Story: Tough Going

***

1

And she died. Their trusted employee, their neighbor, their friend, their mother… She was taken from them.

She was thirty-nine. She was buried after a short ceremony in a beautiful, large cemetery outside the city to the northwest. Now it is called “historic,” but then it was considered new. Her headstone said, "Sarah Decker Davis, 1879-1918." There'd been many burials about that time period, especially just before. So many died then…

Sarah (or Sallie) Williamson had been born in Charleston, South Carolina. Her father was a ship’s carpenter from Sweden, who died unexpectedly in 1896 when Sallie was seventeen. Sallie’s mother Betty Lee had married a man named John Newburg just after the Civil War. He had died ten years later, just after their son James was born.

A year or so after her first husband's death, Betty married again, and three years after that, Sallie was born. Altogether, Betty and Erik Williamson had three daughters. One of them died only five months after she was born, her death record in the Charleston cemetery not even listing a name for her.

Life was tenuous and fragile, especially back then in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

In 1900 Sallie herself married Wallace N. Decker, a ruler for one of the larger Charleston printing businesses. They lived with "Mama Betty" and Sallie’s younger sister Winnie. In 1902 their first son, Newton (“Newt” for short) was born, and Winnie moved to a rooming house near the millinery shop where she worked. A year later, Winnie too died, carried off by a sudden fever.

3

My dear Wallace,

We are all so sad. Mother cannot stop crying. Even little Newt seems to miss his dear auntie. It happened so fast. Mother was called to her bedside late in the afternoon Thursday, and by Friday evening little Winnie was gone.

She was always quiet and sweet, just as I’m sure you remember her. She would have made a good wife and mother -- I can’t bear to think she will never have that chance. And I will never again share a bed with her, or hold her dear little hand. I wish you were here to hold me close.

Mother says we have to “keep a-goin” is how she says it.

I miss you but I hope you find what you are looking for out there in Dallas. Thank you for writing now and then. I know it’s hard to find the time. Is it still very hot? Please, please take good care of yourself and don’t work too hard for Mr. Isaacs.

Your loving Wife,

Sallie

P.S. Do you still think you’ll come home for a while in the Fall? At least we have the trains now. SWD

*

Dear Sallie

I am very sorry about Winnie. I will always remember those days when we were first married. We didn’t have much room, did we, there in your mother’s house? But your Mama Betty and young Winnie accepted me into the family, which made it all right.

I hope Betty is getting along better by now. Having lost two husbands and now her beloved little girl – as she always called Winnie – is just too much.

And little Newt, is he well and happy? I know you like working in that shop, just like Minnie liked calling herself a milliner, but I wish you could have more time with him. Not that Mama Betty doesn’t love him about as much as you and me!

Anyway, yes, I will get a week off in November, unless there’s too much work for Mr. Isaacs to do without me at that time.

Hope you and Betty are as well as possible.

Love,

Your husband

*

“I don’t mind working,” he said to himself, mailing the letter at the downtown Post Office. “I like the print shop. But when the day’s over and on the weekends… well, a fellow should be able to have a little fun. You need some life, some excitement,” he was thinking as he headed down to the river bank to sit a while in the shade. Maybe there would be a little breeze. “Gosh, it’s hot in the sun,” he was thinking.

Sallie was a great partner, he had to admit, smart and a good talker, pretty too in her way. “But with her mother and her, it’s all work. When it’s not the job, it’s straightening up the house, doing the washing, discussing how much can we afford for food this week …and all that.”

He spotted a live oak on the slope near the water with a ring of shade underneath.

“Now, Molly’s mom and dad aren’t like that," he said to himself, thinking of his new Dallas friends, the Corcoran family. "Why didn’t we meet in Carolina? That new Victrola thing is really something, isn’t it? I’ll even know how to dance a little in a while. What would Sallie say to that?”

But he knew she would say they had to save their money. “It’s too bad about Winnie, though. I should have been there…”

4

A hundred years later, his grandson Byron, as an old man, tried to imagine what it had been like for his grandfather Wallace Decker in those days. Why had he left his wife and family in Charleston to look for work way out in Dallas anyway? Was he already restless? Looking for something new? Or were the opportunities in old Charleston really that limited? Or had he already been in some kind of trouble?

It didn’t seem right in the first place for him to have left his one-year-old son (odd-ball “Uncle Newt”) back in Charleston. Then before six months had passed, Wallace had started cheating on Sallie with a mere girl out in Dallas. No, not right.

Byron remembered sitting on the living room couch twenty years ago with his Dad, Evan Decker - Sallie’s last surviving child - when he first saw the old letters that showed how much Evan's father Wallace had failed to live up to the common decencies that Byron knew his Dad himself had always considered so important. Evan Decker rarely showed emotion, even to Byron his only son. At that moment, though, it was obvious how bad he felt.

5

Dearie

Last night was the best night of my life. I’ll never forget it. I wish you could come back tonight but we have to go to a supper at the church.

I hope you can think of another excuse for us to go off alone.

I love you!

Molly

*

My Dearest Husband Wallace

We are all looking forward to having you back with us again soon, at least for a little while. It’s mostly me of course who is eager to see you again. I wish we could meet you at the station but of course we can’t be sure when your train will arrive.

Mr. Wood the printer was going by this morning and looked in to say Hello. “How’s Wally?” he said. It sounded so funny, him calling you that. Did the other men at work call you that? Does Mr. Isaacs?

I guess I’d better help Mama get supper. I think about you all the time. I hope you make all your train connections all right, without too many delays.

Your Loving Sallie

6

By the time he reached Atlanta at the end of what was scheduled to be a three-day journey, he was running six hours late. But all that meant was that he had only an hour or so to spend in the station. He sought out the shoe shine stand. He knew Sallie would have preferred to do that for him, but he paid the 25 cents anyway. He wanted to look respectable… and to have people treat him like a somebody. Altogether, after all, he still had almost $11.00 to give to Sallie and her mother.

He had dinner with the Corcorans – and Molly, of course – once or twice a week now. They wouldn’t hear of his pitching in… so he'd been able to save up.

He realized he was looking forward to seeing Sallie and little Newt more and more as the time and the miles went by. It surprised him a little that he felt that way. And they would be coming out to join him in Texas before too long, wouldn’t they? Betty would be pressing him to find them somewhere to stay, Sallie would say somewhere near the shops where she could find work.

He paid the colored boy for the shine. “Yassir, sir. Yassir,” he said bouncing his head down each time.

“That’s all right, boy,” he nodded as he strode through the lobby. Maybe he’d pick up a little flower for his lapel when they pulled in at the Charleston station.

*

For her part, to be honest, Sallie didn’t seem to have time to think about anything. She found herself thinking about her baby all the while as she was working. And that naturally involved her mother Betty in her thoughts. But until the last couple of days, she didn’t find herself thinking much at all about Wallace out there in Texas. And now she couldn’t think of much else.She and her mother Betty were busy cleaning and straightening things up in the house. They had decided to move the baby’s crib into Mama Betty’s room the morning of the day Wallace would return. Gosh, if he didn’t get in that day after all, she didn’t know if she could stand it!

7

Later, in their little Dallas apartment, little Newt was beginning to talk pretty well even though he was barely two. Like Sallie, Betty remembered. “Gramma,” he said now pulling at her skirt as he stood there a little unsteadily. “Gramma, why Mommy cry?”

Sallie didn’t seem to be able to stop weeping the last couple of days. Even while she was nursing the new baby, as she was doing now, she couldn’t stop. Why had they named him 'Evan'? she wondered. Well, at least it wasn’t Wallace junior. They would have to go to a judge now, she thought, if they had, and change it.

“Gramma,” the toddler insisted.

“She’ll be fine,” Betty said leaning over to hug him and stroke the back of his head. “You’ll see.” She knew Sallie was strong-willed. She’d keep a-goin’ as she had said when Winnie died. That damned bastard had given that young tart a child a full month before he visited them in Charleston that one time. Little Evan was on the way when he left. That’s what hurt the most. They would never have had to leave her house in Charleston! Her anger rose up into her throat and her face felt hot, but she heard Sallie coming out of her bedroom and turned back to the stove.

“How is the little one getting on?” she asked.

8

The judge granting the divorce said it was customary for divorcees to be prohibited from remarrying for a year. Wallace knew Mr. Corcoran, Molly's dad, wouldn’t like that. He’d show the old man the divorce papers when he got them, rather than telling them now. After all, how could he remember details at a time like that?

He and Molly would get married all right, first thing they could. He’d start now taking care of the baby and Molly, since he was out of Sallie’s life altogether. It'd be wrong not to, wouldn't it? He wasn't that kind of a man, was he? Maybe she could go to Ft. Worth to have the baby. No one would have to know. He felt another thrust of regret, was it shame? Think about Molly, he told himself.

Could they name Molly's baby “Wallace junior”? he wondered.

9

Well, at least Wallace and that low-life girl had left Dallas by then, two years after the divorce. They had eloped to Ft. Worth, it said in the newspaper at the time, and now they had gone off somewhere North. Her mother and the boys were doing okay. She had a pretty good job in that big store downtown. She could even walk to work each morning.

She was on her way now, in fact, striding purposefully through the heat and damp air. They could start rebuilding their life together. She could count on Mama, couldn’t she? They had a decent, affordable apartment on Plum Street. The boys could help out in a few years… Lots of boys had part-time work by the time they were six. She'd talk with Marybeth next time she stopped in at the ladies’ garments. Marybeth worked at the Evening News. They had boys… Newt would be six next year.

Soon, she told herself, I won’t worry about running into that Wallace out here on the street. Thinking of his name made her burn...

10

Mama Betty knew everyone. When she told you that family who lived in the modest, well-kept house across Plum Street was a good family, and the father owned a good business, you could count on that. Somebody in the rooming house would know. Sometimes, when Sallie was walking by the house on her way to work, a young man would nod to her as he came out of the house. After a while he started saying,“Good morning.” She nodded, and later she smiled a little.

Eventually he introduced himself. Jack Davis was his name (as Betty had said before). His father Abe Davis ran a well-known tool and die shop down by the railroad line, four blocks away. Sallie wondered if that was where Jack was headed, even though she had to walk almost in the opposite direction and he accompanied her most of the way.

This was four years after that bum Wallace had walked out. She didn’t think of him much nowadays, and never wondered anymore if she might run into him on the streets. She started to wonder, though, if she might run into Jack Davis.

