iv
As Jack hitched the derelict Dodge to the Buick, he launched into a story. “Mike, did I ever tell you about the time my brother and I had to drive down to Colorado to rescue my sister?” Not waiting for an answer, he went on. “She had gone off to meet this guy, someone my mother did not approve of. Afraid he was going to take her away to the city, Denver or Omaha. Your grandpa Mike” – they both had the same name – “he told me and your uncle Mike” – again that name! – “to go down there and get her. It was summer, blazing hot. We drove through eastern Wyoming, nobody on the road at all. I’ll never forget, we came across this rancher stuck on the side of the road in his tractor in that scorching heat. We stopped to see if he was OK. He said, ‘No, I’m not, boys. Been stuck here four, five hours now, can’t get up out of the ditch. You get me out of here, there’s some beer in the back there for you.’ We had a towing rig on the back of our old Model T, got him right out. He had a carton full of beer bottles behind the seat, one of those with the springs visible underneath. We thought they’d be all fizzy and warm, sitting out there in the sun like that for so long. But darned of those weren’t the coldest beers I’d ever had. ‘Course, they were the first beer I ever had, so what did I know?”
“How old were you?” Mike asked.
“Let’s see, I must have been fourteen or fifteen.” After hooking up the Dodge, he got in the Buick, and motioned us to sit in back. As we drove away, he did not resume the story.
Intrigued, I asked, “So what happened, to your sister? Did you find her, get her back?”
“Oh, right. We got to Denver, went right to the Brown Hotel, where she’d said she was supposed to meet that guy. There she was, sitting in one of those leather arm chairs, looked like she’d been crying. ‘He ain’t here, Jack, he ain’t here. He never showed.’ She sure was glad we’d come to get her.” Jack shook his head and chuckled as he reminisced. Then, “So, Jane, I heard Martin Luther King is going to be the commencement speaker at Harvard next month. Do you get to go to that?”
Battles in the south, with dogs and fire hoses turned on freedom marchers, half a million listening to a speech in Washington – images from five years earlier filled my head. Before I could answer, Mike piped up, “I saw him a few weeks ago, at Calvin.” I stared at him. He hadn’t told me about that.
“Oh?” Jack prompted.
“Yeah, it wasn’t a speech or anything. It was a special service at the Chapel, Sunday night this February.”
“You don’t go to church…” I started.
“Right, but this was by invitation only. He’s good friends with one of my Religion professors, Dr. Klaassen. He got a whole pew reserved for our seminar. There were only about 60 people there. It’s not a big cathedral or anything.”
“Religion?” Jack wondered.
“You know; I’ve been taking a Religion class every semester, kind of like a minor to Biology? It’s not the same as going to church, more like philosophy. Anyway, he basically did a whole service, with hymns, lesson, and a sermon. I could see why he’s such an inspiring leader. His words, his cadence, his fire, his sincerity – it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Made me glad I got to go to JCU, to hear someone like that.”
We got home late Monday evening. Three days later, Mike came over to my house for dinner. Dad had left the TV on in the den. Coming from the kitchen to the dining table with the roast beef platter, mom could see the screen. She let out a howl of pain, dropped the platter and roast on the rug, put her hand to her mouth, and started shaking. Turning to the TV, I saw the bulletin flickering madly: “Martin Luther King shot in Memphis this evening, rushed to hospital in critical condition.”
Stuttering to make sense of the words, my mind ricocheted back to 1963 again, this time November, the principle’s short, neutral announcement early in 4th period, that Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. There’d been a sense shared grief which lasted for months. I wondered if we could mourn a black man as we had a white.
Without a car, Mike took the train back to school, while I flew into Logan that weekend. Tuesday after we got back was his birthday, so I called him. Our conversation seemed off, somehow. Maybe it was the assassination, and the riots that followed in Avondale that Sunday after I left. Only a couple of miles from my home, mom reported soldiers patrolling the streets, guarding stores, preventing any more deaths.
