Requiem, Mass.

by John Dufresne

  LATER THAT evening, at my reading, I spot an old pal from Requiem in the audience. Fred’s a poet, living now in the heart of the heart, and a Catholic who has been to church today. His ashes seem to have been applied with a trowel. He’s hard to miss. I nod to him, smile. Dust to dust, my friend. Ashes to ashes. Later at the reception, Fred and I, for some reason, talk about Pope John Paul II, his Parkinson’s and his poetry. Fred asks me if I know whatever became of Benjamin Zawicki, this lavishly paranoid poet from Providence who taught writing classes in Requiem. My ex-wife was his student. Benjamin was so terrified, so certain that someone would steal his poems that he deconstructed them with scissors, then coded the words, images, metaphors, and lines by color, letter, and number, and squirreled away the fragments in various drawers throughout his house. Benjamin seems to have vanished, Fred says. Maybe he fell apart, I say. Lost his voice.

  I’m thinking how I’m someone’s ex-husband, a man defined by what he was, how he failed, a dim figure on the periphery of a family’s awareness, someone vaguely menacing, but inconsequential, when Hillary introduces me to her student, a young woman from Burkina Faso. The Burkinabé capital of Ouagadougou is 6,829 miles southeast of Walla Walla, the Land of Many Waters. Burkina Faso is plagued by drought and is undergoing staggering desertification. The student tells me a story about her childhood. She went for a family holiday to Lake Bama on the White Volta. She and her little sister played with the bones they had found on the shore. They played House and Army and School. The bones turned out to be the remains of a family friend’s wife and children, murdered by the government. Life expectancy in Burkina Faso is forty-four years. The literacy rate is twenty-seven percent. Burkina Faso is a forty-seven-year-old republic with a nine-hundred-year-old monarchy. Every Friday morning in the windswept capital, the Mogho Naba, the king, emerges from his mud palace wearing scarlet robes, clutching a long sword, and approaches his waiting stallion. Every Friday the king prepares for war against the Arabs, against the Berbers, against the French, against the enemies of his Mossi people. And every Friday his attendants plead with him to stay. And he stays—a leader needs to serve his people. He tells his followers the story of Mogho Naba Rawa, the great eleventh century Mossi conqueror. We cannot live with the memories of others, he says. We must have our own memories.

  THE BLOND bartender opens the glass door of the popcorn cart and empties the kettle into a green trash bag. She knots the bag, carries it and the kettle back to the kitchen. I’m the only customer in the Quality Inn lounge. I’m sipping cognac. The cable is disconnected from the large-screen TV. The sound is mute, the broadcast picture blurry. A Hoosier basketball game is on. And then the bartender’s back with a bottle of Windex and a roll of quilted paper towels. An agitated young man walks into the lounge and tells the bartender that his cell phone got smashed. He needs change to make fifteen calls on the pay phone. He’s taken out a restraining order on his girlfriend. I’ve got a pen. I reach for a cocktail napkin. I write, His striped tie is unknotted; his blue dress shirt is unbuttoned at the collar. The bartender makes change.

  The young man tells her that he worked here at the Quality Inn South ten years ago when he was like sixteen, and he was the only one of the sixty or so employees who got a date with Judy Isley, who was flat-out movie-star gorgeous and who later died two days before he married Daphne Degnan. Big mistake, that. You sound like you’ve been a busy man, the bartender says. The young man orders a kamikaze. The bartender tells him that her husband landed his sorry ass in jail last night. Cost her a thousand bucks to bail him out. Her “Cruise to Nowhere” money. The young man takes his drink to the pay phone, lights up a cigarette, punches in a number. The bartender walks back to the kitchen. The young man leans his head against the wall, shuts his eyes, and listens. His right hand is bleeding at the knuckles.

  The phone behind the bar rings and rings. I figure it’s the bartender’s husband calling. He wants her to pick him up a pack of smokes on her way home. At least that’s what he’ll tell her. A pack of smokes and a couple of cans of Alpo for Thor. He really just wants to hear her voice, and he can’t figure out why she’s not picking up. What’s he supposed to think? He’s sitting on the sofa, pounding the armrest with his fist. Doesn’t she understand it drives him crazy not knowing where she is?

