by Mary Gordon
I went downstairs to the kitchen. Sam and my father were sitting at the kitchen table. Sam was sitting with his head in his hands. It was hardly credible. My brother was crying. I’d never seen my brother cry. Even as a child, he had refused it.
“You mustn’t blame yourself, Son,” my father said. “It was an accident. Nobody could have seen it coming … Nobody would have imagined.”
“But the light, Dad,” I heard my brother say. “The light.”
My father saw me standing in the doorway. I hung back: I thought it was not my business. It was not my world. It was the world of men like Sam and my father, who always knew what to do. I knew something terrible had happened and I knew that they would know what to do. And I would not.
“You’ve done everything you could,” my father said. Then he pulled up a chair for me. “Have a seat, Bill,” he said. “There’s been an accident.”
I had never heard my father’s voice like that. Tender, like a woman’s. Like my mother’s. As if, to tell the terrible story he knew he had to tell, he had taken on my mother’s voice. Where was my mother? Away at her sister’s for a week of playing bridge. We all knew we needed her; we needed our mother, he needed his wife. But she wasn’t here. She couldn’t help us.
He told me the story in my mother’s voice.
They had planned to do all the driving along the soft berm at the side of the road; it was more than wide enough for the wagon. But there was just one place where the berm wouldn’t take them because there was an old store on the side of the road, so the farmer, Mr. Thompson, drove the tractor pulling the wagon into the road itself. Just to avoid the store. It all happened in a minute, Sam kept saying … less than a minute. A truck came up behind them. It mistook the white lights of the wagon for the lights of the store and so it didn’t stop until too late. The driver jammed on his brakes. The truck rammed into the back of the wagon and the people in the front of the wagon couldn’t see it coming. The ones on the back of the wagon saw the truck and jumped off in time—“I was one of them,” Sam kept saying. “Dad, it easily could have been me.” But the people in the front couldn’t see anything; they didn’t have time to jump. Mr. Thompson was killed.
“Betsy Laird died, too,” my father said, and he put his head in his hands so that he and Sam looked like matching statues, facing each other, as if they were at the entrance to something, as if they guarded the space between them, which was nothing but night air and the white deal table.
Nothing of what was happening seemed possible. My brother weeping. My brother and my father sitting with their heads in their hands like each other’s reflections. Everyone awake, long after midnight now, the air cool, silky, but heavy with this new wrongness that hung over the white deal table. Betsy Laird dead. The smartest girl I’d known, even smarter than Laurel. A student at Northwestern, not home ec, but literature. Modern poetry. She wanted to be a professor.
One night after a beach picnic, we were all lying around the dunes and she said, “I don’t think I’ll get married, Billy. Who would have me once they knew what I was really like? And besides I don’t see myself doing dishes and changing diapers.”
She’d always talked like that to me, seriously, although most of Sam’s friends thought of me as Sam’s kid brother. We lay looking at the stars and talked about poetry. About life. She had long tan legs and her hair was a cap of crisp dark curls.
She’d been thrown from the wagon and broken her neck. A broken neck didn’t seem like the kind of thing you needed to die from, I thought. “I broke my neck.” It was a statement people used when they were exaggerating something: some difficulty that had nothing to do with death. When you heard the words you didn’t think of blood or a stopped heart. I thought it sounded like something you could get over, if you lay very still, perhaps for a long time. But eventually you’d get over it. Eventually you’d get up again.
But Betsy Laird would not. Betsy Laird was dead. She would not be getting up; she would not be all right. I saw her body, flat, sprawled on the white road in the clear moonlight. I saw that Betsy Laird was dead. She was twenty years old.
I tried to think what was the right thing to be doing now. Should I sit with my father and my brother or should I let them alone? When I was trying to decide, a terrible thought came to me, a thought that I believed was the worst thing I could possibly be thinking. What I was thinking was this: Betsy Laird is dead and I am alive. I am glad to be alive. If I had to choose which of us was to be alive and which was to be dead, I would choose what happened: that Betsy Laird had died and I had lived.