He liked children, he said. And in a year, Sallie became Mrs. Sallie (Sarah, actually) Decker Davis. At Sallie’s request, after the ceremony in Ft. Worth, he moved in with Betty and the boys, there on Plum Street across from his dad's house.

11

By the time Newt was eight and Evan almost five, a year after they had gotten a new Daddy, they were already becoming the best team of newsboys in downtown Dallas. Evan had the spot outside the door where his Mom Sallie worked, but he didn’t pay any attention. He liked calling out, “Paper. Get your paper here!” and exchanging a few words with the men in the suits who gave him a coin or two when he offered them a paper. He put the Evening News’s money in the canvas belt they'd issued to him, and he put his own tips in his pants pocket. Newt had always done it that way, so Evan did too.

The wagon brought the boys one edition of the paper at noon. Newt called it “the bulldog.” Then around four o'clock, the next edition was delivered. The boys spent the time in-between in the grand public library down the street. Newt, Evan marveled, could shout out the words in the big print, although sometimes he forgot and said the Bulldog words instead of the later-edition ones. Not often, Evan admitted to himself, but he could still tease his big brother, couldn’t he?

In the library Evan mainly spent his time looking at the pictures in the children’s section. He made up stories to fit the pictures. Sometimes, quietly over in a deserted corner, Newt would read one of those books to Evan. He didn’t know all the words but he did pretty well.

Newt got to go to school in the mornings. Evan stayed with Gramma until 11:30.

Mom would walk home with them around six-thirty, and after supper they would compare the money in their pants pockets. Newt always had a lot more.

12

I’m sorry, Gramma Betty said to herself as she swept up, but that man Jack's going downhill. It’s Sallie’s lookout but it affects us all. The boys see it, I know. They look so glum now when they come in for supper. They used to be teasing each other and laughing, so glad to be home. They would run over to their Gramma and give her a big hug.

Now, especially when their Mom was with them, so tired from being on her feet all day, everyone was quiet, not so affectionate anymore.

And that Davis man was the reason. Gramma Betty thought he might have started drinking.

Four years after the wedding, over there in Ft. Worth, it had really gotten bad. Jack Davis quarreled with the boys all the time, over things that didn’t matter, like where they left their jackets, or their books. Sallie tried to defend them. Betty herself pitched in. But he was getting worse, not better. Was he drinking while he was out?

It was good when he was away – they could be a real family again – but when he came back, he always seemed to be looking for a fight. It seemed as though Sallie was not getting the invitation to go across the street with her in-laws as often as before either. When Betty would ask about them, Davis didn’t seem interested.

Maybe the elder Davises were having trouble with him too, and they didn’t want to spend much time together. That was another bad sign.

The arguments with Sallie got worse. Everyone – Gramma Betty, both boys – everyone could hear them quarreling in their bedroom. Almost every night. How could anyone get relaxed enough for bed with that going on? It hurt the boys most of all.

Finally, he hit Sallie. She ordered him out and threw his jacket and hat down the stairs. Betty packed up his things the next morning and took them over to his mother. Old Mrs. Davis wasn’t angry. She didn’t look happy, of course. Who would?

The divorce papers – six years after the marriage – granted Sallie Decker Davis's petition, on the grounds of “cruel treatment.”

By the time Newt was fifteen and Evan thirteen, three years after that bad Daddy Jack Davis had moved back in with his parents, their beloved Gramma passed away. She hadn’t been herself in the last year or so, gradually losing her short-term memory. She'd remained the same tough and loving Mama and Gramma she’d always been. But by the end she could not recall the boys’ names, and she didn’t know exactly who Sallie was. A sister maybe…?

Afterwards, Sallie had bought a little house on Royal Circle in a different part of town, and she got work in a real fancy department store only five or six blocks away. The boys kept their afternoon newspaper sales territories. One of the ladies at the Evening Edition, Marybeth, kind of looked after them after school. And then, they’d added evening paper routes to all the houses and boarding houses along the way between the big boulevard and the streets there and the railroad tracks four blocks on the other side of their own neat little house on Royal Circle.

Their Mom’s new girlfriend, Billie Mae, who lived in the front bedroom, would usually be helping out in the kitchen when the boys got home for supper. They were like sisters in only a few months. Billie Mae worked downtown too, as a secretary. She was seeing someone she called "I. O."

Their mother was almost her old self again. They all missed Gramma, but Mom seemed happy and energetic again. With a little help from Billie Mae, she took good care of them herself now….

14

And then, she died. Sarah (Sallie) Williamson Decker Davis was gone.

The biggest outbreak of the 1918 Flu in Dallas and Ft. Worth had come in the spring, but Sallie wasn't hit till the end of December, ten months after her mother Betty had died. Sallie wasn't yet 40. It wasn’t any use sending her to a clinic or a hospital, as Billie Mae told the boys when she came in to take care of their mother as best she could. The hospitals were still over-crowded, with doctors and nurses having been taken off themselves. And so many folks were still dying.

Billie Mae was married now and lived across the street with her husband Mr. Forrester (she called him "I. O.").

The boys were scared. But when Sallie was not sleeping or having a bad episode of fever, she seemed sure she could survive. Look what she’d lived through up to now, she must have thought. Billie Mae told her not to worry about the boys or the house, but just work on getting well.

But then, on December 26, she was gone, like so many others. A doctor or somebody else they didn’t know came by. It fell to Newt – who was only sixteen – to sign the death certificate. It said the cause of death was pneumonia. Evan looked it over and wondered about… lots of things.

15

They boys didn't stop going to school and selling the newspapers. They fixed their own meals, after Billie Mae got them started. It turned out that Billie Mae’s husband Irv Oscar Forrester (or I. O.) had told a judge he would act as the boys’ guardian. Their Mom Sallie had bought some life insurance when she closed the deal on the Royal Circle house, which helped pay off the mortgage.

With I. O.’s help they fixed up the garage with one apartment for themselves upstairs and another downstairs to rent out. They rented the house to a family, so they were actually able to start saving for college. An old bachelor reporter at the Evening News took the downstairs apartment.

They never saw their father, Wallace Decker, never heard from him. The bank with their savings in it crashed in 1919, so they lost everything. Newt worked full-time at the Evening News as Evan finished his last two years of high school, and in 1921, they were able to sell the house and go off to Texas A & M together. To make ends meet, both of them had two, and sometimes three, part-time jobs while in school.

They realized they’d learned a lot from Gramma Betty and their Mom Sallie. They thought they could manage.

***

Poem: Raking Leaves

***

I

The wind’s
Always blowing
The wrong way

II

And they are
Aren’t they
After all
Pretty good
Mulch?

***

Reminiscence: Child Health Problems

***

1

Was I a sickly child? I think so. I believe my mother thought so too, based on how she looked after me in the later years, in periods of which my memories now are sharper than of the earlier times. For example, I don’t remember much about having asthma as a toddler, but I do recollect that episode’s being recalled to me enough times later. “You don’t want to make your asthma come back, you know, ‘Byron’.” And that kind of thing.

And I also remember my sister’s getting the chicken pox, and then my getting them, and the two of us both at home all day. Soon, we had the measles. I think she got well after a fairly short time, but while I was still weakly recovering from this run of bad luck, I came down with a chest flu… which eventually developed into pneumonia. More on that later.

Our children’s doctor was Dr. M--------, not to be confused with my parents’ doctor who went by the nickname “Dr. Happy.” (It seemed appropriate.) All of this was in the late 1940s and the 1950s.

To a little boy, Dr. M-------- seemed a big man, even taller and rounder than my Dad, who was 6 feet tall and weighed about 175 pounds. Dr. M-------- had a hearty manner and talked what seemed loud to me. Mother and Dad had a lot of confidence in him, and remarked that he was right on top of all the new developments. I have thought later, for instance, that he might have been one of the first generation of family doctors and pediatricians who never made house calls.

Mother would have to drag me out of my nice, comfy, warm bed, stuff me into itchy and too-warm clothes, help me stagger down the stairs and climb stiffly into the family car, before driving me down to the shady-lawned, pleasant new office that looked like a house and was in a residential neighborhood… and then cuddle me and talk sweetly to me – amid the soft gurgle of the aquarium - until Dr. M-------- was able to squeeze me in between two of his scheduled appointments. There always seemed to be several Moms and children awaiting their turn.

When we were all done and getting up to leave, Dr. M-------- always held out a candy cane to “such a good patient.” Then when I would reach for it, he would abruptly shift it just enough to one side so I couldn’t touch it. After I’d make another stab at it, he would laugh cheerily and give it to me: “There you go, sport,” he would say. I guess my Mother let me keep the candy, but I don’t recall eating it.

2

Central Texas is well-known as a center of pollen allergies, and that certainly applied to me. I suppose that was the cause of the asthma troubles early on, and “hay fever” symptoms dogged me all through childhood right up until college, when I wasn’t even in Texas anymore. Many were the bottles of brown glass from which I had teaspoonfuls of red, sweet Benadryl. Boy, did I feel sluggish and sleepy then, but the worst of the sneezing, sniffling, and itchy eyes did seem to be much better. Many too were the times when Mother would drive me to visit the aquarium and the other Moms and sick children so that Dr. M-------- could give me a shot in the bottom.

When I had my pants down and was bending over a little chair, Dr. M-------- always followed the same routine. He’d say, “Now I want you to tell me when I give you this shot.” I’d get ready. Then he would slap my poor little behind and plunge the needle in. When he would pull the needle out and wipe the spot with a cotton ball with alcohol in it, he would say, “See? I told you you wouldn’t be able to feel it!”

He was very disappointed when I would say, “Now!” just as he stuck me. I knew after one or two little visits like this that as soon as he slapped my bottom he was going to strike, so even though I certainly did not feel the needle, I timed my cry perfectly every time. As a reward for getting it right, guess what? I got a candy cane! Dr. M-------- seemed impressed when instead of reaching for the candy cane, so that he could snatch it away from my grasp, I would reach for his hand and take the candy with my other hand. How dumb did he think I was? I wondered. After all, I had dozens of shots like this over the years. His routine never varied.

3

One day Mother picked me up at school. My older sister was already in the car, picked up at her school. This was in the 1950s. We went to Dr. M--------’s office I think four days in a row. First she would go in, and then when she came out I would go in. In other visits when both of us went to the doctor, we both went in together. So right away we knew this was special.