Or maybe it was the books I was reading, the ones by Friedan and de Beauvoir. And the conversations I had with my new friends at school, the ones who told me what I ought to feel about a boy, which was different than what I thought I felt about Mike. We agreed to meet that weekend in Cambridge.
He wrote me a letter, about seeing King at Calvin, how that made him feel, about his sorrow and anger at King’s murder, and the riots that followed. I remember he said, seeing those troops, in all their gear, arrayed out along the Capitol steps – that’s not right, that doesn’t happen here. Something must be really wrong if that’s going on…He included along a poem:
A VOICE ACROSS THE MOUNTAIN TOP
A grey-toned man approached me and
unasked
I answered, Yes, I would, Yes
Yes
I’d follow him
To the bus in the back
of a team of mules
He rides now
covered with kisses
And other near misses
and the one that found him
Will not confound him
But hopefully raise his wishes
that covered with kisses we all might love
as he felt we could and should and
Would
someday
When he’d gone away
To his promised land
where his dreams have dawned
on the mountain top
He spoke to us
unasked
He answered, Yes I will, Yes
Yes
4-10-68
That Friday, I wrapped his present, a children’s book, and wrote a note to go with it:
Mike – at the moment I’m fantastically happy somehow – it’s spring & Phil Ochs & you & me and a lot of other things and not very stable – but one thing that should last is the happy that has to last until/through tomorrow – Sat. Yes, it’s strange to save up “happy” for 1 day – but what is the alternative (Not that it’s saved up – but Sat. is different) Like, after we talked Tues. I was kinda upset, really, – I hate feeling that we are insipid ‘cause maybe then what we feel is insipid too – and upset for seeing you, too. But I didn’t write or scream or crack-up – and I realize I’ve got to figure things out, but they can be figured (I don’t mean to sound mystical – this is what happy-sad bubbling is). And the worst thing to do would be to blow what we have together in bitching and biting – I’d rather run around and be crazy with you.
Besides being basically neat and interesting – your letter about Martin Luther King – it was more, for I had been thinking ‘way before how I couldn’t talk about it with anyone it seemed for the emotion was more than would fit words without sounding dilettantish or silly. Somehow your letter was a vindication of something. I sat in the Memorial Service here realizing that comments how he wasn’t a Harvard man weren’t so horrible for they were primarily trying somehow to find some personal meaning out of something hugely shattering; it’s got to come down to personal terms somehow. Also, I guess that’s the first time I realized that somehow his death was about something much bigger & simpler than death or black & white; I’m not exactly sure of what it is – I’m not wise or old (?) enough to know, but maybe Henry Wald is right – the conflict is between a man who loved and one who hated. I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound like Sally College, nor am I responding in any form – but somehow I wanted to write to you about this.
This isn’t really much of a birthday card – but what can I say but what comes to me, right? And there’s too much to say to make anything beyond “Happy Birthday” and “I love you” meaningful –
Love,
Janie
Why should anyone give someone who’s really 19 years old Hector Protector? No overtones, no suggestions – but just that I love it – & maybe it’s me & because it’s also from kids – and because I love you. No, it’s not all the same thing – just related. Maybe I’ve regressed from F. Scott Fitzgerald – but then maybe I’ve gotten sublimely beyond him (well, it’s a mystic possibility). Anyway if it’s all happy – and me – the book & the kids & you & me – it’s got to be related.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY –
Love –
Janie
v
Saturday morning, Mike arrived jittery, his usual calm replaced with a pensive anxiety. I held off on the present and birthday “card” while he explained. “There were people all over the bridge, I could barely get onto Mem. Drive, cars backed up the whole way to the square. Finally I had to turn onto Brattle Street. What’s going on?”
