Remember This

by Patricia Koerner

  Dad patted my hand reassuringly and said, “It’s OK, Honey. Being in love is as beautiful and natural as a sunrise.” I noticed that my mother was quiet and said little during the evening. When she was occupied and wouldn’t likely hear, I leaned over to Dad and asked if she was feeling well. “She’s all right,” Dad answered. “She had another depressive episode. But Christmas coming and your being home have been bringing her out of it.”

  On Christmas morning, after Mass, as my Mother strictly forbade any gift opening before, I couldn’t wait to open John’s gift. It was a beautiful brooch in the shape of a butterfly – gold set with light and dark blue stones. In the box with the brooch was a small notecard with a drawing of a butterfly in flight on the front.

  Inside it said

  Merry Christmas to my beautiful butterfly –

  Love,

  John

  I phoned him that day. Hearing his voice filled me with warmth even as he was telling me how cold it was in Washington. For the remainder of the holidays I made the rounds of my friends who still lived in Los Angeles, partying and catching up on everyone’s news. I particularly wanted to spend time with my closest friend, Laurie Jennings. We had been friends since the first day of school of first grade. Her father, like mine, worked in the industry. He was a script writer, with three or four TV series to his credit. We went together to most of the parties being given, since we had most of the same friends and we found time to attend a movie together, just the two of us. Even with all the fun I was having, I counted the days until January 2nd, when I would return to New York – and to John.

  4

  Present day (April 20th):

  Hannah and Sophie decided they had done enough for the day. Neither wanted to push too far as Hannah still felt emotionally fragile at times. While Hannah was in the kitchen fixing mojitos for them, Sophie walked to the doorway of the apartment’s second bedroom, which Hannah had made over into a music and workroom. “May I go in here?”

  “If you like,” Hannah answered from the kitchen.

  Sophie entered the room. One wall was dominated by the upright piano in the center. All around the room, bookshelves had been built in. They were full almost to overflowing with books on every aspect of music; history, theory, composer biographies, among others. There were also shelves of sheet music, organized by genre. In front of the room’s only window, was a desk, set up with a MIDI controller keyboard. Hannah appeared in the doorway with the two cocktails. Handing one to Sophie, she said “Those photos on the piano are of Danny and me. In the one on the left, we were eight and five. We were ‘Hanni and Danny,’ friends, confidants, partners in crime. The one on the right is of us and a couple of friends he met here in New York. It was taken in 1978, right before I married Tony, at the premiere of the first movie I scored.”

  Sophie looked at the photos and said, “You two look so much alike, you could be twins.” Hannah had to agree. They shared the same blond, fair coloring, toothy smile, cleft chin, turned-up nose and grey blue eyes which were a little too far apart. Hannah had always thought this second photo to be the cutest of Danny. He had cropped his blond hair into a crew cut and behind his right ear was a bright fuchsia colored petunia.

  “Danny was a painter too, like our mother,” Hannah continued. “He made that sketch of me over there.” Next to the door hung a framed sketch of Hannah sitting on a large boulder. Behind her was a snow covered mountainside dotted with trees. At the bottom right corner, it was signed ‘D. Newman, 1975.’

  “So this is where you compose?” asked Sophie, moving over to the desk and touching the keys of the MIDI.

  “Yes. I do almost everything on the computer now. I only write finished pieces onto score paper occasionally just for fun.”

  “How does this thing work?”

  “This thing,” Hannah laughed, “is a MIDI, a musical instrument digital interface. When the controller keyboard is played, information is transmitted to the PC. The software “records” it and makes a graphic representation of what is played. You can edit and play back until your piece is as you want it. There are several different kinds of software you can use, but I work with Sibelius 7. I use this PC only for music. The desk and laptop in the other room, I use for everything else.”

  “I wish Frankie could see this. He’s really into computers. He’d go crazy for a chance to play around with something like this. He works IT at CUNY. He helps maintain the computer system there. He trouble shoots, does upgrades, security, everything.”

