Byron's Lane

by Wallace Rogers

  Recovering some of his familiar self, he told me that wouldn’t be necessary. He had responsibilities to which he had to attend in Iraq, loose ends he had to tie together before he could leave. He wasn’t sure how long these obligations might take. He said he would come home as soon as they were handled.

  I thought Adams was referring to the time he needed to spend with his staff and his women’s families to help them mourn their shared loss. He probably required a few weeks to pass his project on to a new program manager. I’ve since learned that most of the rest of Adams’s time in Iraq was spent directing what he later called “an appropriate response” to what had happened to his friends.

  *

  After I hung up the phone, I picked a book up from the floor that I’d been reading before I’d fallen asleep. The thick black-and-brown-jacketed book was a biography of John Kennedy. I carried it down the hallway and through my darkened living room, barely illuminated by a streetlight beyond the large front window. I laid the book on the desk in my study.

  Like most people who were alive when it happened, I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the news.

  It was early Friday afternoon—a wet, gray day. I had gym class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, right after lunch. I spent lunch hour that Friday unable to eat, sick to my stomach. Before English class, someone fresh from first-period gym told me that Mr. Schilling had brought the mats, the vault, and the parallel bars out of the storage room. The dreaded inevitability of having to face tumbling and gymnastics three times a week for at least a month stared me in the face, then punched me in the gut.

  I was wearing white gym shorts, a white crewneck Hanes T-shirt, cotton Wigwam socks, and black Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star basketball sneakers. I was in the school’s gymnasium, standing at the south end of the basketball court, in the middle of a line of ten freshmen boys dressed exactly like me, shivering. I was hoping no one noticed. Maplewood’s school superintendent waded as far into Ohio’s autumn as possible before he ordered the heat turned on in all the school buildings. I convinced myself that my shaking was as likely caused by low room temperature as it was by naked fear.

  Twenty feet in front of us, lying on his back, was Mike O’Brien. He was staring apprehensively in my direction between his bent knees. I was third in line. In less than twenty seconds I would have to run at O’Brien and somersault over him, my extended arms pushing off his knees as he helped my inverted body safely clear the place where his head lay on the cold blue mat. I had no talent for tumbling. My ineptitude was infinitely compounded by stark memories of spectacular failures, having never accomplished the handspring somersault since I was first challenged to try one as a seventh grader.

  Raising his head off the mat, O’Brien’s legs framed his darting eyes as he looked nervously ahead. He knew my record. Everyone did. What was about to happen would look like newsreel footage of a Japanese kamikaze attack on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. The joints in my knees and elbows were turning to goo as I approached the front of the line.

  But profound embarrassment and likely injury were postponed that gray, damp Friday. A clap of thunderous static from deep inside the school’s intercom system burst through two meshed boxes hanging on the wall behind us, next to the scoreboard. The noise stopped everything. It was followed by the assistant principal’s tap on his microphone to make sure it was working. We reacted like people whose names had been shouted out in a crowd. All of our attention instinctively turned to the source of the sound.

  Mr. Marcus’s voice followed farther behind the crackle and the tap than it usually did. His six words echoed throughout the cavernous gym: “Students: President Kennedy has been assassinated.”

  His short announcement, made haltingly, with a never-before-heard twinge of emotion, rippled through the vacant space around me, then retreated back through the public address system. The incessant waves of a national radio news broadcast followed, and filled our classrooms the rest of the school day.

  We stood in our lines for a while, listening to CBS radio, dumbly staring at the olive-green block wall behind us and the black electric scoreboard and the two speakers attached to it. No one in the gym spoke for a very long time. Silence was finally broken when Coach Schilling told us to go back into the locker room and change. Gym class was over.

  We shuffled, uncharacteristically quiet, through sixth, seventh, and eighth periods. The piped-in radio provided the day’s lesson in all of our remaining classes. Teachers sat, heads bowed, on the front corners of their desks. As disturbing as the news was, it was almost as unsettling to watch the adults around us react to it. They were stunned, off-kilter—unable to tell us how to absorb the information that dumped down upon us from the wooden speakers above the green chalkboards in each of our classrooms.