“You haven’t heard? They’re not doing it down there at Jock U? The SDS, the Student Mobe Committee, ten days of resistance? They’re calling for a nation-wide, one-day strike next Thursday. I don’t know if I’m going to the big rally in the yard. I’d like to, but my classes…”
A knock, and before I could say anything the door opened revealing Marcia and Leslie. Marcia pulled up short when she saw Mike, and looked about to apologize. Leslie acted like he wasn’t there.
“Janie. We’ve got to get down to the Square. Get that yellow thing you wear, it’s drizzling a little.” She finally realized a boy was in my room. “Who’s this?” she demanded.
“Mike Harrison, from Calvin,” I answered in as neutral a tone as possible.
“Janie’s boyfriend,” Marcia added softly.
Leslie glared at Mike, then looked at me with a bit of pity. “So he’s coming too?” she sniffed.
Outside on Walker Street, Leslie warmed up to her lecture. “There’re these Harvard guys, the local SDS group, who are planning the rally on Thursday. They invited some of us from Radcliffe, but when we tried to say anything, it was like, ‘That’s nice sweetie, why don’t you bring us more beers?’ I’m not going back there. Even the men you’d think would understand about women’s lib, they don’t get it. They’re not going to help us. That war, it’s just men fighting men, I don’t know if I care any more, let them all kill each other. It’d make life a lot easier for us.”
Marcia countered, “You don’t really mean that, Les?”
Leslie’s steely silence and razor glare confirmed that she did, indeed, at that moment want to live in a male-free world. I let the two of them walk a bit ahead while I asked Mike, “So what’s been happening? What did you do last night?”
“I memorized Desolation Row.”
“That old Dylan song? It’s long, right, eleven minutes?”
“Mmm hmm,” he affirmed. “Rich wanted to perform it, but he claims he can’t sing, so he asked me to.”
I laughed, “You can’t either!”
“Well, apparently I can growl like Dylan, and better than Rich. He’s pretty good on the guitar, so he played and played while I read the lyrics off the album. First few times through, we did it with the record, then took off on our own. Wanna hear it?” He smiled a little, lifting his left eyebrow.
The rain picked up a bit. Mike was wearing a blue hard hat he’d snatched from the hockey rink construction site. Along with his scruffy faded tan leather jacket, he blended right in with the crowd on Mass Ave. “Everyone is making love, or else expecting rain.” he syncopated. “Or something like that.” He switched gears. “I got that job for the summer, at the swimming club. I’ll be a lifeguard, and they said I could help out with the swim team as well.”
“All summer? Can you get any time off, like a long weekend?”
“What do you mean?”
“I told you, I want to go to the SDS convention in Chicago after the Vineyard. The convention, it’s very important. They’re going to work on the Democrats to get real about making change, the war, civil rights, blacks, women, everything.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if you can get time off or you don’t know if you want to go. I really want to go. You should too.”
“I guess … both…?”
We shuffled along in silence for a while behind Marcia and Leslie. Mike usually followed my lead when I chose to push it. Now, I sensed some hesitation, some pull in a different direction. Last summer, he’d worked in the psych ward, this summer, all he wanted to do was play, at being a kid, with more kids all around him. I wondered, is he afraid of being older, of dealing with the real issues in our world?
“Why not? Why don’t you want to go?” I pushed again, “I’d really like you to be there with me.”
“It seems a little…dangerous. You sure that’s what you want to do?”
His reluctance made me more sure I had to be there. But I wouldn’t let it become a line in the sand between us. I needed him as much as he needed me, I knew. And wasn’t love about dealing with, learning from the differences between two people, building a new common ground?
That evening, Mike unwrapped his birthday present. His eyes widened, and he broke into a smile when he saw Hector Protector and As I went Over The Water, by Maurice Sendak. “You sure like this guy, don’t you? Yeah, I remember, Where The Wild Things Are. And his pictures, not fairy tale stuff, more like an adult perspective on nursery rhymes.”
“Sendak, he writes kids’ books, sure, but they get to me where I am now. If I ever have kids, this is the kind of stuff I’ll show them, I’ll read to them, not those ‘Dick and Jane’ things we had in first grade.”
