by Paul Hawkins
Outside the stadium we were met by a small pack of demonstrators protesting the condemnation. Some of them had signs: “Fair Compensation,” “Stop the Bridge,” “House the Poor,” and, to my amusement, “Not in My Backyard.” A few bull-necked cops stood back watching them, but they didn’t seem too interested. The demonstrators did not get much notice or sympathy from the crowd filing into the stadium. Opposite them were signboards showing artists’ renditions of the city’s plans for the urban renewal’s extension. The posters showed people walking in open air markets surrounded by frozen yogurt stands and coffee shops. Families cruised down bike trails or jogged in the Central Park. Others participated in a regatta on the wide watercourse made, via a dam, from the once-trickle of a river. I swear I am not usually a cynic about such things but I did not see more than a handful of people of color in all of the drawings. Having come from a primarily Hispanic neighborhood, one that was now going to be largely condemned, it rankled me a little.
I walked over to talk with the demonstrators. I told my son and Ed I’d meet them inside.
Once I got closer I could see what an odd group they were. Once was a big, young bearded man, a brown-cassocked monk or friar or something. He was saying a rosary and when people went past he was telling them how many homes would be destroyed and how many families would be displaced by the new construction. Flanking him were two elderly, diminutive Hispanic-looking nuns (Carmelites) in habit with the same message. A strident, lean old man with an Old Testament beard was chanting out a vengeful prayer to St. Michael. A man in a neat business suit was handing out fliers explaining what the real value of the property should be rather than the city’s estimates. This was the man for me. But before I could talk to him I was accosted by two women who demanded to know how the city could raise the sales tax by a penny to make new playgrounds for the rich when there were so many poor and homeless that needed to be taken care of. I turned to them and was about to offer some money to whatever charitable fund they used to feed the poor when I recognized one of the them as the girl I had known years before, when I was a young man and fell in love in the old neighborhood.
She looked startlingly different now. The fullness of her young face was gone and her cheeks looked hollow and had lost their color. Her hair was hidden by a bandana. Her eyes had heavy lids that hid the once-bright eyes beneath them. Her figure was gone – not skinny, not fat – just shapeless. She saw at once that I recognized her.
“Ah, Clayton!” she said and smiled, and she threw her arms around me in a hug, then she held me off and looked at me. “The years have been kind to you,” she said. “I hear you’re some sort of software mogul now.”
“Hardly a mogul – I just managed to invent a few things.”
My mind sized her up and tried to measure her against the woman my memory knew, the young, happy, vibrant beauty I had shared a hope of a bright future with. In my mind, the youthful memory was more real than the woman before me. Then both seemed unreal.
“What have you been up to?” I asked.
“Two broken marriages,” she said. “I finally realized that who I’m really married to is the people. It’s been a long life. We tried to start collective farms in Guatemala and they gunned the peasants down and put a bounty on the priests. We preached social justice in El Salvador and they gunned down Archbishop Romero. And here – here nobody listens. Look around you – we have a playground for the rich and we can’t even fill one coffee can with donations for the needy.”
I couldn’t tell if she loved the poor or loved being a champion for the poor.
“So are you going to donate?”
I took $100 out of my wallet and was about to drop it in the bucket.
“I was hoping you were going to write a check.”
“I’ll tell you what – what organization looks after the mentally ill who have become homeless? I’ll give to that.”
She mentioned a state program that was inadequately funded and could only keep a person off the streets for three months at a time, and then they were on their own again.
“It does not sound like there’s much.”
“There’s not enough.”
“That’s why you’ve got to work to change the whole system.”
“When’s the next city council meeting on ‘Bridge to Tomorrow’?”
“What does it matter? None of it’s decided at the council. It’s all decided in backrooms behind closed doors. The big money draws up the plans and the city rubber stamps them.”
“Look, I’ve got to get into the game and meet my son.”
I excused myself. I went and talked to the man arguing for higher property evaluations and asked him what could be done. He said the Urban Renewal Board would finalize the property values, and that two city councilmen from poor districts were asking them to be generous in their offers. That wasn’t much out of a council of eight, but it was a start.
I gave the man my card and went into the game. I joined Robert and Don in our seats and bought them each a beer. I knew that alcohol was against every bit of advice on my son’s medicine bottles, but he loosened up with a beer. So sue me.
It was a fun game. Even though I knew next to nothing about basketball, I found myself warming to it just by being part of the crowd. Robert was starting to have fun too. I tried to shout my support for the home team.
“You don’t you know any of their names, do you?” Robert asked.
