by Terry Kay
Tonight, I was with him. You will find this humorous, but the library has a display of my writing, and he appeared at the presentation. Tomorrow, I am going to spend some time with him, but you should not worry; I won’t talk about you unless he offers your name. However, if it does happen, and if the opportunity to work it into the conversation presents itself, I will ask him about the letters you wrote to him. After all this time, perhaps he will be willing to tell me why he never answered them. (And, no, it isn’t wholly an altruistic act to assist you in solving a mystery; I am personally curious.)
It is strange being here, having been away for so many years. I see the changes you predicted, subtle on the surface, but coming from deep roiling. Today, at lunch in the Corner Café, I saw blacks and whites eating together comfortably at the same table and it occurred to me that fifty years ago, such an act would have had bricks flying through the windows. Remember when blacks were not permitted to enter the front door of Bell’s Drugstore, but had to use a side entrance? Now, there is no evidence—outwardly, I mean—of such meanness.
I thought of all of this at the library with Moses. I remembered your letter about the library being segregated (I have it with me—all of your letters, in fact) and I read it again. It stuns me still that so little has been made of that sad reality in the telling of desegregation. It’s as though libraries—the centerpieces of our cultural awareness—were provided immunity from criticism.
I’ve seen a few of our classmates, but would not have known any of them without introductions. The reverse is also true. It is so laughable, there is no embarrassment in laughing about it. Alyse (Lewis, now Pendleton) told me she was sorry you would not be here for the reunion. She said you were owed an apology, and I’m sure you can guess why—disdain for the prophet in his (or her) own land. Strange, isn’t it? Time is, indeed, a great healer.
The reunion will be Saturday night at Kilmer’s. Art Crews told me it had been closed for years, but one of the Kilmer children had it renovated and our reunion is the first public use of it. I believe it will be a nostalgic experience for me. I believe I will see you there as you were on our prom night, a dazzling beauty causing gasps of awe. I promise this: I will dance one dance with you, my arms and hands in the proper dance position, holding the memory of that night. I will not care if people stare at me. I now realize it is why I have returned to Overton: to dance with you.
I will write to you of all the goings-on, give you a gossip report. I think it will be memorable.
He typed his name—typed Cole—beneath the letter, coded the document to read Marie: 4-15-05, then pushed the save button and saw the letter disappear, replaced by an icon on his desktop. He opened a folder marked PERSONAL, and then he aimed the cursor at the Marie: 4-15-05 icon, stabbed it with the cursor’s arrow, like a spear fisherman stabbing a fish, and he drug it into a sub-folder titled LETTERS TO MARIE.
He closed his laptop and then took the prom night photograph from his briefcase and held it. A great aching ebbed against the wall of his chest.
When he did sleep, he dreamed of Marie.
They were sitting quietly in a library, facing one another across a table, each holding a book. In his dream, Cole could see himself as he was—a man in his late sixties, grey-bearded, slightly stooped, the finger-scratches of age showing on his face. He could see Marie only as Marie of the prom night, Marie of the photograph. Young, stunningly beautiful in her remarkable gown, the tiara she wore holding a silver light. She looked up from her book, smiled softly, whispered, I told you I would be beautiful.
TWENTY-ONE
In 1995, Jack Alewine, on sabbatical from Upton University, had driven to Vermont to visit with Cole. One morning he had commandeered one of Cole’s classes, telling outrageous tales about their undergraduate friendship. The students had been delighted. They had never encountered anyone as irreverent as Jack, and his playful attacks on Cole—saying he had been escorted out of the South by elite forces of the Ku Klux Klan for being both a pedophile and a womanizer—had produced such howls of laughter that professors in nearby classrooms had had to stop their lectures.
