by Regina Doman
The poetry of earth is never dead
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead...
As he read from Keats’s sonnet to the grasshopper, Rose put her hand on her chin and forgot what she had been saying to Blanche. He was as elusive to her as Shakespeare, as unreachable as William Butler Yeats. By the time he started reading, “Terence, this is stupid stuff,” by A. E. Houseman, Rose was laughing so hard that she coughed up part of her drink at his expressions. She had never realized what a funny poem it was before, and how true:
And malt does more than Milton can
to justify God’s ways to man.
Poetry so fine was like a harp being stroked by a dozing musician, with a careless beauty that made her insides ache. It made her want to seize a pen and write and have verses dance out of her fingers, but she knew that when the fever was off of her, they would only be dull words. In the same way, the dancing, itching pleasure of his company made her think, eagerly, that he was actually within her reach, that perhaps someday... It was cruel to tantalize herself with thoughts like that.
Because I liked you better
than it suits a girl to say
it irked you and I promised
to throw the thought away.
To put the world between us,
we parted, stiff and dry;
“Good-bye,” and you, “Forget me.”
“I will, no fear,” said I.
If here, where clover whitens
the dead man’s knoll you pass
and now tall flower to meet you
starts in the trefoiled grass,
halt by the headstone naming
the heart no longer stirred,
and say the girl that loved you
was one that kept her word.
Last night she had recast some of Houseman’s verse into feminine form to fit her own situation. Now as she leaned against the car window, aware that she had the next several hours to spend alone with Fish, she tried to remain self-composed.
Now that she had tasted home again, part of her longed to stay here in New Jersey with Blanche, Bear, and her mother, but part of her couldn’t wait to start out on this journey away, and she said her goodbyes to her family after Sunday Mass with only the appearance of regret.
She looked out the window at the trefoiled grass (what a lovely phrase) they passed in the fields bordering the highway, not knowing how to break out of poetry into prose. But she couldn’t remain in a car alone with someone and say nothing, any more than she could hold her breath longer than five minutes.
Searching for something normal to say (despite the poetry, she was not going to bare her heart to him again), she at last remembered something she had been wondering about.
“What did you have to come back here for this weekend?” she asked. “Did it go well?”
His lips parted in a wry smile, but he said nothing.
“With all the excitement on Thursday night I never thought to ask you what it was you were coming back for,” she explained.
“If you had asked, I wouldn’t have told you,” he said.
Oh. She was silent.
He glanced at her, and apparently picked up on how his remark had sounded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.” He sighed and frowned. “I had a court case.”
“For what?”
“There was a hearing to decide if Mr. Freet would be allowed to transfer to a lesser-security prison for health reasons, and Charles Russell, my lawyer, wanted me to go.”
“Oh,” Rose was startled. “So that’s where you went?”
“Yes.”
She paused. “Did you actually see Mr. Freet?”
“I did.”
“That must have been awful.”
“It was.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that’s what you were doing? I would have gone with you.”
“No, you wouldn’t have,” he said, rolling down his window to grab his turnpike ticket and turning onto the highway. “I wouldn’t have let you.”
“Why didn’t you have Bear go with you?”
“I didn’t think I needed the help.”
“You don’t let people help you, do you?” she asked. “Why is that?”
“Various reasons,” he said. Then he glanced at her. “It’s difficult for me to become close to people. And there’s a reason for that. It’s something I don’t think you’ve noticed.” He had that faint smile on his face, the smile that had always irked her, that meant he was feeling older than she was.
“What is it I’ve overlooked now?” she demanded.
“Rose, I don’t blame you for not noticing. It’s part of your charm, your innocence. You’re a good person, Rose, and you don’t know all the evil that’s in the world.”
This was the way he always spoke, as if he were sad and amused at the same time. As though he were a much older person.
“So what is it that I don’t know?” she asked, attempting to remain calm.
“Are you sure you want to know?” he inquired, glancing over at her.
“Yes. If that’s what it takes to be your friend.”
For a long moment, he was silent, looking at the road ahead. “All right,” he said, seeming to decide something. “Rose, as you know, I’ve been beaten up quite a few times in my life. Have you ever wondered why that is?”
“You’ve been in a lot of dangerous situations,” she said.
“But so has Bear.”
“Bear is bigger,” she said carefully.
“That’s right. I’m smaller, aren’t I? And thinner. And when I was younger, my voice used to be higher. Haven’t you noticed that some guys like that tend to be treated differently? Especially in school. Particularly if they don’t like sports and are more interested in things like books, and poetry. Things start getting said about them.”
She began to comprehend what he was saying. “Nasty things,” she said at last.
“Yes, very nasty things,” he agreed mildly. “When you’re born with a certain physique and characteristics in a certain environment, you can be put into circumstances, early on in life, which can start to change you, that can cause you to struggle in ways that other people never have to. You understand what I mean?”