I told him I was learning them as I watched.
Don had become a wild man. I half expected him at any moment to rip open his shirt and show his bare chest painted with the team’s colors. This from mild, reserved Don.
Robert watched me watching him and laughed. “Now you’re getting to know the King of Veg-All,” he said.
“Get this Dad,” Robert said. “Don’s latest project is proofreading some literature professor’s novel called ‘Fly Whither, Finch.’” He laughed as he described it to me. It was a tale of lost loves spanning generations of mothers and daughters, each generation carrying a torch for what might have been, yet doggedly loyal to what came to be, their rugged men, all told against the backdrop of a runaway girl who had been murdered - but was it by the lover who had lured her from her home, or by a stranger? The generations of women often discussed the girl in flashbacks while buying antique milk jugs or washboards or other decorations for their country kitchens. Would her lover ever be acquitted? Only flashbacks leading up to the present day might tell, as the mystery unfolded to reveal what might have been overlooked, such as lusty hired hands or drifters or her dark scorned beau (now a prominent businessman). In all instances and imagining she fled into the night, free, beyond all dogmatic authority, finally, the wind in her long hair, running towards what might have been, might be, true love, fly whither?
“It’s like a man writing ‘Fried Green Tomatoes,’” he said.
I told him I’d have to ask Ed to see the proofs. I could stand to read something a little cheesy. “He’s smashing the paradigm,” I said. I had no idea what it meant. I’d heard it in Ed’s class.
I bought them both another beer but that was the limit, I told myself. My son was having a good time. When the crowd spontaneously did that stupid wave he did it – I didn’t know anybody still did the wave. He even commented on how pretty the cheerleaders were. I found myself thinking “This is too good – something’s going to happen.” But nothing happened. At least not that night. Toward the end of the game he did seem tired.
“I need to go home now,” he said, as if he were reading his own temperature on a thermometer.
Robert now lived in an apartment is a supervised community – a kind of halfway house – for the mentally ill. Nurses checked on him every day to make sure he took his pills – he had help on call 24/7 if he needed it. It was a blessing that I was able to afford it. Even he was beginning to realize it was best for him – at least for now. Ed told me that he always talked about it as being temporary – that someday he would be out as a n
ormal citizen again.
“Is that possible?” I’d asked.
“I don’t know,” Ed said. “The doctor said it’s likely he could go back to being a student at some point, but he’ll always need supervision. Maybe someday that can be you.”
We parted ways in the parking lot, and Ed drove Robert home.
*
I ended up going to the City Council meeting designated to formally approve Phase II. At first they weren’t even going to let me speak because I was not actually a resident of the city, but a member of the protesting group said they’d hired me as an outside consultant. Yep – hired for a dollar.
“I grew up in that neighborhood,” I said. “I realize the crime rates are high – but you are the ones who assign inadequate police resources there. I realize the roads are crumbling – but you are the ones who are spending millions across the river and won’t even send over crews to fill the potholes. You have lowered the property values by your neglect, and I think you owe a little more to the families who have stayed behind when everything went rotten, because it simply was their home.”
“The Urban Renewal Board will take all that consideration.”
“And I noticed there are hardly any minorities in any of the artist’s conceptions you had drawn up. For instance, there were only white people at the regatta.”
This seemed to get their attention. The council members looked at their design consultant. He shrugged his shoulders. They next time I checked the sketches online, some of the faces had been colored in as with a brown crayon.
“I hope that’s not reflective of the demographic you’re most concerned about,” I said. “The city should be interested in the welfare of all its citizens.”
“We assure you that the benefits of having a world-class urban renaissance will trickle down to all levels of society.”
I had turned to leave the podium but then turned around. “And you know, you could stand to pour more money into funding care and facilities for the mentally ill. One third of the homeless are mentally ill, and now the only halfway house you fund for them is jail. Or a bus ride out of the state. My son is mentally ill – I shudder to think of what would become of him if I didn’t have the money for private care.”
They nodded thoughtfully. I could see them counting down the minutes to adjournment.
After me a lot of concerned voices and cranks took their turns at the podium.
“The whole system has to change,” the woman I used to know shouted. “The people would rise up if they could be made to see how unjust this distribution of wealth is. I ask all of you to think of what this money could do if it were distributed equally among your neediest constituents. You have a moral obligation to make a just society.”
They passed the measure two minutes after the last voice was heard. Phase II was formally inaugurated. As I was leaving one of the councilman’s assistance gave me a phone number for the city’s executive committee dedicated to studying the plight of the homeless. When I got home I looked it up online. It had a discouragingly meager budget.