I excused myself and stepped outside into the darkness. I was glad to feel myself shivering. My impulse was to strip off my pajamas and run into the lake, which would be freezing at this hour, at this moment in June. But I knew my father and my brother would think that was ridiculous, embarrassing: it would reinforce everything they thought about me. That I was not the man they were. That I was not quite a man.
I stood for a while looking at the water and then I was seized by the urgency to write something, to write something down. I went back to my room and wrote a poem. God, how I cringe looking at it now among the papers my mother saved, that I now save. How false it was, and I see the falseness in every syllable. If I were going to write truly, I would have had to write a poem about being glad that I was alive and Betsy was dead. But of course that wasn’t what I did. This is what I wrote:
She filled the lives of those she knew
With richness born of earnest love
And like a candle, snuffed anew
By Him who watches from above
Leaves still a glow, so then will she
Which through our lives will ever be
Reflections of eternity.
When my mother got home the next day, all the tears were over. My brother was dry-eyed, and my father returned to silence. She took up the work of weeping; they were glad to pass it on to her. And I was glad to be able to hide my real self from her once again, to show her the poem I had written, as if I were a nice boy, a loving boy, a poetic boy and not the horrible person I knew myself to be. Oh, God, how it pleased her, to have a son who wrote poetry. She held my hand and kissed it and said what a blessing it was to have a son like me, and how we were all alive in this world just by chance, and how we could lose what we most loved any minute. She copied the poem in her own handwriting. I don’t know when she took it down to the local newspaper, but that fall, after I’d been at the University of Chicago for two months, she sent it to me. By that time I knew enough to be mortified by it; I hid it in the back of my bureau, the way some other boys hid French postcards. And I knew it was another thing that I had lost: pride in my mother’s pride, replaced now by a necessary skepticism, a necessary coldness.
I started college at Chicago that fall, and it was almost as much of a shock as the news of the world I got from the Hauptmanns. Except that, after the first shock, no shock has the same power. I can hardly believe that I was only there for a few months before I left; I can hardly believe the speed and force with which my old ideas were blasted and new ones put in place. I had already learned from the Hauptmanns what a naïve reader I had been, but now my naïveté was not tolerated kindly: anything personal, anything having to do with the life of Bill Morton had to be excised from what I read, under pain of literal failure: a paper scored through with red lines and marked at the top with a red F. It was no wonder I lived in dread of anyone finding the poem I had written about Betsy Laird’s death.
I was living away from home for the first time, in a dorm, and the excitement of the day’s classes went on all night: we sat on the floor, we smoked endlessly, we talked about God and death and sex. Platonic forms. The existence of the unconscious. Relativity. It was the age of Robert Maynard Hutchins: The Great Books curriculum, the Socratic method, the insistence on a rigorous scientific education. The electrification that had taken me over most violently was fully in force then: I woke up every morning, my mind running like a torrent, l
ike a waterfall powering an electric plant. I lit a cigarette, headed to the john, and talked about sex or death with one of my roommates as we shaved and discussed Spinoza looking at each other in the mirror.
But it was 1939 and what we talked about more than anything was war: the War that was going on in Europe and what our part in it should be. I never told any of them about my encounter with Thomas Mann; it would have seemed too much like bragging, and maybe I was ashamed of how small a part I would have had to play in my own narration of the arguably quite small event. We debated Aquinas’s theory of the just war; we spoke about pacifism and the horrors of the Great War: was force justified, was force necessary … what did it have to do with us as Americans?
And in the library I wrote to Thomas Mann, trying to sort out all the ideas that had been thrown around by my friends as we shaved and smoked and drank coffee and ate our hurried, unattended-to meals. I wrote him a long letter, I remember, about Mr. Lyons, because as important as my teachers and fellow students were to me in trying to understand what I felt about war, no one was more important to me than Mr. Lyons.