When she came out, my sister’s eyes were red as though she had been crying. That was sufficiently scary. In an office with a gurney, where I had not been before, the nurse explained that we were starting a new treatment that would prevent my getting sick so much, with all that sneezing and itchy eyes. I was thinking at that moment that maybe the slaps on my bottom weren’t so bad…

I got up on the gurney and lay flat on my back. A small cushion was placed under my shoulders so that my neck could be tilted back. The room seemed a little cool. I remember it now as being sort of dark too, but that may be because I had my eyes shut… tight.

With Mother holding my hand, the nurse and for a brief part of the visit Dr. M-------- (uncharacteristically soft-spoken, I thought), they explained sympathetically that I was going to get a special, new treatment, the very latest thing for a little boy with my allergies. It would take a few minutes, while I would need to lie there very still until the treatment was over. I should keep my eyes shut too.

It was called a radium treatment. When I was properly positioned and had my eyes sufficiently closed (that part was no problem), something thin and cold was inserted up my nose, it seemed like a foot or more, in any case farther than I had thought my nose went! Then I had to just lie there, very still, breathing through my mouth until after what must have actually been three to five minutes – not the eternity I thought it was – when the long needle-like rod was slowly removed.

I was surprised that it didn’t hurt. But boy, was it obnoxious. Waiting outside for the third and especially the fourth of those treatments was even worse than the treatment itself.

No candy either. I didn’t mind. At least it was over.

I know now that the purpose of this treatment was to shrink the adenoids, which were thought to play an important role in sinus trouble and hay fever symptoms. And I did seem somewhat better afterwards. And unlike many of us who had the radioactive radium treatment as children, thank goodness I have never had any hint of thyroid cancer.

4

At Boy Scout camp one summer, I was exposed to polio.

In my generation children were still vulnerable to polio, and we all knew that the best outcome of really having polio would be some kind of paralysis. You’d have to walk with crutches and braces. And you might have to spend the rest of your life in a big old tube, an “iron lung,” that breathed for you. We knew all this and didn’t talk of it, tried not to think of it, and did not actually think about it very often.

It had been hard for me to adjust to Boy Scout Camp. I had trouble sleeping that first night on my top bunk in a big tent with five other boys, but I was really enjoying the knot-tying, the lanyard-making, the search for arrow heads, and the lessons about the various kinds of tree leaves all around the campground. And then, it was all interrupted and suddenly we were going back home. I was taken right to a special doctor – could it have been Dr. Happy himself? – for a really big shot, in a really big needle. It was something called gamma-globulin, and they had to figure the dosage very carefully based on my exact current weight.

We heard that one of the other boys in the camp had been diagnosed with polio, not someone I knew. We never knew what happened to him.

I do remember that one boy whom I did know well from school, a popular guy who was really good at football and baseball, came down with polio. He was said to be scared; who wouldn’t be? But after a time, they said he was all right. I don’t know or recall whether the diagnosis had been wrong or if he had just managed to throw it off, but he wasn’t the only one who was scared during that time. I remember that.

5

But my sharpest memory of health issues in my childhood goes back to that bout with pneumonia. It remains clear and distinct in my mind, as though it just happened.

This was when I was four, I am pretty sure. My bedroom was at the top of the stairs, just a little to the left. I slept in an apparatus which at one time had been my baby bed, a white iron contraption that was designed to "grow up" with the youngster until he or she was just too big to fit.

In other words, it was high off the floor like a baby bed and at one time had had a fence all around it high enough to keep the baby inside. You could unlatch the one side of it and swing it down to pick up the infant rather than having to reach down in and lift him (me) out all the way up to what have been shoulder high for my little Mother to get me out. The fence had been taken off, all the way around so that it was by then just like a real bed except for being rather high off the floor and kind of small.

When I was sick that time, my little bed was positioned just to the left of the doorway, with my head and pillow nearest the back wall and my feet toward the doorway and the stairs.

What I remember so clearly was late in the afternoon of one long day when I had been feeling rotten. Headache, fever, sleepiness (probably drugged), and worst of all, subject to sharp, stabbing pains in my chest whenever I moved… at all, even when I tried to talk... or whisper.

I had been asleep, again, late that afternoon, lying on my side with my face toward the window on the side wall and my back toward the center of the room, which was fairly large and open. I heard a familiar sound. It was my Dad. He had just gotten home from work, coming through the kitchen door alongside the house, greeting Mother making supper, trudging across the dining room below mine, ready to start up the stairs.

I knew he was worried about me, and I loved my Dad. He was going to stump, step by step, up the stairs and proceed into my room where it would look like I was sleeping, with my back to him. Dad was the kind of person who might touch your arm when he was talking with you, or would put his hand on the shoulder of his little boy when standing next to him, or even tousle his hair affectionately.

In other words, I knew that he was going to put his big, warm hand on my shoulder or my head as I lay there… to communicate his love and his concern, maybe even without waking me up.

And I knew that when he did, my whole little body would be wracked with an awful, piercing pain.

To be honest, what I remember is not his actually doing this and my agony as a result. What I remember so clearly is being torn between my wish to be loved at that painful time and my fear of the sharp stab of that awful pneumonia pain.

I'm not even sure that, if I had felt sure I could speak without sparking the pains, I would have told Dad not to touch me. I wanted him to touch my back and the back of my head... And I also wanted to be free of pain.

It's funny what you remember and what you don't, isn't it?

***

Humor

***

1

A few years ago, the Boston Red Sox were winning all season long, and their greatest rivals, the New York Yankees, were not winning, and this is what you heard:

“The New York Yankees need to take lessons from the Boston Red Sox, on how to be gracious losers …

…because they have had so much more experience at it!

2

Bob and Marie were one of three couples meeting with the pastor to learn more about joining the congregation. The minister said: “You will be able to join our church if you can demonstrate your self-discipline by remaining pure and chaste for three weeks.” The couples would meet every week to tell the minister whether or not they had succeeded in refraining from sex.

After two weeks, all couples had been successful and were making good progress toward joining the church. At the third meeting one couple reported that they had refrained from sex during the final week, and the minister welcomed them into the congregation. The same was true for the second couple. Then it was Bob’s time to report. He said that one evening Marie had bent down to pick up a can of peas and he had been overcome by desire; they’d had furious sex right there on the floor.

The minister seemed sympathetic, but he said sadly that, since they had failed to restrain their desire, they were no longer welcome at his church.

Marie replied: “And we aren’t welcome at the supermarket anymore either!”

3

A big man from a great state in the Southwest was touring the Harvard campus. He happened upon an undergraduate, took off his Stetson, and said: “Please, sir. Where’s the Library at?”

The undergraduate look startled, and replied: “Sir, you have ended your sentence with a preposition!”

So the big man said, “Well, then, uh… Where’s the Library at, you jackass?!”

4

A man who had survived the Great Coal Mine Flood of 1959 loved to tell the story, longer and in greater detail every time he told it, of how he had floated down the river until he managed to grab an overhanging tree branch where he hung on for two hours (or was it two days?) until help eventually arrived.

When this man finally died and appeared at the Pearly Gates, St. Peter welcomed him and said that all new arrivals were granted one special request as they started their new life of heavenly bliss. What did he want?

Well, after thinking it over carefully, he said he wanted St. Peter to call all the angels together so that he could tell them the great story of how he had survived the flood. Peter went to work and assembled all the heavenly multitudes together on a great cloud hillside, with a big stage and podium all set up for the story.

Just before he led the man to the holy microphone, Peter whispered: “Noah is in the audience.”

***

Pride, Revenge, and Honor (essay)

***

1

The Declaration of Independence, our great national treasure, concludes with this statement: “for the support of this declaration … we mutually pledge … our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, of course John Hancock, and the other signers actually meant this; it’s not just great rhetoric, a fitting conclusion to a significant statement, but a meaningful and personal commitment made with full knowledge that all of them, each of them, might indeed be called upon to forfeit all their property, their very lives, and, as they said, their “sacred honor.”

This last phrase is not one we use in ordinary discourse today (although it has recently been the theme of a demonstration in Washington [Oct 30, 2010]). We know very well what we might mean if we were to pledge to some cause everything we own, our fortunes; we understand too what promising to give our lives for a cause – if necessary – would be. But exactly what would it mean to pledge our honor, our sacred honor at that? What would that have meant to the signers of the Declaration of Independence?

We also understand that our property is not sacred. Even our lives are not what you could call “sacred.” So what would be our individual, our personal “honor” that could legitimately be described as “sacred”?

2

Perhaps many of us are not in a good position to say what a claim of sacredness would mean, so let us leave that part of the discussion aside. What about “honor,” though?

When we hear, “Labor Day was established to honor working men and women,” and when we read, “Honor thy father and mother,” we know what those sentences mean. To “honor” someone or something is to publically show our deep respect.

The Boy Scout oath says: “On my honor, I will do my best …”. And when we have made a promise to someone else, we would understand as correct a claim that we are “honor-bound” to keep that promise. We would also have a pretty good idea what it would mean to describe an individual’s behavior as “dishonorable” or a man or woman as an “honorable” person. We may even have sworn at some time in school to obey by an “honor system” like the military academies.

These common uses of the concept of honor have to do with responsibility to others and trustworthiness. But in 1776 the signers apparently meant more than merely that they would keep their word to give their fortunes and – if they had to – their lives for the cause of independence from Great Britain. In other words, that final phrase could not simply have meant: “and when we say we are pledged, we really mean it,” could it? Honor in the conclusion of the Declaration seems to refer to something just as real to them as their fortunes and their lives.

The concept of honor, as used in the Declaration, is related both to a sense of responsibility and to a public avowal of respect, and one’s honor was as real and concrete in that period and culture as one’s life and property.

3

Revenge is easier for us to define. If someone harms you, you may feel justified in seeking to punish that person by harming her or him in return. “An eye for an eye” is a statement in support of revenge as an ethic.

If you pursue harm to someone who has harmed you, you do so because you feel “you owe it to yourself” to do so. Also, revenge is sought in order to demonstrate to the public that a person or a group may not get away with hurting you without being punished for that offense.

If we think about it, we can see that the concept of honor is relevant to the concept of revenge. Honor has to do with what one justly owes to oneself. And one’s honor has a very real public dimension; it has to do with what you think of yourself and what you expect others to think of you. What we hear of in other parts of the world as “honor killings” seems to fit in here in some way.

Many of us today feel that pursuing revenge is unworthy of “good people.” We might say that for many today, seeking revenge is, ironically, dishonorable.