  There’s an Edward Hopper print on the wall above the popcorn cart. Gas. He’s not a mechanic, this slight man in vest and tie, bald as a Binghamton poet. Proprietor, more likely, checking the sales figures on these tall red pumps. Triangles of adamant light spill from the neat clapboard filling station onto the driving lanes. Across the narrow blacktop road a sandy ditch and a wave of palomino-colored grass lapping at the trunks of mute and glorious fir trees. The lighted sign above the station advertises Mobilgas. Pegasus seems about to leap the trees. Pegasus, the winged horse sprung from the blood of the slain Medusa. Pegasus, who opened the fountains of Hippocrene with a kick of his mighty hoof. Le cheval volant, Pegasus, chez les narines des feu! Pegasus, steed of the Muses, always at the service of poets, poets like Hokey Mokey, love’s self-appointed watchman, and like us kids on O’Connell Street in Requiem, Mass., when we would walk by Jolicoeur’s Mobil Station and scream at the top of our unpuddled lungs, Up your ass with Mobilgas!

  In a moment, the proprietor will take in those cans of motor oil, stack them by the windshield-wiper display, will cut the lights on the sign and in the station, will lock the door. He’ll drive home. He lives alone. His house is cozy, neat, but unadorned. He’ll fry eggs and bologna, listen to the radio as he eats, listen for the news from Europe where the Germans have claimed the Sudetenland. He’ll save the milk he has not finished. He’ll wash the dish, the fry pan, the glass, the fork, and the knife. He’ll read a book in the living room. Zane Grey. The bartender announces last call, tells me she has to be at her day job at seven. She’s an LPN at a convalescent home. I walk back to Room 128.

  I DON’T sleep well in motels. I know the alarm will not buzz, the wake-up call will not come. I’ll miss my flight. All night I straddle the border between consciousness and dreams. I surface, I check the time, I fall back to a fitful sleep. It’s one-fifteen. In my dream, Hokey Mokey is played by James Woods. We’re a couple of ramblin’ boys off to the sunless city to find a plot that I’ve lost somehow. When we come to a fork in the Old Planck Road, Hokey flicks his tongue to sniff the air. This way, he says, and he points his little arm to the right. One thirty-five. I don’t know dot about Belarus. I do know that Max Planck’s first wife Marie died in 1909. He then married her niece Marga. His son Karl was killed in action in World War 1. His daughter Margarete died in childbirth in 1917. Her twin Emma died in childbirth in 1919. Planck’s son Erwin was executed by the Gestapo in 1945 for his involvement in a plot to kill Hitler. But that’s not the plot I’m looking for. Two-ten. Hokey Mokey can move his eyes in different directions at the same time. He can look behind himself. Two-forty. It goes on like that all night. We never reach the sunless city. It is always just a little farther on. You can know where it is but not how to get there, or you can know how to get there but not where it is. Three-eleven. There is the world where I do not get the job in Grizzlyville. There is another world in which I do.

  I COULD tell you that the alarm went off at six and that the radio snapped on playing John Denver’s “Hey There, Mr. Lonely Heart,” but I’d be lying. At four-fifteen, I just got up, switched on the light, found a newspaper to read, saw that in Newark, England, one Dennis Weddington, depressed and out of work, killed himself by hammering two nails into his head, and I surmised that he was not a carpenter, but even so, was the second nail necessary? When John Denver died, I was reading my stories at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire. Many years ago now—but it seems like only yesterday. I went to the only bar in town with my friend John Candia to have a drink and to catch up on life and literature, and we stumbled into a John Denver memorial gathering. Folks from all over New England had assembled here of all places, and spontaneous
ly it seemed, to honor the fallen singer/songwriter and to grieve for him. They read reverent poems to one another in the dining nook, shared stories about how John Denver had changed their dismal lives. They applauded, nodded, wept, embraced. They lit candles and called for a moment of silence. John and I sat at the end of the bar, drank Guinness, and whispered discreetly to each other about Kerouac and Joyce till we were hushed. John Denver? And hushed again. Daniels Restaurant and Pub had become a church for the night. The mourners, the celebrants, joined hands and sang, “Almost heaven…”

