And he did.
There was an Eberhartian death-in-life poignancy hovering over Allen’s and my conversation, but which I did not know about at the time. Fewer than ten days later, on the day of my father’s ninety-fourth birthday, Allen Ginsberg suffered his untimely demise.
R.I.P.
Time continued its work.
Dad was immortal, just as Grandmother and Scott Nearing had seemed to be. When Dad was about ninety-six, his gerontologist told me that there was nothing left that could kill him. “Oh, he’ll die,” he assured me. “But he’s survived everything that kills people. He won’t die of something. One day, he’ll just stop.”
Dad was aware of one benefit of his advanced age. Once, when he was in his midnineties, he asked me, “You know the critics?”
“Yes.”
“They’re all dead.”
“Yes?”
“And I’m not.”
When Dad became a centenarian, Gretchen and I threw a big party at his retirement home, and people from all his walks of life attended; he was the retirement home’s oldest resident.
One of the guests at the party asked me what I thought Scott Nearing and my father had in common. Without hesitation, I replied, “Joy.”
No one who knew Scott Nearing well during his later years would describe him as a joyful man, at least not in the conventional sense of the word. In fact, he was utterly bleak in his assessment of the failure of humankind. His diagnosis was so bleak that, if it were put in religious terms—which he would not have done himself—it was gnostic. All created things are evil, including humankind, and there is neither grace nor salvation. Only a very few—the knowing ones—may attain wisdom, but through their own effort alone.
Nevertheless, as I answered the question, my intuition was that Scott was joyful in a personal sense.
Both Dad and Scott lived lives without much second-guessing. Oh, I know my father had worries, and I am sure Scott did as well. One cannot be human and have it otherwise. But the essential quality that binds them together in my mind is their deep commitment to their muses. That commitment brought them joy—the joy of doing what they knew they were meant to do.
My grandmother was joyful as well. She was joyful in the burgeoning of her family, in its success, and in her ever-widening circle of acquaintance. While the two men played to the audience of their own imaginations and were at base concerned with their impact on history, Grandmother played to the audience of our imaginations—we of her extended family—and was content to make herself, for us, a legend of graciousness, of welcome, of taste, of daring, and of apparent immortality.
Another year went by. Dad pushed life’s boulder uphill during another twelve months.
It became more awkward for our children to visit Dad in his retirement home because his bedroom seemed ever smaller—there were six of us, and the children were grown now; where does one stand?
Among all the children, the one who was least discomfited by their grandfather in his decrepitude was Sam. Sam would sit beside Dad on the bed, and he would pat Dad on the chest, and he would say, “You are a good man. You are a good man.” Then he would lay his head on Dad’s chest.
The blazing lyricist and the Down syndrome word-stumbler—at one.
Dad’s 101st birthday party was much more modest than had been his 100th. As Gretchen and I joked together, we were saving the next big one for the 110th.
As the 101st birthday party wound down, Dreamy Dick reclined on his bed with a cup of chocolate milk—upon which he mostly subsisted in those days. He had been unusually energetic during the past four or five hours, very reluctant that the party should end.
Mom had been very present to him. He kept insisting that my family and I not drive back to Maine that evening: “Your mother and I so much want you to stay.”
At one point Dad got up to go and see if Mom might be awake from her nap because he was certain she would want to see more of us. I took him aside and told him that Mom was dead. He was saddened to hear of it, but as he sat down again on the bed, I had the sense that he didn’t perceive her location as being so very far distant anymore. Not so very far away as the Land of the Dead had used to be.
We stayed a little longer. Gretchen and her husband, Michael, had already left, and Dad was tired now. It was time to go. But Dad kept rousing whenever we made to leave, so we would settle back down.
Then I had an idea.
I read to Dad—and to my family—of the exploits of Eberhart the Noble. I’ve mentioned this man before. He is one of our most remote and most puissant ancestors. He was born March 13, 1265, in what was then Swabia (more recently Bavaria). He was kin to the Holy Roman Emperor. At the age of fifteen, single-handedly, Eberhart the Noble created the Duchy of Wurttemberg. When he died sixty-one years later—June 5, 1325—he had spent forty-six years as duke, and most of that time he was fighting either offensive or defensive war. Other dukes in the area had laughed at him when, as a boy, he had bought his seal and set up his throne and commenced to do business as ruler. But forty-six years later, he was no laughingstock. He had annexed all their lands.
That’s seven hundred years of directly traceable Eberhartian lineage. Rome herself scarcely lasted longer.
Seven of my centenarian fathers, standing in a row, could shake the Duke’s hand.
Eberhart the Noble and his wife, Irmingard, had three sons, all of whom were named Ulrich. The middle of these men succeeded his father on the throne. I’ve mentioned him before: Eberhart of the Rushing Beard, which name he earned by reason of his impulsiveness, which was remarkable, and by reason of his long beard, which flew out behind him as he dashed.