When an impersonal system of social justice replaced a revenge-based culture in ancient Greece – as played out in Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy – this was recognized as a major step in the progress of civilization. For Christians, who take the New Testament seriously, replacing “an eye for an eye” with “turn the other cheek” was seen as a significant moral advance. We feel superior to the many-generation feud in the hills of Kentucky and West Virginia between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

Today, we would even criticize an individual that has been robbed who seeks revenge by beating up the robber. We would say it is wrong “to take the law into one’s own hands” in such a case, and even more so in the case of an anti-abortionist who murders an abortion doctor. Revenge is an ignoble motive for us and may even be against our laws.

Revenge is a form of justice, and a person may in fact feel avenged when the robber who stole from him or her is sent to jail through a society’s justice system. Even though we all seek justice, we denigrate pursuit of personal revenge, because revenge is a crude form of justice based only on force and not on law.

4

We have seen that revenge has to do with what one owes to oneself and honor has a significant public dimension. Pride seems to be involved in both one’s attempt to defend one’s honor as well as in one’s felt need for personal revenge if harm is done to him or to his group.

Your pride is threatened by a personal affront such as theft of your goods. Your pride may be restored by an act of revenge.

Your pride leads you to stand up for yourself when your goods, person, family, or values are attacked or injured, reinforcing your sense of self-worth and your honor.

Pride is stronger than mere self-esteem and, in the sense we are using the term here, is very different from personal vanity. Pride can be a strong motivating force in one’s life, as an individual pursues pride in her or his accomplishments or celebrates the status and strength of a group with which one feels identified.

It is this group identification that apparently links pride to the other key elements of a system of honor, although there are many other ways in which one’s pride may be a potent force outside the scope of this rumination.

5

We learn from historians and sociologists that when there is no reliable system of law, which makes it impossible to look to society as a whole to insure that justice is done, then the individual feels it necessary to look to his or her own action to maintain justice. In fact, a system of honor is sometimes contrasted with a system of laws.

A system of honor grows up in situations in which there is no dependable external force maintaining order, no policing or military force whose legitimacy or power one is willing to recognize. It is loyalty to one’s sense of self, to an extended family or clan, to a tribe, a social class, a religious sect, or a particular culture that drives one’s pursuit of honor, justice or revenge, and pride.

When America was still beginning to develop as a society, in the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries, since individuals seem to have felt that the systems of social order in place at that time were not always dependable, a rough justice was often established through dependence on people’s honor, as we can see in the fact that dueling - a personal defense of one's sacred honor - only very gradually declined in early nineteenth-century American culture. (The famous duel when Vice President Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton, one of our Founding Fathers, occurred in 1804.)

Today, we can see honor systems driving unempowered and impoverished peoples, from the Middle East to Los Angeles (and all the other cities with powerful gangs), from Congo to New Guinea. A gang member may murder someone who is considered to have “disrespected” that individual, in other words to have wounded his honor. But such a system – or code – was still strong enough to tie our late eighteenth-century patriots together as they undertook their most treacherous endeavor in 1776.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence were proud men seeking to establish a social system of just laws, bound to their cause by a real sense of their sacred honor.

***

Story: Goodbye to Friends

***

1

I've always said that when I retire, I could write a book called Best Friends I Have Fired. Even one would have been bad enough, but there have been several.

There was one time, for instance, when I had to ask a good friend to retire or be fired. He was experienced, exceptionally good at his job, well-known as an innovative and inspiring leader. He and his wife were friends of my wife Marie and me both... But he had violated our organization’s clear and unambiguous policy on sexual harassment. We were (are) tough on sex, and drugs too.

There had been rumors about Mark Shapiro for years. Even though I had never received any actual complaints, I had nonetheless spoken to him formally on several occasions over ten years or so, warning him that if I ever found the rumors to be true, he would have to go. And he understood. He was conspicuous enough and good enough that I thought there was just a chance that the rumors had been “fomented,” as he said, by others in the organization who were jealous of his success. I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

But in this final instance, when he saw the formal complaint, he admitted the offense. That was a tough time.

But I mainly wanted to talk about Mark’s replacement, Lou Reynolds. It seemed real important for our organization to find someone to replace Mark who was an experienced leader and a creative performer. (A woman would have been great, too, especially under the circumstances.) I had the sense that the organization would decline in public esteem and awareness if we had to settle for second-rate, which would harm our chances at continuing success overall.

We had many candidates, from all over the country. Most of them – including most of the women - were right out of college and totally unqualified. Some others had experience and good recommendations but had no background with an organization of comparable size or orientation, so clearly they were not right for us either. That left only a few for me to call for a chat (all of them men, by the way).

I was visiting out-of-town relatives as the search proceeded. At their dining table one day I tracked Lou Reynolds down on the ’phone. I had noticed as I punched in his number that early in his career, Lou had worked for the same folks as a long-time personal friend of mine had worked for years ago. After I had introduced myself and determined that it was a good time for a talk, I happened to ask Lou if he had ever known a fellow named Bill Howard.

“You mean William J. Howard the fourth?” he replied.

This was a really good start! I said to myself.

While my relatives were off grocery-shopping with my wife, Lou and I had a long, enjoyable, and interesting conversation. Even more clearly than his resume, what he told me about his background demonstrated that his experience was highly relevant to our needs. Our chat revealed further that he seemed to be looking to make a long-term commitment… which is also what we needed. He had a nice speaking voice and seemed like a pleasant person. So I invited him to join a list of two other candidates (less promising, though I didn’t let on to that) whom we would interview in person. Before hanging up, we had it all scheduled.

Three weeks later, everybody in the department acknowledged that all three of our finalists were qualified for the job but that Lou seemed to be the best of the bunch, so he was hired within a month of that first ’phone conversation at my relatives’ dining table.

2

Things started out well on the job too, at least from my perspective. (A few of my vice-presidents were withholding judgment.) Lou and his colleagues were working out of temporary quarters as their regular haunts got a major renovation. Lou was used to succeeding despite tough circumstances and didn’t miss a beat. He was a real “work as a team” kind of guy, and he got everybody to pitch right in.

The results were not revolutionary or startling, but they were fine, despite the temporary digs. Mark Shapiro had been a bit of a loner, maybe even a prima donna, so Lou brought a breath of fresh air into the equation, and within six weeks he had a real synergy going. (The vice-presidents, who tended to be more “top-down” folks, were still cautious, and the teamwork ambience Lou had established was not real tangible…)

When we hit our busy season, Lou and his team stepped right up and gave their customers and clients good value for their money. A few of our regulars indicated that Lou had been a good find.

Once the team was in their newly upgraded quarters, they began to work for a splashy opening. It was well-planned, well within the traditional nature of our organization, and it turned out fine. The v-p’s were not exactly impressed, but it did not escape their notice that Lou himself was a hit with new clients too. The word-of-mouth seemed to be all positive.

3

There followed five or six years of solid, if not spectacular results. Then, Lou seemed to go a little off his game. He had some health issues, even spent some time in the local hospital, where my wife and I dropped in on him one morning and had a pleasant conversation.

He was married to an Asian woman, called “Ellie,” also a professional, whom we had also gotten to know and like. We had socialized, just the four of us, a few times, and in the larger social gatherings that went with the nature of our business, the two wives often sought each other out to chat. (Lou and I were supposed to talk to prospects or dignitaries, not to our colleagues, or we probably have sought each other out too.)

Once, when I was coming back from lunch, I saw Lou apparently saying goodbye to a shabby-looking man in dirty jeans and an old denim jacket. When I asked him later, he said it was a town acquaintance who was a good guy but who had fallen on hard times. Lou had given him a little money to help pay his heating costs. I didn’t think much about it.

Lou’s program was still cooking along all right. When anyone saw him at work, as he was showing a client around, for example, he seemed his old affable and efficient self, but in-between such occasions he seemed to withdraw a bit from the ordinary give-and-take of the regular work week. I chalked it up to health problems, and as long as the results continued to look good, I left it at that.

I had long ago decoded we could trust Lou to help us move forward. But my trust turned out to be a little naïve.

One day when I happened to cross paths with Lou and asked him as usual how things were going, he said: “Not so good today… actually.”

“Oh no,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said with a kind of edge in his voice. We were on the sidewalk next to the staff parking lot. “My car was stolen and vandalized.” He shook his head, looking down.

I didn’t have to feign concern, and asked for more detail.

“Well, you know how I often come back to the office after dinner?”

We had talked about that, how it was the best time to get mindless paperwork done, but then unpredictably, some of the best brainwork got done that way too.

“I was here till almost midnight last night,” Lou went on, “And I stopped at the convenience store on the way home to get a candy bar. When I came out, the car was gone.”

“Ow!”

“Yeah, so the police had to get involved. And pretty soon, in fact, they found the car just a block or so away with the windshield busted out. That meant I had to spend even more time with the police. …But at least I finally could drive on home, and I already have a place putting in a new window.”

“What time did you get home?”

“About three. The whole g-d episode only lasted a couple of hours.”

I pressed for more details. “You didn’t have the car locked, I suppose.”

Lou looked down again and swore: “I left the damn thing running! Just going for a two-dollar snack, after all.” He looked up at me. “I guess it’s not such a good neighborhood, you know, that late.”

“Was anything taken?”

Lou was now really upset. “I had about two hundred dollars in the glove compartment. I don’t know why. No good reason.”

When I told Marie that night, she looked skeptical. “I don’t like the sound of that,” she said.

4

That was nothing to what she said about a year later when she saw Lou’s name in the newspaper.

At work, things had fallen back into the normal routine after the car incident. We were doing pretty well overall. Lou’s team was continuing to contribute. Lou himself was by now a favorite among the staff generally. He was modest, friendly, self-confident, and he liked a good joke too. He had a pleasant, bold voice and a friendly way of speaking.

So it was really something when Marie read, aloud to me at the breakfast table, a brief item from the police report: “Lou Reynolds of _____ (the little town ten miles away where Lou and Ellie lived), for assault.” Lou was said to have forcibly restrained Ellie, causing her injury.

When I got to the office that morning, Lou was waiting for me. His eyes were a little watery and irritated, but otherwise he seemed okay. “I need to tell you something,” he said, looking toward me but not directly at my face.

“I saw something in the paper,” I said as we sat down together. “I couldn’t believe it.”

“Joe,” he said, “I don’t know what happened. I just snapped. I became somebody else. This has never happened to me. The doctor said I probably needed anger management counseling.”

“So you were actually arrested?”

“Yes, I have to go to court tomorrow morning.”

“What exactly happened?” I asked.