When I wrote to Thomas Mann about Mr. Lyons it was, as I said, a way of trying to understand my troubled feelings about pacifism, but it was a way of presenting myself—although it was a presentation that existed only in my mind—to the great man as someone who would interest him. An exotic. Which is the way I was presented to him by the Hauptmanns: Herr Mann, you have before you a specimen of the real American. As if I was a creature in a zoo, or an exhibit at the world’s fair. Chinese jugglers, Indian snake charmers, Peruvians playing wooden flutes. As I had charmed him talking about Grandmother Geer, I knew he would have been charmed by, or at least interested in, Mr. Lyons, such an anachronism, such an anomaly, a sign of something in America that one need not be ashamed of, that I could, even under the gimlet stare of the Hauptmanns, love.
Mr. Lyons was the minister of our church, the Congregational, on Taft Street. He was universally beloved because of his great kindness. When there was illness or death, he was there: you could count on him to show up. He had been trained in the Chicago seminary, with an emphasis on a kind of Gospel Christianity that was almost entirely based on moral responsibility. He was the lowest of low Protestants. There was no ritual element to his services; once a year Communion was provided, and instead of wine, grape juice was passed in special small silver cups, only large enough for a sip. No chance of excess of appetite being tempted … even with grape juice. He dressed in a way none of us had ever seen before. He wore a long swallow-tailed coat, a grey wool vest in all weathers; around his neck, a white silk cravat. Oddly, he gave me my first copy of Life magazine.
Only now I realize how courageous he was, to preach to a congregation that only wanted platitudes and anodynes, that Jesus wanted us to treat everyone as brothers. He spoke about racial tolerance when it was a concept as foreign as space travel. And he was a pacifist, as he said Jesus required us to be. He reminded us of the horrors of the First War. He reminded us to think of shattered flesh, and not abstract ideas, to remember that what was called patriotism so often ended in shattered flesh. And so, by the time I was two months into the University of Chicago, I realized that I had encountered a genuinely good man, a genuine moral hero. And yet Thomas Mann had said that we must do our part to keep back the monster Hitler and his monstrous plans for the world. And that included taking our place beside the British, joining the war effort. This was before Pearl Harbor. By 1942, Mr. Lyons was fired from the congregation for his pacifism. But by that time, I was in the thick of it. I had written to Thomas Mann about Mr. Lyons long before that. Or perhaps it was only a few months earlier, but the time before my entering the ambulance corps and everything that followed seemed like centuries, impossible to calculate with a paltry metric like months.
How do you tell what is a genuine moral concern, real pacifism, and what is simply a desire for self-protection, or isolationism? I read Gandhi, and quoted him in my letter to Thomas Mann. I assured Thomas Mann I understood the depth of Hitler’s menace. (Of course I did not. Of course I believed, at eighteen, that I did.) I asked him if he thought it was possible to be a pacifist and a realist. A warrior and a peaceful man.
So many elements were involved in my decision to volunteer as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service that it’s impossible now for me to say which was the most important. I can say, though, that meeting Thomas Mann made me feel it imperative that I do something about the situation in Europe. But we were not involved, at that point, in the War. And the influence of Mr. Lyons made me gravitate towards something nonviolent, and so when a guy on my floor, who was a Quaker, volunteered for the American Field Service Ambulance Corps, I went along.
But I’m not here to talk about my war; there’s nothing more boring than an old codger reminiscing about the glory days, about the Great Generation. I drove an ambulance from January through May 1940, first in France, and then, when France surrendered, we made our way to Egypt. And then of course we entered the War, and I seemed to have lost all taste for pacifism; in any case, I didn’t feel I could fail to put my life on the line when other people were doing it. And I didn’t feel certain enough of my beliefs to register as a conscientious objector … and I certainly wasn’t certain enough of them to risk going to jail. I enlisted before I was drafted, and, because I’d had experience in the ambulance corps, I was sent to work in the army hospital in Paris. I never had to fight; I never even had to hold a gun. Certainly, I never even came close to killing anyone.