This second Duke carried on the reign that his father had begun, and thus was initiated the 443-year supremacy of the Eberharts in Wurttemberg. When you read about our ancestors, you find that, as a line, we are said mostly to have been strong, resolute, kindly rulers, much beloved by our people. Consistently, the four centuries of Eberhart dukes are characterized as being deeply religious (Lutheran, once that division began), militarily savvy, great riders and hunters, valuers of learning, and notable writers and poets.
Ah—poets!
Of course, we had our faults and made our mistakes. In fact, the end of the Regnum Eberhartium (Dad would love that usage!) in 1723 was occasioned by one such mistake. An act of polygamy by Duke Leopold Eberhart was the culprit.
Duke Leopold was another of the Eberharts whose learning was broad. He explored religious writing of his time, and he found himself interested in the Koran. Under its aegis, he married three wives. This outraged his people, and it weakened the claim of any of his heirs to the throne, as all of them were illegitimate. Duke Leopold attempted to rescue the situation, first by appealing for a favorable verdict to the Pope, but to no avail, and then to the King of France, who wouldn’t assist either, and then by selling the dukedom to his cousin Eberhart Ludwig.
However, in the confusion, an even more distant cousin of the Eberharts—and a Catholic to boot—one Charles Augen, was able to snatch the throne. All of what is now Germany at that time was convulsed with civil and religious fervor—the Catholic–Protestant Thirty Years’ War had weakened internal cohesion. The Catholics were in the ascendancy. When Charles VI died in 1740 without clearly delineated issue, the entire structure based on the Hapsburg line began to crumble.
And the Eberharts, as we have seen before, brought their religious fervor, their work ethic, their high-mindedness, and their literary accomplishment to America.
I sat beside the bed of my father, the 101-year-old poet, and I read to him about the exploits of the Eberharts—formerly sung by the German poets Schiller and Kerner—until he fell asleep.
On June 7, I was on a sales trip in the mountains of way-northern Maine. It was a grand day of high clouds, great stabbing shafts of sunlight, and springing green. The mountains looked like a German Romantic painting. Suddenly, at noon, it came into my mind that if this were the day when Dad died, it would be a very
good day for that.
When I drove down out of the mountains, my cell phone buzzed. A message awaited me. The message from Gretchen was “Dad fell at noon. Stand by. This may be IT.”
By June 8, we knew indeed that this was IT, and that my father’s call to me the day before—the call of his spirit—across six hundred miles of New England, had not been a trial run.
I spurred my car south and west at a furious roar. As I passed through Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the sky darkened until it was the blackest I believe I have ever seen in my life. A thunderstorm of cataclysmic proportions was brewing.
The thunderstorm hit ten miles later. It hit so hard that our line of cars could scarcely crawl. Vision forward was hardly possible. Lightning slashed. Thunder shook the very surface of the road. Entire trees were whipped like straws. Limbs broke off, and I bulled past them, snapping their branches under my tires, not knowing how much time I had left.
I had been following the car ahead, perhaps twenty feet from its bumper, the only thing I could see. Presently, its driver gave up and pulled aside. There was another car ahead, a green car. I tried to close with it. I crept closer and closer. Then I saw its license plate. The license plate bore a single word: POETIK.
I followed POETIK through the storm and arrived at my father’s deathbed in time.
Poet Richard Eberhart died June 9, 2005, two months after his 101st birthday. He died of complications following a fall and of the muse finally calling him home.
The death of a man who is 101 cannot be termed a surprise, but it can be—and it was—a shock.
I adored my father. As I grew, I longed both for his attention and for his affirmation, as most lads do. I received both.
Sometimes, when I wished he would toss a football with me, as other fathers did with their sons, he might instead have written a poem that should last one hundred years. I didn’t get the football that day, and I was disappointed. But in my life I was tossed other sorts of balls, elegiac spheres that danced on my fingertips. I was privileged to observe my father playing verbal catch—and creating incandescent beauty—with the gods of song and idea.
Later, when I was a man, I received attention and affirmation from other sources than my father. When I was in despair at my badness, I wished it were he who could save me. He could not. It was not Dad’s job to save me.
Still later, when I was an older man, and when I had begun to father my father—for example, when Gretchen and I decided to sell his house in Hanover and needed to bandage his pain at the loss—it was a wrench to find that we were now the ones to offer comfort.
There were times when I felt annoyed with Dad’s self-involvement or dreaminess or obtuseness.
Yet my father loved his two children, utterly. He loved us as he was given to love. He could not possibly have given more, for we humans are finite beings powerless to be more than we are.
At the time Dad died, I was a Jew. Not a very pious Jew, it is true, but a Jew nonetheless.
I was a Jew.
I was fatherless.
And I was lost.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I was lost.
But perhaps I might be found.
I had heard about foundness.
There were souls who had been found.
Somewhere there had to be a compass to point me the way.
One day, at the end of the day, more than a year after Dad died, I came in from my car and dropped my computer bag by the wall where we hang our outer coats. Channa was still in the office in the barn. I was tired and grumpy.
I went into the living room and sat on the couch. I felt particularly vulnerable, but at the same time willing to expose myself. I didn’t say anything or do anything; I just sat.
In time, Channa came in from the office.