  At half past three the last bell rang. I had twenty minutes to get my jacket and gym bag from my locker and collect whatever else I needed to take home, go out into what was left of an overcast November afternoon, and board yellow bus Number 8 for a four-mile ride home to Byron’s Lane. Mr. Dawkins, our bus driver, took no notice of me as I climbed the two steps inside the bus’s opened accordion door. His eyes were staring at his lap as he listened to a small transistor radio propped up on the sill of the open vent window.

  Jonathan Adams already occupied half of our bench seat near the back of the bus. The green vinyl felt colder than usual as I slid in next to him, and he moved away from me, hard against the side of the bus.

  During the ride home, speaking in muffled voices like we heard everywhere in public places that weekend, we talked about what had happened. We decided to get off the bus at my house and watch the news on TV. Our ability to grasp the significance of a news event absent pictures of it was atrophied by a short but intense lifetime of television-watching.

  Sharing thoughts and opinions that probably exceeded the grasp of most high school freshmen and thirteen years of life experience, we discussed the effect President Kennedy’s assassination would have on life in America after that Friday.

  Adams said we’d probably have to work much harder at enjoying it.

  He was right.

  We did.

  We still do.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I would finally appear at Jonathan Adams’s front door almost nine months after he had returned from Iraq. I stayed four days. Lesions made by Iraq’s jagged edges seemed mostly mended by then. But one deep gash remained. It had festered since he’d been home.

  “Time heals all wounds” is as true and instructive a phrase as any four words strung together in the English language. But a part of me believes I could have done something to help accelerate my friend’s healing process. Maybe things would have turned out differently if I’d been there when Adams made his first attempts to wash Iraq from his dirty clothes and shake her from his dusty shoes.

  *

  We were almost past Adams’s mailbox when my driver noticed the address written boldly in black enamel paint on its silver sides. His cab barely missed the mailbox when he made a last-second sharp right into Adams’s driveway.

  Adams’s impressive two-story black-shuttered gray house loomed in front of us. It grew larger as the taxi meandered up its neat, narrow driveway, lined on both sides by maple trees more robust than saplings, but not yet mature.

  This was actually the second home built on its foundation. The first one was only two years old when a tornado blew it away in 1975, along with the family of four who lived in it. The people who bought the property three years later designed and built the house that stands there now. Twelve years after they moved in, they were killed in an automobile accident while vacationing in Canada. The stockbroker from Minneapolis who bought it a year later broke his neck when he fell off a ladder; he’d been trying to a remove a bird’s nest from the chimney cap. It had been Adams’s house for almost six years when I visited him in late September. Until then, he’d been unaffected by the tragedy that seeped into the lives of everybody w
ho had ever lived on his hill.

  To be sure, the house and the property surrounding it were beautiful. But it was much too big a place for one person. Its size and its history would have been reasons enough to keep me house-hunting. But Jonathan Adams loved dancing on the rims of volcanoes. The house, its history, and the land all around it grabbed him when he stepped inside its reach, and never let him go. The place was tightly woven into his fabric.

  My folded arms found their way to the top of the taxi’s bench seat in front of me. I rested my chin and stared through the windshield at his colonnaded porch. The absence of a vehicle parked along the driveway told me I had beaten Jim Breech there.

  My visit was overdue. Since that middle-of-the-night phone call almost a year earlier, and the shooting in Samarra six weeks later, our personal and professional obligations had prevented us from cobbling a few days to share together. As it turned out, the four days I would spend with my friend were mostly scheduled, but in a comfortable way that kept us from having to find things to do.

  “Is this where Jonathan Adams lives?” my Somali driver asked. His accent was marked with traces of British English.