“I think so.”
His voice was quiet. “People who don’t understand think of it as a compulsion. It’s deeper than that. It’s a doubt. A guy with this particular struggle doubts his capabilities. I don’t mean physical abilities. It’s a struggle in the soul. Things that come naturally to other guys—to most other guys—you can’t do, without feeling a constant and persistent, and sometimes, fatal doubt. That’s what it’s like, to live with this. You’re constantly doubting yourself. And that can be, as I said, fatal.”
He paused, then went on, “I’ve come to realize that a lot of girls don’t sense this in a guy. But other guys can sense it. They know there’s something different about you. And some of them have a problem with it, and will avoid you because of it. And other guys will try to take advantage of you.” His voice was calm, as though he were discussing something he had read in a textbook that was faintly interesting.
“And that’s happened to you?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t see that in you,” was all she could think to say.
“I knew you wouldn’t. But think about it. I have the profile for it—the usual psychological aberrations. I had a weak relationship with my father. My parents had a bad marriage. I had emotional trauma in the early teenage years with my mom dying. Bear’s the only real family I’ve had for a long time.”
“Has Bear struggled with this too?” Rose asked.
Fish shook his head. “No. It’s different for every personality, definitely not genetic. This was never his particular cross, although he’s had other ones. I try not to bother him with my struggles, but he knows about them and understands. You
know what a great heart he has.”
A darker thought had occurred to Rose, who was rapidly starting to see how all the pieces fit together, in a new and ominous light. “He saved you from a gang when you were in prison.”
A wry smile passed over Fish’s face. “Yes, he did. And if you’re thinking that my problem had something to do with my getting singled out by a gang for drowning, then you’re right.”
“And Mr. Freet—” she said softly, not daring to ask.
“Yes. Freet.” He paused again, and looked out the window for a moment, then looked back at the road. “When I was a freshman at St. Catherine’s, he used to hang out by my locker and say things to me every morning. You know how it is when you’re a young teenager. You’re changing, you have acne—you’re terribly self-conscious anyhow. And Freet would needle me in the worst ways, asking me things, making evil suggestions. You see, I knew what he was, and I was afraid of him. Because I was afraid of myself, and he knew it. And so I let myself hate him.
“I was also a new Catholic at the time, and I had begun to be around religious people for the first time. I’ve found that’s one of the few things that even some otherwise very good Catholics feel free to ridicule—men who have the kind of struggles I have. It’s ugly to see that. Still, I can’t blame them too much—I used to do it myself, all the time, particularly to Freet. But looking back, I know I did it because I was ruled by my fear. It was wrong—it’s a sin against charity. And in treating Freet the way I treated him, I made Freet hate me. I hated him, and he hated me right back. You see how these little sins can multiply.”
“Did you tell Father Raymond about all this?”
“Father Raymond was the best thing that happened to me at that time in my life. He knew my struggles, and he accepted me as a man, just a regular young man, not someone strange or deformed. He kept telling me not to be locked into it by the evil choices of others—that I shouldn’t define myself by it. And he tried to teach me charity, mostly by his example. He would never deride anyone, even if they were his enemies. He was always respectful of Freet, that twisted soul, but he did tell Freet to stay away from me. Fr. Raymond was a big man—I always wondered exactly what he said to Freet. He tried as hard as he could to get Mr. Freet kept out of the school—you know how he always used to hang out there—but it didn’t work. After all, Mr. Freet was the principal’s brother, and that was before all the scandals in the Church made people more aware of these issues. It didn’t help that the principal and Father Raymond didn’t get along either.”
He paused. “The day after Father Raymond’s funeral, Freet was right there at my locker again, leering at me. I wanted to kill him. I hated him so much. But I just ignored him and shut him out—almost fatally, as you know.”
She knew what he meant. “And when Mr. Freet kidnapped you—” She stopped.
Fish nodded, and swallowed slightly. “That was after I had been in prison and been out on the streets. I had thought I was tough by then. But when Freet had made me a prisoner in his cellar, he just stripped that all away from me, and got under my skin, the way he knew he could. He went through me like a needle brush through cream cheese.”
He licked his lips. “I won’t go into what he did to me. I wouldn’t burden you with that. But I’ll tell you what he said. He tried to make me believe that the relationship between Father Raymond and I was twisted—you know, the whole thing about us being his favorite altar boys—when in reality, Father Raymond was the closest thing to a normal dad that I ever had.”
“That was a horrible thing to do.”
“It was pretty grotesque. Fortunately, he didn’t get me to admit it. I didn’t give in to him. Freet was going to kill me, you know, after he had finished degrading me in the worst ways possible.” He paused, and added, almost as an afterthought, “And then you showed up to rescue me.”