After that, it was only natural that I thought of becoming a doctor. By that point, I understood that I wasn’t going to be a great actor, that, although I loved literature, I wasn’t going to be a great literary scholar. And there seemed no point doing those things if you weren’t going to be great at them. I believed I could be a good doctor, and that it was a good thing to do. I’d seen enough pain, enough broken bodies, to believe that what I wanted was to do something to make those kinds of things better. Sometimes I thought of the broken body of Betsy Laird and I wished I’d been there. Maybe I’d have been able to do something.
I think I was a good doctor. I loved my work. Was I a great doctor? It doesn’t seem a worthwhile question. I was good at what I did. I can honestly say I’ve had a good life, and I know that even that is quite a rare thing to be able to say.
For a few months, though, I was an ordinary college student, as though anything in that year could have been ordinary. I went to classes, I did my work, I stayed up all night talking with the guys on my floor, I had a few dates, but nothing spectacular: I was still a virgin. I was working my way through school, having to supplement my scholarship: my parents couldn’t afford to give me any money. So I got a job, first as an usher at the Apollo Theater on Randolph Street, and then, when the doorman had a heart attack and died, I was hired to take his place.
It was a great job, everybody wanted it. I was hired right away because I’d been an usher at the movie theatre in the Dunes. I guess I was considered experienced. Once again, I got to see movies for free; my boss was a terrific guy, I realize now he must have been pretty old, maybe in his seventies, I don’t know why he was still working. He’d had something to do with the making of movies, not just running a movie theatre. He talked to us about movie stars he’d known. Norma Shearer. Jean Harlow. William Powell. Edward G. Robinson. He told us that Jimmy Cagney was a good friend of his. We thought he was exaggerating, maybe making everything up, and then one day Jimmy Cagney came by to see him. Looking just like Jimmy Cagney, a small fellow, walking on the balls of his feet, reminding me of nothing so much as a bantam cock, though he was very nice to us, signed autographs. I have no idea what I did with my autograph of Jimmy Cagney. Of course I’ve moved around a lot. But I have managed to hold on to the books signed by Thomas Mann. And my silly Thomas Mann notebook.
It was a great location, the Apollo, everyone passed by, everyone going to the fancy stores on Michigan Avenue, everyone coming out of
the train station. I saw some amazing things, some things I’d never seen before. Drug addicts stumbling along, falling into the gutter. At first I thought they were drunks, but then Mr. Rosenberg, my boss, said, “No, kid, they’re junkies. They’re that way because of dope.” I guess I’d heard of people taking drugs but I’d never seen it. And once I actually saw a bank robbery, and just like Jimmy Cagney looked exactly like Jimmy Cagney in the movies, the bank robbery looked exactly like a bank robbery in the movies. First a guy came running out of the bank and jumped into a car that sped down the street, but it was caught in traffic, then there was a police car with a siren, followed by a taxi with a cop on the running board brandishing a gun. He shot at the tires of the getaway car and of course it had to stop, and the robbers got out of the car with their hands up over their heads. And then a man in a suit and a fedora—he must have been the police detective—got out of a taxi and put the robbers in handcuffs. When I told one of my grandchildren that, he said, “You know, Grandpa, for a lot of people that would have been the most exciting thing that ever happened to them. But you just tell the story like it was just another thing that happened in your life.”
I don’t know whether he was telling me that I wasn’t very good at telling stories or that my life had been unusually eventful. I sometimes find it difficult to distinguish praise from blame.
Mr. Rosenberg liked putting us all in snazzy outfits. The ushers had white pants and short red jackets and red caps with white bills. But when I was promoted to doorman, I was all in white pants with a red stripe up the side of the leg, a red jacket, a white Sam Browne belt, gold epaulets, a red cap with a lot of gold braiding. I thought I looked quite fine; it was a good way to get girls to notice me.