He also had told the story of a trick he and Cole had played on a young, pompous professor named Reed Fulmer. The trick involved a teenager who worked in a service station. Jack and Cole—Jack, mostly—had coaxed him into writing a poem about a flying squirrel, mimicking the style of Emily Dickinson. They had then presented the poem to Reed Fulmer, claiming it was a recent discovery among Dickinson’s papers, and they had begged him to interpret it. Reed Fulmer had found it to be astonishingly profound—flying squirrels being the metaphor for angels—and had, in fact, written a lengthy paper in support of his interpretation. The teenage author had listened to the reading of the paper while sitting on a stack of used tires, enjoying a cigarette break. His response had been one of puzzlement: That poem ain’t about nothing but a flying squirrel.
Cole had joined the laughter of his class, having forgot the episode, yet he had also marveled at how Jack had used it to make a point: you had to be careful with learning, or the truth could become obscured. He had watched the faces of the students in his class, how their faces had absorbed Jack’s lesson, mesmerized by the power of his presence, by the magic of his spirit.
And he had realized on that day what it meant to him to be in the classroom as a teacher.
He had always had a romantic vision about the campus of a college or university. For him, it was where life bristled, where men and women broke through the last transparent membrane of their childhood and realized they had a right to be themselves. It was like colorful photographs of swimmers springing up from the bottom of a pool, pushing off on one strong leg, splitting the water, a launched human missile breaking the glass of the surface, erupting up, up, with curls of water spilling away. He liked the faces of those swimmers, swallowing air with open, glad mouths, their eyes shining in the rinse of the water. Walking across the campus of a college or university, he had always looked for those faces, and he had always seen them. It was his blind spot that he did not see the dissidents or the apathetic or the angry or the drug-takers—the misfits he heard about constantly from colleagues. He saw only the hopeful, even in those who had the look of a misfit. He had friends who thought he was humorous. They called him a fossil, a card-carrying member of the Era of Ozzie and Harriet. They accused him of taking a detour in the late fifties, of wandering into some valley of illusion and never finding his way back into the flow of things. They told him he could not survive out of the classroom, where—they charged—he had formed himself into a protected being, like a god kneading its own image from a lump of clay, or from Silly Putty. They openly scoffed at him, saying he could not cope in the real world, the larger world, and he had wondered why they insisted on calling it a larger world. His answer to them had always been couched in a comeback intended to be forgiveably clever, but was honest: I pray you’re right, if you’re an example of what I would become in that larger world of yours.
And he had believed that Jack Alewine felt the same about the magic of colleges and universities.
For Cole, Jack’s visit had always been a good memory. Coming shortly after his divorce, it had been a way for Cole to reconnect with his history and he had reasoned it was why Jack had made the long drive from Atlanta: to be a comforter-friend.
It had been the opposite: it was Jack who needed the comforting.
On the night before he was scheduled to leave for Atlanta, Jack had become inebriated and the anxieties he carried like a disease had spilled from him in melancholy and in fear.
Three years ago, I was considered the best goddamn teacher they had, he had lamented. I had more testimonial letters coming in than Billy Graham gets. But that’s changed, Cole. It’s not like an English department anymore, not to me. It’s like a corporation, with witty little clichés plastered to the bathroom walls to bolster morale. But they’ve got it all wrong, Cole. The reason morale suffers in the first place is the insane list of policies a
nd procedures that spell out everything from when to say good morning to when to take a leak. I swear it started with Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt. Had to have a law a minute just to keep that unruly herd on the march, and God didn’t mean it that way, Cole. He meant to have some spirit in things. Spirit, Cole. That’s what I’ve lost.
His breathing had been labored and a bead of perspiration had lined a furrow on his forehead. He had pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and rolled it in his fingers.
Maybe you should use this sabbatical for doing nothing more than getting away from everything, Cole had suggested.
Jack had looked up, his eyes red. Get away from it? he had said irritably. Does that work?
I’m not sure I’m the right person to ask, Cole had replied.
Of course you are. You’re the perfect person. You got away, Jack had countered. Why do you think I came up here? I wanted to see if you’d found Camelot.