  “Do you know him?” I asked, surprised. It has always been difficult for me to absorb the fact that my best friend is moderately famous. He never acted like I supposed a famous person should act; he was too familiar to be any kind of a celebrity.

  “Oh yes, sir, I know of him. Jonathan Adams is a good man. He has been very helpful to my community—to the Somalis who live here.”

  As if he had been standing picket duty at a hiding place in the shrubbery, Adams pounced on the taxi the moment it stopped in front of his house. He bear-hugged me before I was hardly out of the car. The spontaneous gesture was an awkward, unusual show of emotion for both of us. Realizing that, Adams pushed us a handshake’s length apart.

  “It’s great to see you, Tom,” he gushed. He was grayer and thinner than I remembered from our last visit in New York.

  He led me behind the taxi, where the driver was already pulling my bag from the trunk. Adams shook hands with the man, introduced himself, and asked him his name, where he lived, how long he had been in Minnesota, and how he and his family were adjusting to life in the United States.

  I stood beside the cab and watched them talk, lost for a few seconds in random thought.

  Adams was a man who aged well. He was in reasonably good shape and had managed to keep most of his hair. When we were kids, he would suck his cheeks into his mouth, making the sides of his face indent. When I asked him why he did this, he said that it would mold his face and give it more character as he grew into it. He compared it to lifting weights. He told me that every time his mother saw a Gregory Peck movie on television, she would say how handsome he was. Adams decided that the lines in Peck’s face and the hollow spots beneath his cheekbones gave him his distinctive and quietly confident look. Adams liked the look. He decided he should emulate it after Peck got an Academy Award for his role as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Much to the consternation of a hundred housewives in our hometown, Adams beat all of them to the bookmobile the summer of 1962 and checked out the traveling library’s only copy of Harper Lee’s novel. He managed to keep it half of June and all of July. He read it twice during those six weeks. The film was made shortly after the book was published. The closest movie theater was ten miles away. Our parents seemed uncomfortable when we mentioned anything about the book and talked about wanting to see the movie. Most adults in Maplewood, a third-ring, white, middle-class suburb of Cleveland, were bothered by the civil rights movement, race relations, and what was happening “down South.” They wondered why “the coloreds” felt a need to stir everything up, instead of being “just a little more patient.” When the movie came to the Bristol Theater our parents were too busy to drive us to see it.

  Against my objections, Adams insisted on paying my cab fare.

  “I should have picked you up at the airport. But I wasn’t sure when Breech would get here, and your plane could have been late.”

  No explanation was required, but as always, Adams felt compelled to offer one. He had forgotten the fact that taking a cab from the airport had been my suggestion.

  I’d offered it when he called me the Sunday before and told me that Jim Breech, a seminal part of our Wonder Bread years growing up in Maplewood, had called Adams out of the blue and suggested he could “stop by for a beer” sometime that Thursday on his way home to Ohio after a two-week fishing trip in Manitoba. Neither of us had seen or talked to Jim Breech in almost forty years. Adams insisted that I extend my planned visit, moving it up by two days to be on hand for the occasion. I eagerly complied. Seeing Breech again would be like having a second chance to get a look at Halley’s Comet—a once-in-a-lifetime experience offered to those of us alive when it was scheduled to swing by.

  Adams and I saw Halley’s Comet at an observatory in California in 1986. We hoped that Jim Breech’s reappearance wouldn’t be as disappointing.

  As the taxi headed back down his driveway, Adams picked up my bag, put his arm around my shoulders, and steered us up the walkway and through his bright-red front door. Ten minutes later, we were sitting on the long redwood deck attached to the back of his house, waiting for Breech and drinking cold beer from a chilled case of Rolling Rock that Adams had bought specially for Breech’s visit.

  *

  Over the years, Adams and I learned how to bridge the wide gaps between the times we were in each other’s company. We ignored them. If something happened during the interim that we felt was important, the news worked its way into the flowing conversation. An hour after Adams and I had toasted my presence on his back deck, ours was already in the midst of a lull. The quiet was more the symptom of a comfortable familiarity than any indication of a burned-out friendship.

