Hamilton Stone Review #23
NonfictionReamy Jansen, Nonfiction Editor
Soo Na Pak
River
There will come a time when you cannot speak. There will come a time when you cannot tell any more stories aloud, when the stories become dead weights and cannot be spoken, because they have not yet been written.
You will find moss paths leading into forests, and dream of oceans crashing in the lower floors of your apartment building. You will wander through the hallways of universities, film schools, notice peripherally the stone masonry and brickwork of the buildings, old, established, illusions of permanence.
Flowers will beckon you in their crevices of macadam, in the harshness of overhead lights in grocery stores, in buckets black and smooth, full of tepid water. It is said that memory is a vehicle, not the past. Memory becomes a quiet, swallowed, invisible claim, a tangible evidence, proof of what no longer is, and the body now inhabiting that nonexistence.
For instance, you will meet your brother. His name did not exist, according to many people—Korean and non—to whom you spoke it. You will sit beside her, a woman who is a stranger, but trusted as a thread from this world to the next, from this part of the earth to another. She holds a backpack in her lap, and you rest, beside her, the windows fogged inside the bus, the cool air outside tapping at the windows as you move through the city, toward Seoul, toward the towns just outside. In the warmth of the bus, you will tell her, as you flash to memories of shrimp crackers, bags of whale- and squid-shaped snacks, the smell of salt and sweetness on your breath, sitting on a bus filled with children, young children, clutching shiny, crinkling, metallic plastic bags in their laps, filled with food from a rest stop, junk food, snack food. You tell her, as you remember where you are, his name.
"It means river," she says.
A first. This is the first time anybody tells you that the name is. Does not say is not Korean, does not exist. This is the first time anybody tells you something other than No. Something other than That is wrong. Something other than That did not exist. Something other than Your memory is incorrect.
River.
She tells you the name means river. And you smile to yourself. You know she will guide you to the next place.
You will learn that of all the years you've spent speaking your memories aloud, none of it mattered. No one would remember what you did. You wanted to know you existed. That this life before the one you called your own happened. That they would recount it with you. Hold it with you. Tell you Yes. Yes. It happened. Yes. I remember.
Who was it? What was it? Their faces. Their hands. Their very names. The names that pieced you back together. River. Hana. Soo Na. They existed because you did. You existed in their presence. You existed in a way, in a way that breathed, that took shape and form. You began to feel like you had a body. You began to feel like you could start seeing what you looked like. You remembered what you looked like. No. You saw, for the first time, what you looked like. How do you dress a body you cannot see?
Try as she might, a little girl of six years could not hold onto the image of imprinted memory, faces of a mother, a father, a brother. Names slipped, but not his. Not River. No one in the family had black hair. No one knew what his eyes looked like. The way he smelled the same twenty years later. His fingers snapping. His eyes, long-lashed. The way he slept, his eyelids open.
You met him. You found yourself wanting to sleep beside him on the floor, comforted, soothed, a little girl body. His little boy body. Two siblings holding each other for warmth. For comfort. In the fear and the sweat and the sharp smell of escape. Now, you are a woman. In the car, he takes your hand. He is a man. He wears long black coats and slips a lighter and a carton of Parliaments into his pocket after taking one out. A cigarette. He does not smoke near you. He looks at you, long. Casting. You are holding your brother's hand, for the first time in decades. He is reaching for your hand. You giggle with him. He speaks a language that feels funny coming from his mouth. You speak a language that feels like stuffing biscuits into your mouth, and crumbs keep falling when you talk. Sometimes no sound escapes at all. You sit beside him in a restaurant. I cannot tell you who is seated across from you. There are two people. A man and a woman. I cannot tell you who they were. I could not say.
He sits beside you. River. He tells you to relax.
And it goes back. Your black boots, coming up to just below your knees, are wet. Sand, wet, and the foaming seawater splashes beneath them. Your feet are wet. He comes out to the shoreline, pulls you back, holds you. Green silk from your neck lashes in the wind. No one can comfort you. Not even your brother.
THIS SPACE IS OPEN: PAGES FROM A MEMOIR WORKSHOP
Joan White
Butterfly: "Just a Girl from Camberwell"
For Sam (1925-2009)
1.