Usually I put introspection aside when Channa comes off work, and I ask her about her present project and how it’s going. But this time I said to her, “I can’t do it myself.”
“What?”
“I mean it. This is hard for me to say. But I can’t do it myself.”
Channa sat down next to me on the couch. “Do what?”
“Everything. Life. All of it.” I was still for a moment and then said, “I thought I could, but I can’t.”
“Oh, I get it.” She smiled. “It’s the end of the month, isn’t it? And there’ll never be another sale.”
I laughed. “No. It’s not that. The month was fine. No. It’s not that. It’s—everything else.”
Channa watched me for a moment. I was looking at the painting over the fireplace but was aware of her eyes on my profile. Then, “Hold that thought,” she said. “I’ll put on the soup. Then I want to know more.”
I sat still. There were a few minutes of kitchen sounds and then Channa went to the bottom of the stairs and called up to Sam to set the table. When she returned, she asked, “You want anything?”
I shook my head. She sat sideways on the couch with her legs pulled up under her. “Tell me.”
“I’m good at a lot of things, I know that. But I’m fifty-nine years old, and I’m tired of carrying everything inside myself. I don’t think I can do it anymore. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes. Someday, everyone’s going to see that there’s nothing here. It’s just—I don’t know, ego. And burden. And pride, I suppose. Pride that I can do it my way—but I can’t.”
She touched me to reassure me that she was there, but she didn’t say anything, wanting me to go on.
I took a deep breath and let it out. “I need help.”
I turned to look at her for the first time. “I need help.”
To me, as a husband, it seemed I had just made a dizzying revelation, but my wife did not appear to be shaken by it. Of course, in my heart, I knew my revelation was neither dizzying nor likely to shake Channa. But it felt dizzying.
“I need help,” I repeated. “I can’t do it alone.”
“You’re not alone.”
“I know I’m not alone.”
Channa took my hand, the one closest to her. I looked away again and took my hand away and ran both hands through my hair.
“I don’t like to admit that I can’t do it all.”
“Yes.”
“But I can’t.”
There was a long silence. Then Channa said, “No one can, Dikkon.”
“No. I guess not. But I don’t know where all this is going. It frightens me that I don’t know where it’s going.”
“That’s part of the asking for help. If you knew where it was all going, you wouldn’t be asking for help. And all of us, we all of us need to ask for help.”
“Who said that?” I wanted to know.
“I don’t know. Probably everyone. But I said it now.”
We were quiet. Sam came downstairs, gave me a hug, we exchanged a few words about how his work at the college dining hall had gone that day, and then he went to set the table. He’s short, muscular, handsome, athletic—and funny. Quite a guy.
“I just feel I need help,” I repeated.
“We need help. It breaks my heart when I know there’s something you’re thinking, and you can’t find a way to tell me. It makes me imagine all kinds of awful things. You need to not be afraid of whatever you’re thinking. We can handle it. But you need to tell me what you’re thinking.”
I sighed. “What I’m thinking is, I can’t do it myself.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
I woke up.
It was Sunday. It was March. It was windy and cold on the coast of Maine.
I had no idea how to solve my problem.
“I guess I’ll try the church across the road this time,” I said to Channa. I sighed. “There’s got to be an answer. Somewhere there’s got to be an answer.”
Channa was still in bed. She was propped against pillows with a coffee cup and a book. She pulled the blankets higher. Her glance was affectionate but without anticipation.
“You go. I’m too shy.”
“Shall I need a tie, do you supp
ose?”
“This is Maine.”
I swung out of bed. The floor was cold. I hurried to dress—collared shirt but no tie. From up the road, the church bell rang.
“Tell me all about it,” Channa said.
“Back soon.” I bent and kissed her. “How long can one more church service take, after all?”
I went downstairs. I didn’t see the children. Someone had eaten cereal and not cleaned up afterward.
I was too tense to eat.
I pulled on a winter coat and stepped out the door.
Watch out!
Here comes the Jew.
I walked across the road. I just—walked across the road.
I walked through the church’s door. A person handed me a bulletin. I sat in the rearmost pew. Shortly, the pastor asked us to stand and to sing a hymn. So far, so good.
But then it got bad.
Oh no. They’re not going to do that, are they?
There I stood, a Jew, in the back pew of Small Point Baptist Church, Phippsburg, Maine. I was surrounded by strangers. We of the assemblage had just finished two hymns, and instead of asking us to sit down and to listen to his sermon, Pastor Dan had just instructed us to turn around and to greet one another: “If you see someone you don’t know, greet that person.”
Oh, darn.
I remembered that this embarrassment of handshaking began when I was young. It was all the rage among Episcopalians. It was going to change our lives. We called it “passing the peace.” What I had wanted instead when I was young was to sit in decent isolation and not to foist an unwanted salutation on our neighbors in the opposite pew.
Really, as I thought of it here, at this church, it was too bad that they should stoop to phony theatrics. Until this moment, this church had seemed such a nice little church, with its white steeple outside, and its numbered pews, and its plain-Jane decor inside. Too, I liked its rugged, old wooden cross, which was hanging in its apse, free of any corpus or folderol.
The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told Page 19