Cole had laughed easily. Camelot? he had said. I thought Camelot was at Upton. That’s what Wade Hart used to call it.
For a moment, Jack had looked away, shaking his head, and then he had turned back to Cole. Do you have any idea what’s going on in your beloved Southland? he had asked softly. My God, Cole, we’re as polarized now as we were forty years ago, maybe more so. In a lot of ways we are, ways we never thought about.
I don’t believe that, Cole had said.
Of course you don’t. Up here you wouldn’t see it, Jack had argued. There’s a mood, Cole, a bad one. I see it all the time, especially in young white students, kids that grew up in integration. They leave the comforts of home and suddenly find themselves face-to-face with what they consider indignant bitching. It’s that whole ridculous retribution argument, and God knows, maybe there’s a point in some of that chest-beating rhetoric for everybody, but these white kids don’t have the foggiest idea what they’re talking about. All they know is that blacks seem to separate themselves and get away with it. Do you think a White Student Coalition would last five minutes at Upton? No way, Brer Rabbit. No way. But we’ve got a Black Student Coalition. Can you imagine White History Month? Or, for that matter, Red History Month or Yellow History Month? Not a chance. So what happens? Everybody gets pissed off, but they’re far too politically correct to say anything about it. But the fact is, all that building resentment is hurting blacks a lot and they don’t seem to know it.
He had wiggled from his chair and begun pacing, waving his cigarette like a wand.
The worse word in the world is nigger, he had said in a low voice. God, what an awful word. Worse than spic or kite or wop. Worse than fag. And it’s too damn bad the slang destroyed a beautiful word: Negro. Listen to how it sounds, Cole. Neee-gro. I like Negro better than black, and I despise African-American. That, to me, is posturing. It’s like Irish-American, or Italian-American or Spanish-American or Polish-American. Damn it, American is the word. He had paused, fighting for breath, then had continued. I mean it, Cole: Negro is a great word. Did you ever hear King say it? Neee-gro. It’d bring shivers down the spine the way he rolled it out. It wasn’t a word with him, Cole, it was a pronouncement. Neee-gro. It’s a majestic word, a poetic word, a much better word than Caucasian. Caucasian sounds like a Japanese car, or some medical procedure they perform only on women.
He had sucked from the unlit cigarette and had blown imaginary smoke from his mouth. Here’s what I think, he had said. If you’re a minority, and I don’t care what it happens to be—black, Indian, Asian, Hispanic, harelip, amputee, drunk, whore, teacher—you’re going to get shit on by somebody, even from the people who claim to be helping you. You can stand around screaming about it, but if you’ve got just a little bit of sense, you’re going to dodge all the droppings you can.
You really believe that? Cole had asked.
Cole, I know it, he had answered quietly. That’s what’s been wrong with me, old friend. I’m a worthless minority with the profile of a gnat’s tiny ass, and I haven’t learned how to live with that sad fact, or with the sadder fact that I could scream until hell freezes over, and nobody will ever listen. And if you take a good look at me, you’ll see that I’m covered in bureaucratic diarrhea.
He had looked at Cole, had smiled a nervous smile, and then he added, I’ve got to learn to start dodging.
Jack Alewine had died of a heart attack in his classroom at Upton University in 1998. The students who witnessed it said he paused in mid-sentence of his lecture, said the expression on his face was the expression of someone who has had a sudden, jolting realization. They said he touched his chest lightly, smiled at them, and then reached into his pocket and pulled out a package of cigarettes. He staggered to a wastebasket beside his desk, dropped the cigarettes into it, touched his chest again, mumbled, “Damn,” and then he fell dead.
He had awakened with the memory of Jack, not understanding why it was there, yet accepting it, and the memory had stayed with him like a sticky aura through breakfast with Amy and Jake, and was still with him on his drive into Overton to see Moses Elder. Age, he reasoned. Hearing of so many who had died, and sensing that each had claimed part of him to take as a souvenir on their journey to the Great Out There, as Marie Fitzpatrick had mockingly called the mystery of death.