“Yeah, those were kind of worthless. You were like me, I guess, you could read those things easily, and knew they weren’t actual stories, just an excuse to show us new words. But we already knew them, right, so it got real boring real fast.” He paused, then continued. “Hmm, kids…It would be fun to have kids, show them things, watch them grow. Wouldn’t it?”
I was thinking about families then, but not about making one. I knew that Sendak was a Polish Jew, like my great-great grandparents. Even though he was born in Brooklyn, his family had lost everyone they knew who still lived in Europe during the Holocaust. I thought that might be why his pictures seemed so dark, so real. For some reason, I didn’t want to talk with Michael about this, that family means different things to different people. He could trace himself back to 1620 in this country, but my people, I thought, go back over 3,000 years, through slavery and pogroms and ghettos. My parents, each in their own way, had downplayed all that in our life, not hiding it, but never bringing it up either. It might be time to explore that, to come to terms with another part of who I am, I mused.
I pulled up suddenly. While the rain dripped from the brim of my yellow vinyl hat, I said, “I just remembered!”
“What?”
“Today’s Pesach.”
vi
“I remember…some smells of you, of us.”
Lying on my bed, side-by-side, we had invented a new game: “What do I remember?” The idea was to come up with something we’d done, somewhere we’d been, together, which the other did not remember. We’d been miserable failures up to this point, as everything I said, he nodded vigorously with, and added to. He couldn’t find any gaps in my recollections either.
“Events, words, they’re easy to share. Sounds and sights, even. But what about aromas? I bet they’re more private, personal. What about these?” Staring out the window, he drifted into his poet’s voice. “Your hair in a graveyard, an un-washed tent, Italian ambrosia, ambergris and wine – and love.”
“What am I supposed to do with those?”
“For starters, you could say when I sniffed them. The hard part, of course, would be to prove that you and I each got the same sensation from them.”
“The first one’s easy – that day you came up in October, Columbus Day weekend, we went to the graveyards downtown. You kept putting your nose in my hair, telling me how much you’d missed the smell. Un-washed tent? I guess that’s the time last year, when we went camping with Phil and Jerry, Lizzie and Leon and everybody, up by the lake in Hueston Woods. I thought we were so adult, going off on our own, some of us celebrating the graduation, the boys wondering what they could get away with.” I repeated, “Italian ambrosia, ambergris and wine…and love.” I was pretty sure I knew what he meant. That first time, after I’d gotten the pills, I had worn some Roman perfume. I decided to show him, not tell him. I felt a softly pealing rhapsody start inside me, a symphony we could play together – the harmony of love.
Soft caresses, not quite gestures began between us, falling, streaming, cascading upward and around. We enclosed each other, trembling, then shattering and finally stopping, with nothing coming of it but the pleasure of itself, appealing, soft forever. We seemed outside of time, beyond our lives, above our minds, a soft refrain we sang together with all our movements. It was a fairy structure, only a dream-wrought castle, more fragile than a turreted masterpiece built from sand.
But it was ours, our wishes for ourselves, come to full fruition apart from the world outside. Our presence, our presents, our present eternal presence in and out of the rapture of our life together. I thought, at last, this once, I place my trust outside of me. I was slightly sleepy, vaguely gliding towards his warm translucent flesh that pulled me over, met with mine, is mine.
Mike was first to speak. “OK, I think you win.”
“No, we both won, buddy.”
Next morning, Mike got up first. He padded over to the window, raised the shade, and said, “I love this time of day, this time of year. It’s still early spring, the sun’s trying to wake up. The night’s melting, there’s a dull blue glow in the sky, not too bright, just enough to light the lawn down there. Everything’s still so new, that light green everywhere in the grass, the trees, the buds.” He paused, moving his hands as if conducting, painting, or writing on a blackboard. “Wow, there’s something there.” He recited, “All I see is green and blue and all that’s new and you, my love and you.” He turned and smiled
“I I hear a poem in that,” I offered.