“Ellie has been upset with me for a long time,” he said. “Maybe she’s right, but… She doesn’t like my giving Wendell money here and there, to help him get by. She doesn’t like him.” He looked up, “You met Wendell one time, didn’t you?”

“Well, I saw him anyway. That must have been close to a year ago.”

“He just can’t seem to get a break,” Lou said. “Anyway, we were arguing about that and Ellie was storming around. I took her by both arms and sat her down on a chair, hard, so I could talk for a change,” he may have been reliving that part. “She said I hurt her and called the police.”

“You were there when they came?” That surprised me.

“I started to leave, but I came back and waited for them. Ellie locked herself in the bathroom. I let the police in, actually.”

Lou told me later that week that Ellie had calmed down and the judge was requiring him to go to a counselor, right there in his little village.

5

Again, things returned to the routine. I had told Lou he had to keep me informed on how things were going in his private life, since there seemed to be potential there for public scandal. He told me that his counselor’s advice was promising, things were going pretty well with Ellie, he was feeling more himself than he had in a long while.

And then, the real problem began to surface.

Late one afternoon, I received a telephone call from a local police officer. She said she was off-duty and it was not exactly according to protocol that she was calling me, and she needed for me to keep the conversation confidential. I didn’t think we had anything to lose, so I said I would.

“Your organization means a lot to the community,” she said, “and I wouldn’t want your reputation to get harmed. So I’m calling just with a head’s-up for you. Okay?”

“Right, sure,” I said with some alarm. “I appreciate your calling.”

“It could be nothing, you understand. And I hope you won’t do anything, but I thought you should know that we have identified several individuals to be watching, for maybe dealing drugs.”

“Oh my god.” Now, I was concerned for real.

“Now it may be nothing, but one of your department heads has been observed coming and going from one of the residences we have under watch. Lou Reynolds. It’s a house on ________ street (naming a location not far from our place, near that convenience store). You know who I mean?”

“Lou is doing quite well with us,” I said cautiously.

“Well, it really could be nothing,” she said. “And I will really be in trouble if you say anything to him, you know. I just thought you might want to keep an eye on him.”

“I certainly will, but I won’t spook him, I promise. I appreciate the call.”

6

Lou can’t be doing drugs, can he? I asked myself more than once. My friend, good ol’ likeable, reliable Lou?

We often ran into each other in the parking lot before or after lunch. So it didn’t seem unnatural when I was just getting out of my car when Lou drove in a little before 1:00 the next day. (I had been waiting about 15 minutes, to be honest.)

We greeted each other, and I said, “So, Lou, how’s it going with that friend of yours you mentioned a while back? Wendell, was it?”

“Well, I doubt he’s just turned it all around, you know,” Lou did not seem on guard or any other way unnatural. “But for Ellie’s sake, I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

“Does he live pretty close to us here?” I asked as we walked along together.

“Yeah, that’s right. But I told him right from the beginning not to be hanging around the shop.”

“I appreciate that, Lou. Anyway, have a good day, okay?”

I realized then that I hadn’t asked the police officer how long ago was their last observation of Lou at the house in question. But it didn’t seem reasonable to think it was way back before he started getting counseling. Lou had probably just told me a lie, I thought. I didn’t want to believe it.

I called Lou later and asked him to stop by my office around 5:30. When he came in, I said, “I was just thinking when I saw you earlier, Lou, that I hadn’t asked you in a while now how’s it going with you and Ellie, or you and that counselor…”

“Oh, he told me to call him if I had any problems, but I was okay to go back to normal life,” he said smiling. “Ellie’s still mad at me for having spent that much of our money, and she’s right. But we’re fine now that that’s all settled.”

“You told me that you weren’t yourself on that awful night,” I said.

“I became someone I didn’t recognize,” he replied, shaking his head, “…and haven’t seen again since, thank God!”

“Lou, were you drinking that night or doing drugs?”

“No, no,” he said. “Nothing like that. It might have made more sense if I had. But no…”

“I hope you understand that I am asking as a friend who is concerned…” He nodded. “But I’ve also got my responsibilities here.”

“I know, Joe. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“We have to be very strict about drugs,” I went on. “I let people go whose involvement – ”

“I think that’s a good policy,” Lou said.

“ – affects their work,” I finished.

“Well, I don’t get into that stuff,” Lou said. He seemed to be telling me the absolute truth. Was that possible?

7

“Lou, I don’t want for there to be any doubt between us, so I want you to take a drug test." This was two days after the parking lot conversation. "You haven’t been doing marijuana or anything” (he nodded) “so that shouldn’t be any problem. But it would be good to have it behind us.”

He didn’t respond right away, looking interested but cautious.

I went on: “I’ve already had occasion to use an agency over at the hospital that will take a sample, absolutely confidential, you know. And then bill the company. You get the results at the same time I do, within about a week. They send it out of town somewhere to be analyzed.”

“I’ve got – we’ve got - visitors coming tomorrow,” he said simply.

“Well then, why not do it today? It only takes ten or fifteen minutes. Here’s the address and ’phone number. You want me to call right now and see if you could go right over?”

He took a deep breath, looked me in the eye, and said: “I guess so. Let’s get it out of the way.”

Two days passed and then one morning a doctor called. He was from the Occupational Therapy office where I’d sent Lou. “I thought I would call this time,” he said, “because the test was ambiguous. We need to reschedule.”

“Okay…” I said slowly. “Does this tell us anything in itself? Are the results often indefinite like this?”

“Uh well, no, not often. But they are once in a while…” he seemed a bit hesitant, unless I was imagining it.

So anyway I called Lou and said, trying to avoid overly explicit language: “You know that errand you ran for me on Tuesday? Well, it needs to be done again. Indefinite results, nothing to worry about. Can you reschedule today or tomorrow?”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, not really cheerfully.

Then after work that day he dropped in. “I didn’t mean to seem uncooperative this morning. It’s just that, well, that waiting room was pretty full that first time and after I waited a few minutes, they just called out in a loud voice: ‘Lou Reynolds!’” He said it real loud, like an emcee introducing the star.

“Oh, crap,” I said, understanding Lou's desire to remain anonymous. Then I added: “You know, they actually do occupational therapy there too…”

“I just asked them, This time would they just say, ‘Lou.’?”

“Ah, well I’m sorry it had to be redone.”

He showed me the spot on his neck in back where they had taken a little sample for the hair follicle test.

8

The next time Lou and I got together, it was about four days later.

“Thanks for coming over, Lou,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, fine. I think we’re perking along all right.”

“Good. Well, I got a call this morning, Lou. It’s important.” I paused and then went on. “Your test results were positive. For cocaine.”

“What!” he burst out. “That can’t be; they must have mixed my sample up with someone else’s. It just couldn’t be. I haven’t ever taken cocaine. Never seen any. I don’t get it, I don’t believe it.”

“I know,” I said. “I know, but we can’t just ignore it.”

“Joe, look,” he looked me over earnestly. “This is me. You know me. I’m telling you. It’s got to be a mistake.”

“Lou,” I said, then after a minute, “I’m going to ignore these results, see? They didn’t happen, all right?” He was confused. “You’re going to have to prove yourself to me, though, you understand?”

“Yes…” he said cautiously.

“I want to give you the benefit of the doubt. See? Thanksgiving is in three days. You’re going to make an appointment now for Monday morning. If you’re not clean, I don’t know what can be done.”

We shook hands before he left.

I wondered if the first test had been ambiguous because he had drunk a lot of water, trying to flush out his system, or maybe he had taken one of those detox things they sold at the vitamin store. I couldn't help wondering, but I didn't ask the Occupational Therapy folks... probably, I can see now, because I didn't want to know.

9

“Now, Lou,” I said following the script I had thought out in my mind over the weekend. “You have been doing drugs, haven’t you? You’ve been lying to me, haven’t you?” Then I waited. I wasn’t angry. Firm, sure, disappointed.

I kept waiting. We were in my office Monday before work, before the next test appointment. My door was closed, and the shade on it was pulled down.

After a very long minute, he teared up. His hands were shaky, and I barely heard him say, shaking his head, “Yes. I’m sorry. I’ve lost control. I don’t know what to do.”

“Wendell is your source?”

He nodded. “Ellie doesn’t know I’m still leaning on him. Now and then, Joe, not very often. Only now and then.”

“Once is enough, as far as I’m concerned.” The truth is, I couldn’t believe him even if I wanted to.

He was shaking his head, looking at his hands on the table between us.

“You know our Employee Handbook is real clear on this - ”

“Do you want me to resign?”

“ - It says that anyone who comes forward and says he has a problem with illegal drugs and wants help will be given a chance. That’s what it says.” His look indicated he didn’t know where I was going.

“I’m going to interpret your coming in today as your admission that you need help.” He was still confused. “You’re asking for our help, see?”

“You’re going on rehab now, today, taking a six-week leave of absence. I’ve made arrangements for a place for you over in ______ (a small city 20 miles in the opposite direction from his little village). Unless you want a residential program. That would be half at your expense.” He seemed a little uncomfortable. “Thompson will be appointed as interim head of the department with me directly supervising.” He still did not respond.

Then, “I want to go back to my counselor at home,” he said quietly.

“You can go to him too if you want, but I’m saying you’re going to be evaluated for substance abuse over there today. Then, you will do what they tell you.”

He sat back but remained silent.

“It will most likely be daily sessions,” I told him, “maybe random drug tests. Do you see?”

He abruptly leaned forward and faced me: “Joe, I’m sorry I lied to you.”

“Well, you should be… But let’s get you back in form. If anyone can do it, you can.”

Then I added quietly: “I appreciate your telling me the truth today.” We shook hands again before he left.

10

Tuesday afternoon after Thanksgiving, I called the counseling service. Yes, Lou had met with them the day before and had extensive diagnostic exercises and tests. He had come for his first group meeting earlier that afternoon. He looked like a good candidate for progress. But he did need the program.

I reached Lou at home late that afternoon. He said he was doing okay and asked how the staff had received the news about his leave of absence.

“I told everyone that you had to take six weeks leave for health reasons. There were no questions about it. Everyone sends you their good wishes.”

Lou said two or three had already called to wish him well, and some flowers had just arrived.

I told him that when he came back, of course, there would have to be some drug tests and after he was cleared to return, the tests would be when I said, randomly, and he would have to go in right away whenever I called.

He just said, “Okay.”

“I’m going to send you a contract for you to sign, so we can get you back to work,” I said, “when you’re ready, okay?” He agreed.