  Hannah smiled at the obvious pride Sophie had in her brother. “There’s something special about little brothers, isn’t there? I was lucky to have Danny in my life for as long as I did.”

  Sophie ran a finger along the closed lid of the piano and said, “I’ve heard your piece that featured on that computer commercial.”

  “Oh yes, Dancing Snowflakes.”

  “Could you play it for me? I’ve always loved it.”

  “No. I can’t,” said Hannah softly.

  “I’m sorry, if you don’t want to…” began Sophie.

  I don’t mean that I don’t want to,” cut in Hannah. “I mean that I can’t. Ever since John …has been gone, I haven’t been able to play. I’ve tried, but my music seems to have left me.” She struggled to keep her composure.

  Sophie put her glass down on the piano and moved close to Hannah. Stroking her back, she said softly, “It will come back. It will.”

  The day of Hannah and Sophie’s next scheduled session was a balmy spring day and Hannah decided to eat breakfast out on the balcony. She almost didn’t hear the buzzer when Sophie arrived. Over coffee, Hannah reviewed the material Sophie had completed from the first recording. “I like how you stay focused and don’t add too much superfluous detail.”

  Turning on her recorder, Sophie asked, “So, how did you and John build your lives and careers after graduation?”

  5

  June 1973:

  Over spring break, John and I decided to move in together after graduation with Greg and his girlfriend, Cindy. Cindy wanted to move to the city to be with Greg. It was John and Greg’s idea of a good way to share expenses while we tried to get our careers off the ground. I knew my parents and probably John’s as well, would not approve of us living together unmarried. A good Catholic boy and girl just didn’t do that, so we discussed getting married. It just didn’t feel like the right time, though. We were so much a part of each other by then that while it seemed the natural thing to do, we wanted to first get our careers on track and just grow up a little more. We agreed it would be best to conceal our living arrangements from our families.

  After graduation, I took John with me to California to finally meet my family. As I guessed, John and my Dad did hit it off and Dad just had to dispense all of the career advice a seasoned actor has to pass on to a younger one. I was happy though, to see that my family liked John and my father wanted to help him.

  One day, Danny, John and I went with Laurie and her boyfriend at the time, Cory Randall, to Zuma Beach. Cory had grown up in the industry like Laurie and I, his father having been a cameraman. We got together a game of volleyball with some of the other young people there. I was glad to see John having a good time. After a few games, we were tired and thirsty and Laurie and I went to get drinks at a concession stand. Just as we arrived there, two guys about our age, perhaps a little older, stepped in front of us, blocking our path. They were obviously drunk. One of them said, “Wanna party, ladies? We got beer, plenty for a good time.”

  “No thanks. We already have our own party,” Laurie said. We tried to go around them, but they again blocked our way. The man who spoke before leered at Laurie. He reached out to touch her, but she slapped his hand away.

  He said to his companion, “Ooooh, we got a live one here, Joey.”

  Joey turned to me and said, “You look pretty fine, too, Blondie.” He cupped my chin in his hand, squeezing hard. He looked me up and down, stopping to stare at my breasts. I felt myself flush
with humiliation.

  I didn’t realize Danny had come up to us until he pointed at Joey and said, “Take your hand off my sister.”

  The two of them laughed and Joey said, “What are you going to do if I don’t, you little piss-ant?”

  Just then, John and Cory came up behind Danny. I don’t know what it was, but something spooked those two bullies and they took off running. John, with his long legs, caught up with one of them in about three seconds, tackled him and got him in a headlock. Cory had the other one a few seconds later. They stood there for a minute, not quite knowing what to do. Finally, Cory jerked his head toward the water. John nodded and they wrestled the bullies to the water, threw them in and held their heads under for a few seconds. Pulling Joey out, John demanded, “Are you going to leave the girls alone?”

  “Yeah, yeah, OK,” Joey sputtered.

  “Are you going to get the hell out of here?” yelled Cory at the other bully.

  “Yeah, whatever you say.”