I was three when the war began in 1938. Have seen a photo of myself at that time. My Auntie Doll probably pinched that picture. She was notorious not only for having tuberculosis and being in sanitariums for years but also was, as my mother put it, "a tea-leaf" meaning that she helped herself to small items such as other people's photos. Aunt Doll, she who was always dying yet outlived them all. Her son, John, was here in New York in 2008 as a tourist for four days and we got together for two of them. I hadn't seen him since he was 16 and so now at 65 it must have been as big a shock to him as it was for me. But there in his face I saw the earlier teenager. His comment to me was "I remember, Joanie, how you use to speak up!" Then I asked John, if he had any of the photos his mother had, he said he would take a look. Later, on returning to London, he e-mailed me a few pictures of various aunts and uncles. Growing up there were thirteen in my mother's immediate family. However, she said that she didn't believe that her parents were ever married. Anne Garrret, my grandmother, ran away from home to marry John Briggs, my grandfather. She died at 56 from tuberculosis and he at 41 probably from 'the drink.' My friend Valerie Feakins, aka White, no relation, friends since we were 10, both of us from Camberwell Green, has been researching my genealogy. She confirms that they were not married. But, with 13 children, how more married could you get, I ask you2.
The photo that Aunt Doll had was one of me at about three, pre WWII in a white dress, patent leather, strap shoes with ankle socks. My blond hair in ringlets, a silver bracelet on my chubby arm. My mother was fond of dressing me in white because she adored Jean Harlow. "You can have the face like the back of a bus" she would laugh "but if you've got blond hair you always stand out." Strangely enough, when I had Susan, my first daughter, born in London in 1955, my mother raved about her first grand daughter's head of black hair and big brown eyes. The truth be told, she loved children, not adults so much, but children could do no wrong in her eyes.
3.
In the London Blitz; evacuated for a very short time, they could handle my brothers but not me. Later, I delivered The Daily Mirror to a neighboring house bombed out by a doodle bug shortly thereafter. At 7 years of age, I knew the clothing coupons and food ration books better than anyone else in my family; never ate a chicken until I was 16. Always skeptical about eggs. My poor mother. Toward the end of the war, went to sleep in a bunk in a deep shelter every night for nine months, —me and my mum, my brothers were still evacuated in Barnett, Kent. I had Tuberculosis at 17, one month in Intensive care in Kings College Hospital. One year recuperating, six months of that bedridden.. My poor mum. Although we had difficult times when money was short, my Dad always kept enough aside for his cigarettes. Everyone smoked in those days, Weights, Woodbines, and Players were a little more expensive. Sometimes when things were especially tough Dad would roll his own. He also liked a daily bet on the horses, as did mum. He always nagged her about wanting to have one, too, but she was a very determined woman who always did what she wanted.
4.
In World War II my Dad proudly steered a red double-decker bus through all the roads of southeast London. After the war he drove his No. 35 bus up until six months before he died of lung cancer in 1967. He went in March, and, Stephanie, my youngest daughter, was born that December. The only accident he ever had was hitting a dog that ran out in front of his bus and he was devastated. Just before World War II, perhaps early 1938, London hadn't been bombed yet..my father's bus garage was situated on Warner Road, a five minute walk from our house on Crawford Road. On the corner of one side was Skilton's grocery shop and the other a pub. Although we lived in a poor section of the borough, Lambeth, the names of the streets had a magical quality of a time long ago when many affluent Victorians lived there. We actually had a park called Ruskin Park, named after John, who had lived in Camberwell at one time. On Sundays there was little else to do other than go to this park. Once there, my friends and I would either watch the older men bowl on the perfectly manicured green lawn or cheer my brothers playing soccer or boo their opponents. Further up from Herne Hill where Ruskin Park was we could reach Dulwich Park by a short bus trip, which didn't happen often because who had pennies to pay? After the Germans bombed us, Herne hill was hit quite hard, as was nearby Green Lanes dominated by a large Keep Out sign. Quite often we used to climb over the wall into this forbidden area where we had discovered many moss covered caves. Later it dawned on me that what we imagined were caves with Egyptian mosaic floors were really the remains of the rich peoples' mansions that had once glorified the area.
5.
After WWII, one of the games we children played was our interpretation of the Olympics. My eldest brother, Alfred, was the organizer. We planned, had try-outs, we trained. When I think back on it, how impressive were our organizational skills and enthusiasm, as well as our imagination and deep-hearted team spirit. The war had taught us much-- not only how to survive, but also to appreciate being alive. The sports we chose were the mile race, which was measured and decided as once around Crawford Elementary School. There was the long jump; the high jump; the javelin throw and the 100-yard sprint at which I was the expert. Some of the contenders besides myself and my two brothers were, Peter Tindall, Norman Hunt, Peter Gibbons, and Billy Sheehy. All boys except for me. My friends, Josie and Yvonne Thomas and Irene Lane, were spectators, but I lost out to them when it came to Dare, Truth and Promise. Having brothers held me back in that regard. The games were held in the street as there was hardly any traffic to shout at. My brothers were always proud of me when I proved unbeatable by the boys. They even allowed me to be the 12th man on the cricket and football teams.