And the reports I got from the rehab program continued routine for over two weeks. Lou called to say he had missed a group meeting; the other men in that group were all ex-cons and like that, so he had made arrangements to move to a different group, made up of professional men. I told the service I would have hoped they would have alerted me to this sort of change. They seemed to understand but did not apologize.

On the Monday morning when Lou was due to report back to work, there he was waiting for me to get in.

“You’ll be getting another bill from Occupational Therapy,” he said cheerily. “I went on in for the first test Friday.” He seemed proud of himself.

“Hey, good,” I said. “You ready to go back to work?”

That test report was negative, in other words good, so first thing the next Monday I called Lou to say I was making my first random call. The Office would expect him at 1 p.m. He said fine. That report too turned out to be good.

And so it went, things apparently back to normal, punctuated by a random call from me now and then. Once, after having Lou go in for a test on Friday, on Monday I told him he had to go in again. He resisted a little, saying he had work stacking up, but he went.

Then, on Tuesday, I got a call from the rehab agency. Lou had now missed two of his regular group meetings. The counselor seemed very solemn. “I think he has some serious problems, sir,” he said. “We may have to ask him to leave the follow-up program.”

Lou himself dropped in on his way home for dinner that night. He said he and his counselor had had a big argument the day before, and he had asked to have someone else assigned to his case. I asked him what the trouble was and he said it was just a personality clash. This man was the leader of the other group, the one Lou had left, so Lou was trying to get moved over to the fellow who was running the professionals group, which had turned out to be better for him.

“Are you going weekly now, is it?” I asked, “or more often than that?”

“Tuesday nights,” he said. “I’m hoping I can start going only to the one-on-one, weekly, with this second guy. He’s been out of town.”

But Thursday I got another call, from the doctor at Occupational Therapy. “I thought I ought to warn you, Mr. Martinson,” he said. “The second test results are in the mail to you and Mr. Reynolds. They were positive for cocaine.” He paused. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to think.

He went on: “I’m afraid there is no ambiguity. He had used cocaine within 48 hours before the last test.”

In other words, after he was tested on Friday, he thought he was free to get high for a certain period. Having to go in again on Monday tripped him up.

11

“Lou,” I told him an hour later. “You’ve had a melt-down. You’ve been missing your rehab follow-ups, and you’ve apparently done cocaine again as recently as last weekend… Haven’t you?”

“Yes,” he winced and looked away. “Wendell happened to see me one night and…” He shook his head. “It was only the once, I swear.”

“I’m sorry, Lou.”

In a very quiet voice, most unlike him, Lou said, “I asked you before if you wanted me to resign…”

I couldn’t help taking a deeper breath than usual, trying to stay businesslike.

“Here is a letter for you to sign, Lou,” I said. “Maybe you’d better just not come in tomorrow, until the others leave and you can clean out your office then.”

He signed the resignation letter. We stood up and shook hands, for the last time.

12

When I called him at home the next week, Lou said he and Ellie would be moving back to the Midwest where they had lived and worked fifteen years or so before. Ellie had a sister there, a nurse as it turned out. So we said Goodbye.

Looking back, I can see I was what they call an enabler. But I don’t regret giving Lou every chance. I can’t help thinking he’ll get it together now, somehow, back out in the Midwest. But I don’t expect I’ll ever know.


***

Wise Sayings 3 from Ron Lucius

***




Don't stand on what you are trying to lift.


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Use your head, not their headlines.


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Supplant corporate greed

With social responsibility.

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Not trying is the same as failing.


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Less is less.


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……………………………………………………………………Ron Lucius


***

The California Decision and Political Correctness (essay)

***

1

“Something is terribly… terribly wrong, when one person can take away your civil right to vote!” I heard an elected official from California express that outrage recently, protesting the federal judge’s ruling that the Proposition 8 banning gay marriage in California is unconstitutional.

This was a federal official speaking recently, a Republican Senator or Representative. His lack of understanding of the Constitution is shocking. Yes, the voters of California have the constitutional right to vote on how laws are made in their state, and in that state the right to legislate by referendum has been legally established. The Californians who voted in Proposition 8, of course, also had the constitutional right to approve a law reserving marriage for only one man to one woman.

But the federal judge who said that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional had not only a constitutional right but in fact a constitutional responsibility to determine whether or not this new law should be implemented. Once the law suit was brought to him by parties with a legitimate claim that the law would harm them, he had to decide whether or not the law was in sync with the federal Constitution, and he found it was not.

The same was true in 1954 when the U. S. Supreme Court determined that state laws supporting racially segregated public schools violated federal civil rights law and thus were unconstitutional and could no longer be enforced. The Justices had the responsibility to rule one way or the other on this matter, and the case went beyond the decision of the first federal judge – one man – only because the party losing the lawsuit in his court appealed to the higher court.

In other words, in this landmark case fifty years ago, one man was absolutely right – not “terribly wrong” – to make his judgment on a civil rights matter, and the judge in the recent California case was right too. This will continue to have been true if an appeal of this decision on Proposition 8 should be overturned on appeal at some point in the future.

So, it is right for one person to overrule state legislation that in the judge’s view violates federal law. Whether one disagrees with the California judge’s ruling or not, it is wrong or even terribly wrong, for a U. S. Representative or Senator to so mislead the public about the constitutionally mandated processes of our government.

2

I also recently heard a report that when President Obama supported the right of a group of pacifist Muslims to build an Islamic Community Center near the site of 9/11’s ground zero, in which a commentator laughingly said the President “had succumbed to ‘political correctness.’”

At the moment I can think of only one reason that so-called “political correctness” has ever been sought: particular words and phrases, according to the principle of political correctness, are to be avoided in order to support certain citizens’ civil rights, to avoid illegal discrimination against designated groups of Americans.

One familiar example of political correctness is the expectation that no one (at least who is not black) will refer to African-Americans using the infamous N-word. Is it “succumbing to” political correctness to expect of ourselves and others that we will avoid using that belittling and offensive word?

Saying “mailman” to refer to a woman who delivers the mail to your house is another, somewhat less significant example of a violation of “political correctness.” Saying “mail carrier” is just as simple and easy as using "mailman", and "carrier" avoids gender discrimination. Does expecting of ourselves that change of long habit mean that we have fallen victim to some disease, as the term “succumbed” implies?

Saying “he or she” instead of simply “he” in either speech or writing when the person referred to is either female or male, as political correctness recommends, is not necessarily as easy or as simple as in that first example. That makes the principle of political correctness in this case more irksome, causing some understandable resentment. In many instances, on the other hand, when using “he or she” (or the especially inelegant “he/she”) is awkward, such as when the phrase has to be repeated over and over, many have discovered that it is just as simple as using “he” indiscriminately to rephrase the sentence using “they.”

It does seem odd to say that someone is the “Chair” of a committee, instead of the “Chairman,” and we have not found any suitable alternative that I know of. In the context of a committee organization, let us hope that eventually all vestiges of using “chair” only to refer to a place to sit will disappear.

3

But the main point is, the Constitution is the supreme law of our land. For us to belittle or deride its provision for equal civil rights to all citizens is unpatriotic and un-American, whether one is referring to the duties of the Judicial branch of the U. S. government or to the way we speak and write about each other.

***

Story: The Red Dress of Rome

***

1

Smooth, unbroken curves and turnings, sweeping upward through a golden polyphony of spangled colors, sure balance, and freely flowing rhythm. At the center, a cool and deepening blue, strong calm eyes turning the flow, pouring it inward, rolling it downward, and slowly drawing it back up.

David was also munching a crisp, white and brown cracker. The munching sound echoed comfortably in his mind, lightly touching and turning in his brain like his eyes in the lines of the multicolored mosaic he was staring at.

He let his hand drop again to his side and creep into his pocket, over the half-torn wrappings of the cracker box. He felt as if his movements too were orchestrated and made rhythmical, flowing and balanced by the graceful golds and blues, by the still, showy Christ spreading his hands over the basilica from the mosaic.

David's own fingers swept another cracker to his mouth. The slow crunching, and the warm salty taste intermingled with it, brushed freely through his mind like a vast regal robe sweeping over a slick, dusty floor.

He smiled complacently at himself for thinking of that comparison.

It was not until he felt the stiff corrugated cardboard at the bottom of the box in his jacket pocket that he became himself again and carefully lifted his eyes from the agile grace frozen up there within the edges of the main cupola.

He couldn't tell how long he'd stood there, among the icons, leaning on a wooden rail that circled off the main altar. He'd seen wooden barriers like that all over Rome, directing the big 1963 Easter crowds. He glanced again at the mosaic, and vowed to always have just a little too much wine with lunch before visiting old churches.

It was only recently, he thought pleasantly, that he'd begun to do things like that. He imagined the sodden crackers pouring quietly into the wine he hadn't ordered but drank anyway. And his smile, he thought, spoke languidly for the simple warmth of all his being.

Moving away from the altar, David seemed to glide soundlessly, like an immaterial whisper (he thought), behind the first section of brown wooden-and-wicker chairs. Next to a column, he paused and eyed a fold in the stone, the regular scallops of the robe of a statued saint with his fingers stiffly blessing the wicker chairs. His eyes were hollow and the lines in his face were smooth. David touched the scalloped hem which stood rigid and quiet above the delicate toes. The stone felt cold to his warm fingers.

At the rear of the church was an intricate black-iron stand on which thin white candles had been placed. Some had burned down to tiny stumps, but most had bent forward like old, crooked fingers to lace together a tangled clasp of wax. The flames were little points of light, spangling the misty air.

David turned. The chairs sat humbly ranged on the stone floor. A colony of white statues blessed them stiffly from the columns. The mosaic at the front now seemed to David a tiny, intricate miniature. The scene down the center aisle froze before him like a quaint imitation, shimmering in his mind.

He stepped out the side door.

Rome rumbled to him. The long, wide steps vibrated in the white light before him, and the sun passed through him like a warm breeze in lean, wild grasses.

2

Walking along Via Nomentana. Tall sycamores and tweeting birds. Warm sun and gentle breeze. People scurrying by.

David’s supposed inner gracefulness had gradually dissolved in the rattle and shake of the bus he had found before the Stazione Termini. He had never quite felt that way before and was not sorry it was over now. But he did enjoy things like that sometimes.

Cars zipped by him, and crowds of people, as he idled down the wide sidewalk. All motion within him had stopped, and now his mind was peaceful and silent, he thought, like libraries or empty boxes. (He had never compared things that way before).