  As soon as John and Cory released them, they grabbed their belongings and disappeared. The people who had gathered to watch the spectacle laughed and a few even applauded. They told us that those two frequented the beach and harassed people. Each time they were run off, they would return after a few days or a week. Later, Laurie and I treated our “heroes” to dinner and later we drove up Mulholland Drive to take in the view of the city and do a little necking.

  When we returned to New York, John and I moved into the apartment in which Greg and Cindy already were living. Cindy had finally landed a job as a copy editor at a magazine and with my experience as a session musician, I was able to get on at a recording studio. In spite of what some people may think, it can be grinding work at times, definitely unglamorous, but it did pay the bills.

  It was a little tougher for the men. Parts were hard to get and the competition was fierce. When I wasn’t working, I went with John to the cattle-call auditions to support him and keep him from getting too discouraged. His parents had stopped his allowance after graduation, not because they wanted him to starve, but because, I suspect, they wanted him to either succeed or not succeed as an actor and if not, to quickly as possible choose another occupation and not make a career of being an out-of-work actor.

  I could see though, that he had a real gift and could become an incredible actor if his gift was given the chance to develop and grow. When I got control on my 21st birthday of my trust fund, consisting of prize money I’d won plus my earnings as a session musician which had been put into trust for me as per the Coogan Law, I was able to pay both John’s and my share of the expenses. There are those, I suppose, who would say he was taking advantage of me or that I was an enabler, or both, but they would be dead wrong. He gave me every bit as much love and moral support as I gave him. Growing up, I learned not to express my feelings openly because of my mother’s unpredictable moods and the need not to provoke her. John, with his open heart, showed me that it was OK to show my feelings, especially the love I felt for the people closest to me. He did this, not by instruction or lecture, but by his own example. I think I’m a better person because of my relationship with him. That makes anything I did for him more than worth it and I’ve never regretted it.

  In September, John and Greg both finally landed parts at a small theatre over in Brooklyn. John’s was as a schoolteacher, of all things. I remember he had to wear rimless glasses which kept falling down his nose. I couldn’t stop laughing at that. At about that same time, John brought home another “roommate,” a tomcat he’d been feeding scraps to all week out in back of our building. We named him Rusty because of his ginger color. It wasn’t long before Rusty worked his way into all our hearts. Greg took to affectionately calling him ‘Rust Bucket.’ He started showing up every day late in the afternoon on the fire escape, meowing. We’d let him in, he would stay a while and we all petted him and played with him. John took one of Greg’s empty cigarette packages and tied a string around it to make a toy. Rusty never seemed to get tired of chasing that thing. Around bedtime, Rusty would want out again. I guess he’d been a stray so long, he wasn’t comfortable being inside all the time. We would leave food and water out on the fire escape for him.

  The play John and Greg were in, a drama about censorship, opened the second week of October. Cindy and I got as many of our friends and acquaintances as we could to attend. We ended up with a party of eight to cheer them on. It ran for six weeks and closed just before Thanksgiving.

  The following February, John got another part, but this play wasn’t successful. It closed after only half its anticipated run because it was losing so much money. In the spring, the four of us began planning a trip to the Grand Canyon. We wanted to take the Greyhound bus rather than fly since none of us had ever seen any of the country between the coasts. Greg and Cindy had to back out ultimately because Cindy couldn’t get time off from her job and Greg landed another much needed part. John and I decided to go anyway. We left around the middle of May.

  6

  The first leg of the trip was from New York to Cleveland, passing Lake Eire along the way. We considered getting off and looking around, but decided to wait until we reached Chicago. We arrived there around lunch time and we stayed the rest of the day, that night and most of the next day. We went on a sightseeing tour, and then tried a Hungarian restaurant for lunch, totally unprepared for the amount of hot paprika in the goulash. It took a whole pitcher of water to wash it down. We then took a ride on the El train, comparing it to the subway back home. We boarded another bus late in the afternoon and proceeded through Des Moines, Lincoln, Nebraska and on to Denver. We got off there and planned to take the next bus going south, but we got distracted and missed it. We didn’t want to stay in Denver, so we decided to hitch a ride to Santa Fe and get a bus there.