“You must have thought I was a fool, didn’t you?” she shuddered.
“I wouldn’t say that. You did succeed. I owe you my life.”
Of course, she thought to herself, she owed Fish her life as well. But it was polite of him not to bring that up.
At last, she managed to say, “I hadn’t realized you were dealing with such horrible things, Fish.”
“I know. I never told anyone else, except Bear. And I wasn’t going to tell you. Although Bear said I should, when the right time came. Assuming that this is the right time,” he cocked his head at her. “Do you understand why I’m telling you all this?”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve had this feeling—ever since we came out of that cellar together—that I’ve been disappointing you. I have this idea that you expect me to turn into a knight in shining armor and whisk you away into the sunset on a white horse.”
She flushed, and under different circumstances, would have made a quick retort. But instead, she dropped her eyes.
“And I admit I’ve avoided you because of that. But that was wrong. I should have faced the matter with you squarely and frankly a long time ago. I don’t want you waiting around for me, Rose, expecting something that’s just not going to happen.”
She looked up at him, and met his brown eyes as he glanced at her insistently, pointedly.
“Why not?”
He looked back at the road and blew out his breath in exasperation. “Haven’t I made you understand, Rose? I’m a broken man, with all sorts of psychological baggage. And your expectations of me are so high that I could never meet them.”
“Are they?” she asked quietly, trying to quell her swelling emotions. “How do you know?”
He frowned, speeding past the truck that had been ahead of them with typical New York impatience. “Rose, you live half in your ideal world of adventures and archetypes, and half in this real world. But I don’t belong in that ideal world. I’m happy enough to share the real world with you, but you can’t put me into that fairy-tale-land of yours. I don’t live there. I’m no handsome prince, and I’m not a knight in shining armor.”
She couldn’t help smiling through her tears. “You’re just a wounded soldier,” she said. “It doesn’t mean you can’t be a knight, someday.”
He groaned and rubbed his hand over his forehead, muttering to himself in quiet frustration. “Rose, Rose, Rose. That’s just not me. What can I say that will convince you to leave me alone with my sordid past?”
“Nothing,” she said, sniffling and wiping her nose. “You’ve been hurt, and you’re struggling...”
“Which is why I probably seem cold and solitary to you sometimes,” he said, handing her his handkerchief. “I don’t have many friends. It’s a real effort for me to initiate relationships with others. Not like you, Rose. You have more friends than I’d ever know what to do with. And you’ll have boyfriends, too. Those guys you hang out with—they’re all good Catholics. Maybe one of them will be like Bear was to your sister. I don’t want you to turn down one of them because you’re waiting around for me, who’s been used like a trash bin by too many thugs and criminals.”
She set her jaw. “Fish, don’t talk about yourself like that. You’re not trash. And not a trash bin.”
He looked at her mildly, then turned his eyes back to the long highway ahead. “I know,” he said. “At least on one level. But there always seems to be that fundamental doubt.”
The rest of the ride home, they remained silent or kept to lighter topics. Rose managed to keep her emotions under control, and when they reached Mercy College that evening, she thanked him and said goodnight with miraculous normality. She deliberately didn’t stay to watch his car pull away, but shouldered her backpack and walked back inside.
Kateri was not in the room, but there was a note from her, telling Rose to call Dr. Morris.
She dialed his home number and he answered.
“Rose, you’re back. Did you have a good trip?”
“Wonderful,” she answered truthfully.
“I wanted to tell you what the Dean and I decided to do, after talking to Donna,
Tara, and their parents. I’ve expelled Donna from the play. The school administration is considering whether or not to expel her from school, but that’s their call, not mine at this point. However, based on Tara’s willingness to admit and repent for her part in the mischief, I’m tempted to keep her on and give her Donna’s role. I’m giving Tara’s part to the understudy. But I wanted to talk to you first to find out if you are comfortable with Tara remaining in the play.”
Rose considered. “I think so,” she said. It was true that Tara had always been nicer, particularly in the beginning, before falling under Donna’s influence. “How did Donna respond?”
“Oh, very badly. She denied everything, and tried to take the high ground, saying she was being persecuted. Well, with two witnesses, it was obvious that she was lying. Then Tara broke down and admitted to everything. When I spoke with her alone, she said that she had been too scared of Donna to object when Donna made the plan to trick you. That seemed to make sense to me. The Dean wanted me to expel them both, but I asked that Tara, at least, be given another chance. But he said I should talk to you first.”
“I think that’s fine with me,” she said.
“Good. I’m keeping her on probation. We’ll see how she does on rehearsals—she’s done well so far. I have picked another understudy to study her part, and she knows I will drop her if there are any further incidents. I’m sorry again that you had to go through this, Rose.”
“I think I’ll be all right, Dr. Morris. Really. Thank you.”