But he couldn’t allow himself to move along too slowly; the church might be closing soon since it was Easter Saturday after all, and late afternoon. Soon, he was standing before a small old church building, Santa Agnese, with what his guidebook (which looked like a missal) called the best-preserved catacombs in the city.

Inside the door, it was not a church but a tiny hallway with a table where there were neat stacks of pamphlets. They were in Italian, but David took one anyway. Propped against the wall behind one table leg was a piece of white cardboard on which someone had written in red, not too neatly, “Entrada,” with an arrow pointing to David’s left. He turned that way and crossed to the head of a murky stairway.

He hesitated, and then stepped down the stairs. His heels--now worn down to the nails--made scratching sounds on the old concrete.


At the foot of the staircase was a narrow courtyard, green and quiet in the twilight. There was an organ playing somewhere. At David’s right, there was another, shorter flight of stairs. As he moved toward it, the pale court-light seemed to catch at David’s jacket cuff, and the frayed edge tickled his wrist.

He stood before an apparently ancient wooden door, which was carved and inlaid with mossy silver. One corner of the rich, dark oak had rotted or worn away, and that special church-light David had noticed before - the silver mist, he said, of departed souls and candle flames” - shone through the hole.

Beyond the door, there were several more steps descending into the church itself. The breathy organ seemed reverent in the silence. The room was empty.

David crossed the rear floor, the sound of his footsteps mingling diffidently with the phantom organ tones. There were two small doors on the either side of the entranceway. On one was a card on which the red pen had written in Italian, French, and English: “Catacombs: please wait one minute until the guide returns and a new party is formed.”

Presently, the other door opened, and a man came out: a very clean man, David thought, in a neat gray suit. His face had points all about it, a pointed nose, a pointed chin, and jawbones that pointed out sideways. He had almost no eyebrows at all, and the hair on his head was thin and black and lay smooth on his skull and about his ears. His eyes jumped pleasantly when he saw David standing there, and he came over, walking not at all as if it were a church.

Just in front of David, he hesitated before saying, “Buon giorno.”

David replied, “Buon giorno,” but not without communicating in that way he had learned in France that he had already exhausted his fund of Italian phrases.

The man’s eyes positively danced. “Francesca?” he said, and soon David and he were talking away in French. --Yes, David speaks French, they said, though he is really an American, just studying this year in Paris. --My, didn’t David speak French well for an American, and such a nice-looking young man too! But then the man told David they would have to wait until some other people came to see the catacombs, and went back into his room and shut the door.

The church grew silent again, the organ playing quietly still.

In a moment, the old oak door peeped open, and a sturdy, middle-aged woman, whose skin was light and whose hair was gray, came down the steps inside. She looked shyly at David (who suspected she too was an American) and then went over to read the card pasted on the door across the room. Then an Italian woman about 30 (strikingly handsome, David thought, dark and tall with long black hair) came in with a wiry little boy about eight on one side and an even smaller and darker girl about six on the other.

The man had opened his door again and was standing there watching David before he spoke to the gray-haired lady, who told him in English that she was from Canada and wanted to see the catacombs. David thought that the man looked even neater than he had before. He spoke to the Canadian woman in English and the Italian woman in Italian.

In a moment he had produced a long, thin white candle for each of them. He told David and the others how to hold the candles and lit them, and arranged the visitors all in a line. Somehow he managed to get David at the front. Then he opened the little door with the card pasted on it and led David by the lapel of his jacket (for which David was beginning to feel self-conscious next to the man’s neat suit and the Canadian woman’s simple tourist dress) down a narrow, unlighted staircase made of rotting stones, telling all of them to watch their steps, to be careful, and not to let their candles blow out. He repeated each of his sentences first in French to David, then in English to the Canadian woman, and finally in Italian to the handsome woman and her two children.

At the bottom of the stairs, they found themselves in the catacombs, and the guide began to describe the people who had built them, who had worshipped there, and who were buried there now, his voice echoing softly into the damp clay-stone walls and the shadows waving on them as the candle flames fluttered in the humidity. The air was very cool.

The man led them along, pointing out how tiny the tomb-niches were because people were smaller in those days (especially ones who lived underground, David thought), always repeating each one of his sentences in all three languages and always keeping his hand on David’s lapel because, as he said to David, he knew the way well and was afraid someone might get lost if he were not there to guide them.

Often they would just stroll along gazing down the tall, narrow corridors of crumbling clay, the man telling David how well he spoke French, what a fine-looking young man he was, and asking if he didn’t think the women in Paris were beautiful. Sometimes, the passageway was so narrow that they had to turn sideways and squeeze between the shadowed walls. The guide would then somehow twinkle through quickly, wait patiently for the others, and then take up David’s lapel again, because as he would say again, he knew the route so well.

Once the guide stopped them, had everyone pass his candle forward to him and then had everyone sit down on the cool ground. When he took the candles away from them down the corridor, the walls grew even taller and darker above them. The guide set the candles all around a little chapel far at the end of the narrow passageway, and asked David and the others to try to imagine the early Christians sitting or kneeling there, in single file since it was so narrow, watching a little priest moving about in the tiny chapel down the way. They all watched as the guide moved around putting the candles in the wall holders. A tiny golden cross shimmered in the soft flame-light next to his shadow.

“Monsieur,” the guide had come back and was speaking into David’s ear, “I am here every evening after five, you know. And I like young students like yourself, who are more interested than these tourists.” He put his hand on David’s shoulder, “Come back some afternoon next week (I am here every afternoon after five) and I will give you a personal tour of the family tombs."

3

The morning air was fresh, the sunlight clear and comfortable. David was walking among the pensione and small, below-street cafes along Via Palestro. Rome early on Easter morning was very quiet.

He had returned to his bed early the evening before, just as the city was beginning to glow and smile, gyrating in welcome to the holy day ahead. The French boy and the two law students from Sicily, with whom he was sharing a room, had not returned until two hours before David got up in the morning and began his easy stroll across the city.

He wandered among small, rising streets north of Via 20 Settembre. The streets had been washed, and the morning smelled like mowed grass after a rain. He hadn’t yet seen even one car.

At Via di Tritone, he watched the fountain running over the strong man’s muscular thighs. The water was clear and blue-green at the same time, chirping like mountain streams over cool stones. Beyond, there were several policemen standing guard at the corners and entrances of a large stone mansion. They straightened and clicked their heels as David passed. He smiled slightly and acknowledged the salutation with a courtly nod. He didn’t feel as reckless as he had the afternoon before, not quite as “pleasantly silly” as he would have said. But he still felt free somehow and confident in a way.

He turned north again among steep streets and some steps with iron railings, hearing occasionally the passing of a car on one of the broad avenues nearby. The sun seemed to scrub the little stone buildings leaving them rosy and clean.

Soon he was listening to his heels strike the cobblestones of the alley with the Etruscan restaurant where he might as well have lunch after the service. It didn’t matter. As he crossed the wide Via del Corso he remembered that he had planned to call Alison sometime to say “Happy Easter,” and watched a single little Fiat amble by. The woman inside smiled at him.


He rested a moment at the Mausoleum of Augustus, then crossed the Tiber, and wandered beyond the green park at Piazza Cavour, where people were beginning to move about, and walked on toward the Vatican. He passed a little bakery and stopped in to buy another small package of crackers. He slipped them into his jacket pocket, tearing away the wrapping at the top as he again walked toward the main piazza. The crackers were old and limp, but he was hungry and liked them anyway.

In a small piazza north of St. Peter’s, little groups were gaily strolling and chatting, policemen were directing traffic, and all the tables of the sidewalk cafes were filled with bright people, most of them European.

David stopped in at one of them to call the convent where Alison was staying with other members of the Paris students’ pilgrimage. She was not there, another student had explained. She had left earlier with her boyfriend, who was studying in London that year. David hadn’t known they were planning to be together. She had talked about going to the Forum to read lines from Julius Caesar with friends from the pilgrimage group.

He was on about his third cracker when he wandered between the columns and into Piazza San Pietro itself. Already hundreds of people were there, swinging their legs over the sides of the waterless fountains or sitting around the center obelisk, strolling about in the sunlight, or chewing gum. But the vast circular opening looked almost empty.

At the main entrance at David’s left, vendors had already begun selling their Pope pennants and pictures, their gelati, and their orange, red, and white balloons. Most of them had signs in four or five languages and shouted at everyone in Italian, pointing at the signs and at what they had to sell.

David stepped from under the columns to the gray paving stones. Already, the huge empty-seeming piazza was beginning to jump and move. David started out across the open space, his legs feeling loose and his knees agile under him. It was his “crowd feeling.” He felt them watching him enviously, in his picturesque old jacket and easy stroll, and felt sorry he had shaved off his beard as Alison had wanted him to. He would never have worn it home anyway.

All the people in the piazza seemed to be dressed in red or white cottons, sports-shirts and tourist dresses, with new Kodak cameras hung from their necks and “Festival” written in their eyes. David surveyed them as he strolled by the first fountain; they were quieter than he would have supposed, some of them with their eyes closed and faces turned up, baking in the sun like peasant breads on hot stones. His own camera was old and worn, and folded up small enough to slip into his sports jacket pocket.

He imagined meeting some friend from the Paris school, as he expected he might, and slipped another cracker between his lips. “My breakfast,” he would say to them, and they would admire him and laugh that he could do such unusual things now. Many of the people had bought ice cream from the gelati man since it was so warm.

On the other side of the piazza, David noticed that the people were very crowded, some in a line coming toward him and others in a stream moving the other way. He wandered over and followed the stream moving toward the basilica, trying to behave as if he knew where they were headed.

A row of wooden barriers stretched all the way across the front part of the piazza, still several hundred feet from the basilica. The people moving David along were just able to squeeze around the end of the barriers. Ten yards beyond was a second row of barriers, and twenty yards beyond it a third. David moved with the others up behind this foremost row of barriers, which was only about fifty feet from the basilica. There were hundreds of cameramen with long lenses and television and film cameras, and reporters with recording machines, all hurrying back and forth beyond the barrier testing various angles on the main balcony in the center of the cathedral facade, where a large white cloth had been draped. David found a place just in front of the balcony, where only one row of spectators separated him from the barrier.

