simple glance.