  WE ARE all blessed with the gift of perhaps. We all feel more than we can imagine. We all imagine more than we can remember. We all remember more than we can know. And we all know more than we can say. I shower and dress and inspect the room one more time for what I may have forgotten. I check out at the front desk and wait for Hillary in the porte cochere. She’s driving me to the airport. I’ve woken with a sinus headache. Feels like someone has plunged an ice pick into that notch above my left eye. I remember that Pietro DiPietro, Diane’s dad, was the president of Ascension, a French-Canadian college in Requiem, Mass., and I wonder if that faint memory was the virus that brought on yesterday’s Whitman College dream. I see Hillary at the red light in front of the Bob Evans. Hillary, who has lost her brother.

  Any meaning is better than none. Ask any Catholic or Methodist or Hutterite or Hmong. You believe in a God who, in his exquisite loneliness, created the universe and little you. Or you believe that we, in our terrifying loneliness, created God. Doesn’t matter which. Ask any Vietnamese child kneeling in the mud, praying, choking on her tears, feeling the hot muzzle of an M16 at the nape of her neck, hearing the screams of her grandparents, inhaling the sting of smoke and cordite, knowing that this soldier here behind you, dear, is about to make his own meaning by firing a burst of bullets through your head. At that moment there is no arrow of time for you, there is no there, no then. There is only this singularity, this Planck instant, this big bang. At that moment you are borrowing energy against time and shaping your brief life into a quantum of meaning.

  Limbo

  DAD TOLD ME once—I was eating split-pea soup; he was looking for his keys and cursing under his breath—that memory’s most important job was to forget. And I said, “Well, it’s doing a fine job right now.” He found the keys under a sofa cushion. “Always the last place you look,” he said. He sat back down at the table and dipped his Wonder bread into the soup. He said, “What were we talking about?”

  “Memory.”

  “Right. Not the memory of where things are. That’s not what I meant. The memory of who you are, where you’ve been. Your past. Memory’s job is to erase it. Most of it anyway. That way you won’t be haunted by what you’ve done. So you can get on with your life.” He slurped his soup. “Two kinds of problems in the world, Johnny. Those you can do something about; those you can’t. And you can’t change the past.”

  “You can change the way you think about it.”

  “Eat your soup.”

  I had this idea then that my brain was a camera and had recorded every second of my life, like a TV show, so all I had to do was find the right channel to call up the episode. I had every confidence in God to make a flawless memory for each of us. All we needed to do was to want to use it and then to use it.

  The discussion had begun when I told Dad that I was distressed that I couldn’t remember anything that happened before I was a year and a half old, and he told me he couldn’t remember anything that happened before he was six.

  “Maybe you don’t want to remember.”

  “Supposedly I had a dog named Milou.”

  “You don’t remember your dog!”

  The first eighteen months of my life had vanished. Audrey, on the other hand, remembered being in the womb. She told me she could hear music, the same song over and over—she thought it must have been Conway Twitty because every time she heard “It’s Only Make Believe” now she felt this warm buzz at the back of her neck, and her eyes drooped, and she wanted to suck her thumb and go to sleep. She hoped they wouldn’t play it at her prom. Mostly, she said, she felt cramped and ignored inside. “It’s like sleeping in the trunk of a moving car.”

  Memory’s what you use to find your story. Dad’s story begins when he’s six. Mine begins with Dad in our apartment over D’Errico’s Italian Market. He’s in my bedroom, which might also have been their bedroom, only I don’t see a bed. Just the crib that I’m in. Dad’s across the room in front of the closet, taking off his gabardine topcoat and hat, a gray felt porkpie with a red feather in the hatband. I grab the bar of the crib in my fat little fists and pump my knees up and down doing my happy dance. Dad laughs and walks over and puts the hat on my head, which I, of course, have to touch immediately. The hat falls over my eyes, and I panic until Dad pushes it back on my head. It’s so good to see him again. I laugh till I drool. I couldn’t talk then, and if Dad said anything to me, I don’t remember it. And then Mom’s standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, with her arms folded. She’s smiling.