None of the religious activists followed me out – they had spotted a TV camera and were organizing a chant in hopes of making the evening news. I admired their fight, but didn’t think much of a joint venture of Christ and Marx. But this is coming from a man who doesn’t think about religion much. Everything I know is in the sacraments, and I’ve neglected them for so long I’m scared to go back. If I could run into one of those diminutive Carmelite nuns again, maybe I could ask her how to get back, or to walk back with me.
The next day I donated five million dollars to the Salvation Army’s homeless shelter and asked the largest companies lobbying for Phase II to match my donation in the founding of housing and training for the mentally ill. I even wrote an editorial about it. I knew I was getting to be a lonely old man when I started cranking out self-righteous editorials.
Was the donation a lot of money to me? Yes, it was a lot to me. The ElectronCo app had just caused two million cellphones to simultaneously crash. I would be litigating and paying for that for quite a while. I fired the Ivy League biz whizzes I had hired to run the company and resolved the next day to go back and run it myself. I needed something to do.
*
While cleaning house at ElectronCo, I had to hire outside consultants to sort out the mess of the books. One of the women I hired seemed to read my mind, and finish my sentences for me. She knew what needed to be done before I could think to give the order. She was kind to me, and empathetic. I could make her laugh while still being diplomatic. I began to think that maybe I would like to get to know her after the work was finished. I hoped she liked older men, but at 54, I told myself, I wasn’t really that old.
*
I invited Art from church over to my house when football season started like I said I would. It turned out that as two widowers we had much in common. I even went with the church men to fix up the houses of the needy, and not a one of them proselytized to me after I told them to back off. I hated being preached to, but I like hammering things, but please don’t ask me to paint within the lines.
*
I would like to be able to say my son got better, but it was a day to day thing. We were able to see each other more often, although he still had outbursts of animosity toward me. The best thing about our relationship was that we were both able to talk about Ed. I dreaded the day when Ed should exit our lives. When the next semester started he was able to get enrolled back in school, in his old degree program, and he and I frankly told his professors about his needs. That required a great deal of trust on Robert’s part, but his faculty advisor was a great help. He took Robert under his wing.
And the great thing was when Robert started coming by my house for dinner now and then without Ed. He used my office to study in because it was quiet and I had a great computer/printer setup. He would sometimes fall asleep in the office and wake up and leave the next day. It made me glad that he could sleep under my roof at all. I felt as though we might be on the first steps of a long road to building the kind of relationship that would eventually let him trust me again. Once he hinted to me about a girl. I never asked about it – he could tell me when he wanted to.
*
Ed was kind enough to get me a copy of “Fly Whither, Finch.” I was all ready to make fun of it, but damned if it didn’t make me cry. Three generations of women, all meeting at flea markets hunting for antiques and pining for lost loves that could never be. It was written as broad and cheesy as hell, but something about it was compelling:
“And so she ran into the night, young Jenna Finch, free free, the farmhouse and the mill behind her, the love she thought she needed gone, shed like a ribbon from her long hair, now blowing wildly in the grain-sweetened breeze, the love of her mothers, the love out of duty, gone gone, at long last abandoned in the moonlight, the heart at war with itself no longer, free to remember what it was, what if was made for, what it could be, free free, free to fly whither but to wonder, desire made pure by its own purity, at last the possibility recovered from predictable design, now rediscovered, a door opened because she chose it to be, for her, for now, the waiting strong arms of the farm hand and the night train to the West, chugging slowly with the red rhythm of life, leading to where life still unfurled into broad limitless tomorrows. No more butter churning for her. No more making soap from hog fat. Free free.”
We all had hearts that knew love even before we even had a name for it, and at some point in our lives we lost that forever. If I ever yearned for anything, it was for a memory of love when it was young and strong before the world numbered and encumbered it. But that was deep as my thoughts ever got. Free free.
*
I hoped I could fall in love with the lady I met at work. She seemed to sympathize with me. And I hope I might invent one more really big thing before I died. And I hoped for a cure for my son.
I feel like I have survived difficult things. I have tried to write down some of it, and I get di
spleased with what I’ve written, but I’m old enough to tell myself not to try to be perfect, so I jot down what I can. Maybe my son will understand me better when he reads it.
It is good that to have things to hope for. I drink less scotch than before. I still enjoy my musty house and my too-big chair. Maybe Robert will come over tonight. Or Robert and Ed. It is good to have visitors to look forward to. In some ways it is better to have visitors than friends.