Tanya Berry had cautioned him about confronting memory long put-away. She had said the mind held memory like microscopic seeds, and he had found her description of it to be true—a random thought springing up, growing in the rapid blinking of time-lapse photography, until the seeds became a garden.
His memory of being a student was part of the garden. He had loved that pretentious, skittish period of his life, when liberation was as cherished as education. He had belonged to a generation addicted to liberation, a generation peeling away at bigotry like the stripping of dead, sunbaked skin. All of them—himself, Jack Alewine, Wade Hart, Marian Shinholster, Henry Fain, and all the others—had hypnotized themselves with the drone of their own rhetoric, and had adjusted their blinders to shut out anything that seemed, to them, unnecessary complaint. They had imagined themselves to be the most sophisticated, the most patient, the most righteous human beings who had ever lived, and, yet, they had been incredibly unprepared for experiences that would explode around them like miniature home wars. There was only one thing about them that had been truly commendable: They believed. And the world—for the sake of its quintessential humanity, if for no other reason—desperately needed believers.
The thin, fragile face of Henry Fain bloomed in his garden of memory.
Henry Fain had killed himself in 1967. Marian Shinholster had informed Cole of his death in a letter, saying that Henry had pinned to his shirt a page from a novel he was writing, and he had underlined one sentence:
He sucked the barrel of the pistol into his mouth, its cool steel on his tongue like a communion wafer, and then he pulled the trigger.
The underlined sentence had been a description of Henry’s death, and his family had not understood it. He was demented, they had wailed. But Cole had understood, and he believed Marian also had understood: Henry Fain had been writing a paperback murder mystery; he was not writing of quintessential humanity.
Higginbottom’s Funeral Home was now Elder’s Funeral Home. As a young man, Cole had driven past it many times and remembered it as a large, two-story house with a classic dignity, like an elderly lady posing in elderly clothing, still regal, still proud. Now it had a refurbished look with expanding wings. The paint of its siding was a gleaming white. A dozen cars, maybe more, were in the parking lot, suggesting to Cole that someone had died and family and friends had gathered for mourning.
He wondered if he would be intruding. He had called Moses Elder and Moses had set the time at ten o’clock and it was now ten. Still, he wondered. He did not want to interfere with the delicate negotiation of sadness.
Moses answered the door and dismissed Cole’s concern. It’s fine, he said. Everything I can do, I’ve done, and I’ve got good people. They know how to handle things.
That’s impressive, Cole said of the painting.
Moses smiled, invited Cole to sit in a leather armchair, asked if he would like coffee.
No, thank you, Cole told him.
Moses settled in a matching armchair facing Cole. His dark blue suit seemed tailored to the angular shape of his body and it occurred to Cole that he had the look of a model posing as a quiet, yet confident businessman, someone who knew answers before questions were asked.
It’s good to have you back in town, he said to Cole. As I said last night, I liked your book—and the poetry. Wish I had the gift for putting words down on paper. I don’t. I just like reading them.
I lean more to that preference myself, Cole replied. I always found reading to be a pleasure. Writing, for me, is labor. I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t come with the job. That young fellow who’s the editor of the paper asked me last night if I’d wanted to be a writer when I was in high school. I told him it never entered my mind back then. He didn’t seem to believe me.
Moses bobbed his head and the manner of it suggested to Cole that it was a habit, a wordless way of saying many things. He touched his hands together, fingertip to fingertip. There was something you wanted to ask me, he said calmly.
The comment surprised Cole, coming so directly, so quickly, into their exchange. He thought: Cut to the chase. And maybe that was the way of Moses, the reason he was successful; he did not become mired in babble. I do, he replied, but you might not want to address it. If you don’t, I understand.