  Adams showed no fallout from his trauma in Iraq, though he seemed to be making a discernible effort to avoid the subject. I came to Minnesota determined to induce a detailed account of what happened to him in Iraq, so I could pull him back to where he was before he left. My first attempt occurred when we were standing in his kitchen, uncapping our first bottles of beer. Adams asked about my sister. I made my move. I told him that her youngest son returned home last year from an eight-month tour of duty near Tikrit.

  Adams nibbled, but chose not to take the bait. “He must have been based at Camp Speicher. The place is a hell hole: a patch of dusty desert, roofless cement-block buildings, a few scrubby trees, some brown grass, and lots of buckled blacktop.”

  Then I heard the story for the hundredth time about how he had always regretted not having made a run at Gina while the three of us were in high school.

  “Your sister has the most beautiful brown eyes I’ve ever seen. They’re unforgettable. They’re truly something to behold.”

  As far as I know he hadn’t seen my sister and her brown eyes since my wedding in Connecticut a very long time ago. He handed me my beer and I followed him onto his back deck through the screen door he slid open.

  Six billion people walked the earth that Thursday afternoon, and not one of them had been involved in as much of Adams’s life as I had. Yet there was almost always a sliver of space between us. That was how he was. He allowed me glances at the intimate details of his life, but he shared very few of the feelings that surely accompanied them.

  To a casual observer Adams seemed contemplative and sensitive. Sometimes he was inspiring. But I’ve never known anyone so ill at ease with his private side. He blossomed when circumstances thrust him into highly charged situations. But he needed more space and time than the rest of us to work through personal problems, most of which were self-inflicted. He was as incapable of managing his own life as he was abundantly blessed in his ability to take care of the rest of us. A pilgrim in the Land of Opportunity, Adams perpetually sought more, to fill a gnawing sense of emptiness he had no business feeling.

 
Alongside the fragility that almost no one ever saw, Adams was assembled with all the best attributes of our generation: curiosity, idealism, tenacity; elements that had gradually been beaten out of the rest of us by the demands and compromises of life that Adams had somehow managed to avoid—at least until Iraq.

  As we talked on his back deck I looked for signs that he was pushing and pulling and shaping himself into what he used to be.

  “I introduced a campaign finance bill last month; we had hearings on it last week,” Adams said.

  First indications were that my Byronic hero was back.

  Adams paused and picked at the label on his beer bottle. “We got a fair amount of good press, but it’s not likely to go anywhere. We have too few sponsors and there’s a ton of money quietly working against us. The struggle’s wearing me down and I’ve only been at it a few weeks.”

  The smile on my face dissipated. Faith and hope were eclipsed by cynicism and doubt in the space of a sentence. I was searching for what I wanted to see. I needed to be more clinical. Adams was like one of Claude Monet’s paintings of sunflowers and Japanese bridges spanning lily ponds. His substance was most obvious and best appreciated if the person looking for it wasn’t standing too close.

  We talked about politics for a few more minutes. Then he broke off the conversation.

  “I need to walk out front and get the mail. Relax and make yourself comfortable. I’ll get us two fresh beers when I pass back through the kitchen.” Adams rose from his chair, walked the length of his deck and disappeared around the corner of his house.

  Suddenly I was alone. I looked around me for the perspective I sought.

  Where a man comes from and where he lives speaks loudly about him. Where he was born and how he was raised shapes him; his house tells how he’s processed that. Adams and his house showed great possibilities and a crate full of contradictions. Adams made no effort to hide the creature comforts he collected, available to Americans whose dreams have been largely realized—at least in economic terms. Signs of success were everywhere on display. A two-story floor-to-ceiling window separated most of the redwood deck from his sumptuous living room. Enclosed by a vaulted ceiling, the room was dominated by a massive stone fireplace. A covered hot tub occupied the north end of the deck; a large gas grill was pushed against the side of the house.