Rushing to my desk, he grabbed some paper and started scribbling. Soon, he read out loud, “You speak so clearly, gently wave the words across my ears, calm my fears…” Smiling again, he announced, “That feels good. But I like living life with you better than writing about it.”
That afternoon, I sat with Jeanne, Leslie, and Marcia on Cabot’s second floor balcony, facing the sun. With the brick building to our back blocking the wind and reflecting the radiance towards us, I almost felt comfortable in the cool April air. Below us, a red-haired girl sitting on the steps practiced with her guitar, singing folk songs. Stopping, she fiddled with the tuning pegs, put a green glass cylinder over her left middle finger, and shifted into a driving blues riff.
Jeanne leaned over, then turned back towards us. “Who’s that? What’s she doing with that glass on her finger? Is that some giant ring?”
Marcia looked down. “Oh, I know her. That’s Bonnie. She lives down in Bertram. From California, LA.”
Leslie added, “She’s doing bottleneck blues. You guys know what that is?” Seeing our blank stares, she went on. “Back before the depression, down in Mississippi, they started cutting the tops off beer bottles, using them with a guitar tuned so all the strings played one chord. You slide it up and down, get that twangy sound, like someone moaning. Lots of people are doing it now, kind of mixing up country music with rock ’n roll. She’s good, she knows what she’s doing.”
She turned to me. “Jane, where’d you go yesterday, after we went to the square. That boy you were with, he’s gone now?” She tilted her head, furrowing her eyes accusatorially.
Flustered, I said, “What have you got against him? You hardly know him.”
“I don’t need to know him. He’s a guy, they’re all the same. If they’re not trying to get into our pants, they’re busy ignoring us or putting us down. You don’t need him.”
Anger rose in me. “First of all, he’s not like that…”
Jeanne chimed in, “Yeah, it took them, what Janie, 18 months to go all the way?”
Leslie sneered back at me. “Was it worth it? Where do you think this is going, anyway?”
I looked to Marcia for help. She was leaning over the balcony, nodding her head with Bonnie’s syncopating blues. Jeanne studiously examined her fingernails.
I thought carefully, then said, “It might be true, I’m using him, he’s using me. But neither of us cares” – here I hesitated, afraid of being seen as innocent, naive – “it doesn’t matter, because…we love each other.”
Leslie snorted. “Aww, that’s sweet. ‘You love each other.’ What’s that mean, anyway? Girls say that because they want to be wanted, and boys say that so they can get what they want. Then they ignore you, or worse.”
“He says I complete him, I make him a better person. And he sees a part of me no one else knows is there.” My analytic head sidled up next to the emotional tugs inside my heart, trying for an understanding, a merger. “OK, here’s the way I see it… love is not a simple, isolated thing to me. It may have started with feelings, a desire to have someone to fawn over. But that’s not enough, at least not for me. I can share what I’m thinking, what I’m seeing, where I want to go, in a way that’s deeper, fuller, different than I get with anyone else.” I glanced at Marcia and Jeanne. “Not my best friends. Not my family. Not anybody. With Michael, he’s all those things, and more.”
Incredulous, Leslie asked, “There’s more?”
“The way he views the world, how he moves through it. He told me once, he has two rules that guide him, ‘Always be honest. And never do anything for the sole reason it’s expected of you.’ That makes it hard, sometimes, I know. In the end, though, it’s his authenticity I cherish most.”
Leslie looked about to explode, then sighed, “You’re a lost cause, a hopeless romantic. That stuff’s not real. You’re better off getting what you can from someone like him, and moving on to the next one. Or keep him around in reserve, while you find out what the rest of the world is like.”
I wondered if Leslie had ever felt love the way I had, or if she’d been hurt, abandoned. I’d had good luck, to stumble onto Michael Harrison. I wanted to say, “I know what it’s like to be loved, and that’s a feeling I don’t ever want to lose.”