  WHAT I remember about that afternoon that Dad drove home:

  My mother thought she was being followed.

  My mother thought she was being poisoned by degrees.

  My mother thought she was dying.

  My mother thought she was pregnant.

  My mother thought she was maybe being held against her will in a replica apartment in Vermont.

  My mother thought she was Elizabeth Taylor.

  My mother thought Elizabeth Taylor was a nun.

  My mother wore a black lace mantilla, white cloth gloves, and clutched a Daily Missal in her hands. She stood before various objects on the kitchen walls and muttered to herself. The clock; the calendar from Candela’s Market with a print of a horse and wagon crossing a wooden bridge on a snowy day; the JFK commemorative plate; the crucifix with palm frond; the decorative copper gelatin mold; the print of Jesus on Gethsemane, weeping over Jerusalem; the red plastic teakettle switch plate. What I thought she thought she was doing was making the Stations of the Cross, meditating on how the clock and company had suffered for our sins. But I couldn’t confirm this because she wasn’t responding to any of us. Maybe she was trying to memorize the room. Maybe she was trying to ignore us into nonexistence. I’ve done that sort of thing myself.

  Audrey told Mom there were no justified resentments. That got her attention. Mom said, “If you were my kid, I’d slap your face.”

  “Go ahead.”

  I looked at Dad sitting there at the table and asked him what he was going to do about this. He told us to leave.

  Mom said, “For Christ’s sakes, I was only kidding. Jeez!”

  Then she said, “No, I wasn’t.”

  She raised an eyebrow, smiled, nodded.

  She shook her head.

  A quick nod.

  A vigorous shake.

  A barely discernible nod.

  She waved her hand, no.

  Dad said, “I’ll take care of this. You two get lost.”

  We went to Veronica’s.

  DAD PREFERRED to think that our domestic tranquillity began heading south when Mom first got sick in the head, as he put it. My recollection is that neither of them was ever very parental. They liked the nightlife. And everyone loved Rainy; Rainy loved everyone. They stayed out till three in the morning most nights before Dad got the trucking job. I was babysitting Audrey when I was seven. What could I have done if anything had gone wrong? I had the phone number of the Cat Dragged Inn. If they left the Cat, Dad would call with the number of their next stop. But I’d be sleepy and wouldn’t write it down. And then I’d try to stay asleep so that I’d miss the bickering, the name-calling, and the sounds of slobbery make-up sex when they got home. But I seldom could. I’d hear the dreadful footfalls on the back stairs, and I’d break out in a sweat. I’d start to pray that tonight they’d be in love, be happy and quiet. Their fighting was, I figured, due punishment for my original sin. Original sin is th
e sin we did not commit, like we commit actual sin, personal sin. We come into the world depraved and without grace, inheritors of Adam’s punishment. And once I thought of my black soul and hellfire and eternity, well, I was up for the night. I’d sit at my window and look out over O’Connell Street. Sometimes Deluxe would sit on the sill and bathe himself, rest his paw on my arm.

  If you died with original sin on your soul, if you weren’t baptized, in other words, you could never go to heaven. You went to hell or you went to limbo if you were lucky enough to be a baby. Limbo I pictured as an empty bright white room that everyone has forgotten about and in which nothing ever happens. This meant that none of us would ever see little Arthur, who had done nothing to deserve his fate. That’s who I thought about those sleepless nights.

  I asked Sister Casilda about limbo once, and it was like she’d never heard of it. She had been talking about abortion in class. How what humanists and scientists call a fetus is a breathing, thinking human being, and that abortion is murder. And so those poor victims can’t go to heaven unbaptized, I said. The classroom went quiet. “They go to limbo, right, Sister?” She told us all to do a report on limbo, and we’d talk about it the next morning. She told us in the morning that she considered the victims of abortion of having been baptized in blood—they were martyrs. “What about my brother Arthur and the other stillborns?” I said. She said that limbo for them was a state of eternal natural joy. Limbo’s somewhere between heaven and hell. To get to heaven, you need a passport. Baptism’s that passport. Limbo’s not a punishment; it’s a pleasant enough destination.