  We walked to the freeway entrance and stood there with our thumbs out for what seemed to me like forever, and we were getting hot, dusty and a little woozy from breathing all that automobile exhaust. Finally, a dilapidated old white van pulled up beside us. A woman leaned out and called, “Hey kids, where are you headed?”

  John motioned for me to stay behind him as he walked up to the van. “Well, we’re going to the Grand Canyon, but we’ll settle for Santa Fe,” he said.

  “So are we. Actually we’re going to Mesa Verde Park first, then the Canyon. If you don’t mind a little detour, we’d be glad to take you,” said the woman, who introduced herself as Karen. John and I were a little wary when we saw that they were hippies, but they seemed harmless, so we decided to take our chances. When we climbed in and the van took off, we met some of the others in the group. There was Pete, the driver and also Karen’s husband, their son, Mikey, who was about three years old and Maria, a little girl around eight years old. Maria’s parents, Bill and Melissa, were in a second van with the rest of the group, Gary, his wife Sandy and their 11 year old daughter, Lexie.

  Once we introduced ourselves and settled in, I became taken with little Mikey. He had brown curly hair and big blue eyes and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was how John looked when he was that age. Mikey had an amazing vocabulary for a three year old. He talked almost like an adult and rattled on about whatever came into his head.

  Pete engaged John in conversation, asking him if he had read Alan Watts’ book on Eastern versus Western religions or any of Gregory Bateson’s work. John somewhat sheepishly admitted that he had not, but Pete didn’t seem to mind as it gave him an opportunity to expound on them. I talked to Karen and found that this group had set up a “free school” in Denver; an alternative for what they saw as the repressive methods of traditional schools. They based it on A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School in England and on Neill’s pedagogical theory that children learn best in an environment of complete freedom from adult coercion.

  “Neill didn’t mean license when he spoke of freedom,” Karen told me. License is disregarding others’ rights, whereas freedom respects others as well as accepting the consequences of one’s decisi
ons and choices.” Still, it seemed a radical idea to me, having been educated by nuns and priests in strict Catholic schools. However, the children in this group seemed happy and relatively well behaved, so I wondered if there might be something to it. Also, as John and I eventually learned, all of the adults had either a teaching degree or at least a bachelor’s degree in their respective fields.

  We passed through Colorado Springs and Pueblo, and then we stopped for the night in Durango. After the children were put to bed, Pete and Bill brought out some marijuana. I had smelt it before, in the restrooms and the storage room behind the auditorium at Performing Arts, but I had never tried any. I didn’t like the smell and I assumed that I would not like it. John said he had tried it once and found it OK. Bill rolled a couple of joints and we lit up. I couldn’t help but envision the horrified faces of my parents and imagine the lecture I would have been certain to get had they known what I was doing. It must have been a strong batch of weed, because both John and I got quite high, I especially. I became so light headed that I don’t remember clearly what happened other than I found everything hilarious and giggled uncontrollably. I do remember feeling like I was floating. Finally, John got me to my feet and said, “Come on. Let’s get you to bed.” I didn’t particularly want to go, but he was firm. I remember him getting me into the van where we were to sleep and after covering me, leaving again. He later told me that the others were afraid that my giggling would wake the children and they didn’t want the kids around when they were smoking pot.

  The next day we spent at Mesa Verde National Park. I was amazed at how much was left of the Indian ruins. Some of the kivas still had cooking pots and other implements left inside them. Karen was our tour guide of sorts, since her degree was in anthropology with a psychology minor. She explained that the kivas were where various spiritual ceremonies took place. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what the ceremonies might have been like and pictured myself attending or even participating in one. I wondered what it would be like to breathe smoke from a burning smudge stick, to chant incantations, to be transported to another realm of existence.