He began to stand there quietly, occasionally eating another old cracker. The sun was very warm on the back and top of his head, and especially on his neck, and soon he felt content to stand there watching the reporters and photographers testing various angles, even though he was no longer moving his feet at all and had been walking for quite a long time. After a while he was warm enough to take off his heavy old jacket, revealing to the crowd his comfortable corduroy sports coat with wrinkles in the sleeves and the tear in the cuff he had received from a barbed wire fence he had climbed near Vicenza so that he could hitch-hike on the parkway (which was illegal!). Surely someone should notice that, he thought. He always felt very public these last days, especially in a crowd.

Presently, he began to take note of the people standing nearby. To his right was a bald German man in a gray suit talking to a dark, athletic Italian. They were speaking in English, the stout German quite volubly; and the Italian was laughing and making brief, pleasant replies. The German had his wife there who was short and stout, as he was, and as neatly dressed; she had a small camera dangling from her neck. The Italian man was there with a small son, about five years old, who was always clinging, about his father’s knees.

Directly in front of David were two unmistakable American girls, clean, beauty-treated, sweet smelling and fluffy-haired; and next to them was a tall, thin and fair lady with white hair, who seemed to be quite by herself and who looked about by turning her head in little jerks this way and that. Her eyes had something lively or wild about them, but her features were as precise and delicate as Alison’s.

From under the columns where David had entered the piazza, four or five military bands now marched, each accompanied by forty or fifty soldiers dressed in the same uniform as the band they marched with. All of them marched between the two wooden barriers, behind David and the others with him, separating them from the vast other section of the crowd, which now numbered in thousands, moving and waving in the sunlight like a multicolored wheat crop far, far beyond the last part of the broad entrance avenue. Each band played a brief tune, and then all stood at ease.

The German and the Italian were getting on so well by this time that all around were quite actively, though tacitly, enjoying the conversation. --Yes, it was a grand day, they said. --Yes, the boy was the Italian’s son and they came out to hear the Pope every Easter. --The Germans were here on a pilgrimage with a good many others who had all chartered a bus.

Soon the German man spread his enthusiastic good will to all those standing nearby, by offering to everyone (though not to David who was still some way behind him) a bit of an enormous chocolate bar. That brought the white-haired lady, who turned out to be English, and the two American girls, who turned out to be southern, into the conversation. Later the girls and the English woman moved a little away from the German couple, and the Italian man and his boy and began to talk among themselves.

David tried to think of a nonchalant way to include himself into their cheerful conversation. He briefly considered offering everyone a cracker, but there were only a few left by then.

At that moment, someone made a short announcement over the loudspeaker at the front to the basilica. The English lady wondered what the man had said since she herself did not understand Italian. The Italian man and the German were joking and talking about something else.

David, on the other hand, felt that he had understood. “I believe,” he addressed the English lady, whose eyes fired at him in return, “that the announcement said that the mass will begin at 11:15. I don’t really understand Italian, but I think I understood the words for ‘mass’ and ‘11:15.’” He had learned words like that from reading train schedules and signs on churches and museums.

It was enough to make the others take note of him. The English lady thought he spoke much more like an Englishman than an American, but the American girls seemed rather uninterested. He noticed that one of them had a box camera in her hand with her purse.

The announcement was repeated, and the Italian man confirmed that the mass was to begin at 11:15. David informed them that that was only five minutes away. In a moment, a stream of young man and boys in ankle-length black robes with delicate white lace vestments on top of them appeared from the center door of the basilica (seminary students, the Italian explained). Then a cardinal, similarly dressed except with a little more white lace, came out and began to celebrate the mass at the small altar which had been set up just under the balcony; the seminary students were standing on both sides of the altar and by turns answered the cardinal in Latin and gazed, thunderstruck, at the huge crowd now assembled before them.

Now and again as the cameramen tested various angles on the crowd (a reporter was squatting just to one side of the center aisle between the big-eyed seminary students, setting up a portable tape recorder), members of the crowd would kneel down. The white-haired English lady was at the front and felt conspicuous since she couldn’t see anybody else to know whether or not to kneel down too; she would start to kneel down and then hesitate. David put his heavy jacket on the ground for the German woman to kneel on. When the mass was over and the seminary boys were milling around and looking at the crowd, she gave David back his jacket and thanked him for it. Her husband was wiping his forehead and bald scalp with his handkerchief; he thanked David too.

Even the American girls seemed friendlier after the mass. They were from Alabama. The bands played a little more.

Just then the entire crowd burst into frenzied shouts and applause. A fierce joy, warm as the sun, sprang into sound, as the reporters began running back and forth in front of the seminary students who were beginning to stretch and twist their necks to see the balcony above them.

The heavy maroon curtains there had been pulled open from inside. A minute later, the Pope stepped out in his white robe and his conical, bold-spangled hat. Wild jubilation rang from the crowd. David clapped his hands too. Everybody was shouting and applauding madly. The white-haired lady was jerking her head this way and that. The faces of the American girls were red, and they were bouncing up and down on the balls of their feet. Everybody was smiling and laughing and talking to himself. The women looked like they wanted to hug each other, and David too.

The Pope was waving to everybody with the back of his hands. David felt a drop at the side of his cheek and didn’t know whether it was perspiration or a tear. It was so warm, it could have been either. David could see the Pope’s old smile, and remembered how tired the calm old man seemed in all his pictures.

After a few minutes, everyone got very quiet. The Pope spoke briefly, and no one moved. David didn’t feel like moving. He thought of how strange it all was, how feudal, and how old. In a minute the Pope started saying “Happy Easter” in every language he could think of. Each time he would say it, a different little group would cheer and wave from somewhere, and everyone would applaud. When he said it in English, David, the American girls, and the English lady cheered, and the Germans smiled at them. Then he said it in German and the man his wife cheered, so the others smiled at them. When he said it in Italian, everyone cheered, and the German man thumped the Italian on the back. It was like a football game or a political convention, David thought, where there was a lot of cheering and everybody had a good time.

Suddenly, the Pope said something else, and from under the eaves at the right of the Vatican colonnade, hundreds of white doves flew out above the crowd and into the sky. Then as the Pope spoke again and some people knelt down, the birds flew around and around overhead getting smaller and smaller in the deepening blue, swirling down and around and away...

It was over then, and the Pope went back between the red curtains.

Before David knew it, the bands and the soldiers with them had marched away under the columns again and the crowd was scattering about. The Italian man and his son were gone, and the German and his wife were hurrying away after the bands. The white-haired English lady was walking off to the left, looking this way and that. The American girls had disappeared.

The reporters were all running away, and a few cameramen still tried various angles on the crowd. The seminary students had gone back into the basilica.

Some men came hurrying out and moved some of the saw-horses around. There was a loud squawk as someone let a corner drag on the paving stones. A few people wandered through the hole in the barrier, but most of them went over to the right, where a long line had formed moving into the side door of the cathedral next to the colonnade. It was rather quiet for such a large crowd.

David felt his “crowd feeling” again. He reached under the folds of his jacket which he held draped over his arm, but there were no crackers left. He moved over to one side, his knees feeling weak from walking and then standing for so long. He leaned against the part of the barrier that had been pulled away to one side, facing the obelisk and the dry fountains, the wide piazza and the broad approach avenue, and, far away in the crowd and the sunlight, the bridge.

It was very warm, and David stood there leaning with one foot up behind him on the wooden barrier. He was relaxed and placid, watching the many colors of the people scurrying around. Once he closed his eyes and turned his face up to the sunlight and felt like a fat peach lying forgotten in the light on a bed of damp leaves. When he opened his eyes again some of the color had gone and the people shimmied for a moment.

Pretty soon, he saw Alison walking toward him down the center of the piazza, with a young man talking to her. She was wearing a red dress that David had not seen before. He watched her coming, but she pretended not to see him until they were close enough to speak to him. David enjoyed watching her coming. “Hi, David,” she called.

“Hello there,” David took his foot down but still had his elbow on the barrier’s top bar. He thought his eyes must be glowing.

“Isn’t Rome wonderful!” she was very enthusiastic.

“Rome is wonderful,” David nodded sagely, and made the wrinkles laugh about his eyes.

“David Grosmann, this is Tom McKay.”

They shook hands. David was surprised that Tom, the Great Tom whom Alison had told him about in Paris and on their trip to Spain, was so regular. He was just a nice, clean-cut American boy with blond hair, cut very short. He had a light, tan, triangular face with rugged cheekbones, and seemed very “West Coast.” A nice-looking young man, David thought, with a firm handshake.

They chatted there a moment saying how much they’d heard about each other, and how nice the weather was.

All the time, David was looking at Alison. She had been with Tom now for several weeks, he supposed, and David had already forgotten her gay vitality. She was small and slender with delicate hands and features, dark hair and eyes with long lashes. Her skin was fair, and her mouth thin but tender and sweet...

“We’re going to the forum this afternoon,” she said.

"Yes,” David smiled. “You’re going to read Shakespeare.”

Tom laughed. “You knew about that? She gave it to me this morning.”

She had tiny thin fingers, and her hands were always cool. David remembered that he had given her a birthday gift when they’d had tea together in Florence, a reproduction mounted on wood of her favorite Lippi madonna with her favorite St. Francis quotation on the other side. But she didn’t mention it. She was wearing the black lace mantilla they had bought in Madrid.

“Are there many with you this afternoon?” David asked.

“Some kids from the Vienna school,” Tom said.

Alison’s dress had a small cord which ran around her hips two inches below her waist. The skirt didn’t begin to fill out until just above her thighs. Her little body softly rounded out the abdomen of the dress.

“I’ll be going back to Paris tonight,” David said. “I don’t know exactly what I will be doing this afternoon, wandering around in the sun somewhere, I suppose.” He imagined their asking him to come along with them to the Forum. But they didn’t, and soon they were playfully punching each other at how long the line was for Communion, and telling David goodbye…Tom shaking hands and Alison smiling oddly when David said he’d call her next week in Paris. Then they were walking off, laughing and joking.

The warmth was moving around inside him like smoky winds over an autumn fire. His eyes were full and glowing, but rather tired.

He replaced his foot on the bottom rail of the wooden barrier behind him, taking up again his nonchalant pose with his elbow on the top bar. How cool he must look, he found himself thinking, in his comfortable corduroy coat and his neat black slacks, in his nonchalant attitude in the sunlight watching the crowd in front of him. He was thinking that Tom and Alison would be talking about him now and looking back at him, seeing him from behind leaning that way on the barrier.

He happened to glance around. Their backs were to him, already far away, and Alison’s red dress was mixing quickly into the Joseph-coated crowd.

He watched after them a moment with the sun warming his shoulders and his forehead feeling a little heavy.

“People look much better in the sunlight,” he said.

***