Oden Oak
Growls, Barks, and Whimpers from a Palace Dog
Just before you die, life passes before your eyes from earliest memories to the last moments. I first heard of this phenomenon at age eight or nine and vaguely wondered how this information was communicated from folds who had passed on to the living.
It was a hot, humid day in August of 1969, typical weather for Saigon. The oppressive atmosphere was only broken by heavy afternoon showers during the rainy season. I was in the fourth month of a year's tour of duty in Vietnam. The circumstances which brought me to that war zone were precipitated by my quitting graduate school at the University of Buffalo. Perhaps it's something to do with an inability to see the relevancy and practicality of studying French literature. In any case my decision set a chain of events in motion from which there had been ho honorable escape.
At least I had what was considered "good duty," however potentially dangerous the environment. Instead of traipsing jungles and rice paddies looking for Viet Cong on search through jungles and rice paddies looking for Viet Cong on search and destroy mission, I was in an old , dilapidated building in Cholon, the Chinese quart of Saigon, teaching English to Vietnamese military personnel. After gaining language proficiency, the soldiers were to be sent to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, to receive training as helicopter pilots and mechanics. Ostensibly the Vietnamese could assume a large role in the war effort.
That August afternoon, I was writing some grammatical exercises on the makeshift blackboard, when I heard yelling on the street below my classroom. I walk over to the window to check it out...
Where are my glasses ? Crawling around the classroom, without windows or wall. Here they are; one busted wing, but the lenses intact. Still, hard to see what with all the smoke and particles of debris saturating the air. Sweating profusely now; carefully I wipe my eyes. Not sweat, blood. Damn. Students pressed up against me now, some crying. I remembered the first time I bled, four years of age, having cut my palm on a jagged rock. Than in rapid succession and chronologically people and event raced through my thoughts to that day in early 1969 when I received orders for a tour in Vietnam.
'Oak! Let's go—weapons room. You're on duty!" To my feet, following the sarg down the stairs, stepping over debris and covering bodies. Only thought: "I don't want to die in this God forsaken shithole."
When we got to the weapons room, it was empty. Clearly after the explosion, personnel cloest had grabbed whatever was available. The sarg turned around and left with a word. I made m way back upstairs and sat down outside what had been my classroom. Just opposite sat a light-skinned, black staff sergeant. He had a cigarette in his hand and asked for a light. I drew out my lighter and slid it across to where he was pressed up against the opposite wall. Cigarette now in the mouth, he flipped open the lighter, no easy task, as his hands were shaking so. Light the butt proved fruitless. Too much motion for the flame to maintain life for even a second. After the third unsuccessful attempt, I offered, "Want a little help there? He replied sheepishly, "I guess, if I'm ever going to get this damn thing lit."
I slid it across the floor, took the lighter, flipped it on, and held it toward the Marlboro, jutting from his mouth. He cupped my hand, drew in, and soon a plume of smoke was rising from the tip. "Mission accomplished," I quipped." "Team effort," he responded while smiling wanly.
We sat there and talked. I wasn't aware of time passing, just a succession of event and words among people. We both relaxed a little, somehow feeling that we weren't going to get overrun in the next few minutes. He showed me a picture of his wife (just gorgeous). It occurred to me at one point that this was the first conversation I had ever had with a black person. His comfort level became such that he mentioned his embarrassment at having to buy suntan lotion. The askance look he got from salespeople were annoying. "I wanted t shout, 'Hey, colored people can get sunburned, too!'"
We continued talking as he chain smoked. After finishing the first he was able to light his own without help, returning my lighter each time.
Then, from who knows where, my roommate, Bill Pettie, rushed up and plopped down beside me. I had met him at tech school where our outfit trained to be language teachers back stateside. He was a tough kid from Bayonne, New Jersey whose favorite expostulation was, "Bigger than shit," as in, "Bigger than shit, I'd have joined the Marines if I wasn't married!"
On this occasion, however, all he could manage was a whimper, "Oakie, what are we going to do?"
"I don't know, Bill," was all I said.Seconds, maybe minutes passes, when another NCO came of to our huddled group. "Pettie, there's a fire on the third floor. Get up there and help to put it out!" Bill didn't respond or move. "Petttie, move your ass, now!" He crouch lower and still said nothing. The "lifer" muttered some expletive, turned and left. He soon returned, this time with an order for me; "Oak, down to the second floor. They need some help with an injured man."
I followed the sergeant downstairs to where a couple of guys were trying to load a moaning G.I. onto a stretcher. I helped get him squared away and we carried him to the ground floor. On the way to the exit, one guy said derisively, "This SOB ran for the elevator after the first shots. Hit his head on the door after the explosion. So much for leadership. Probably get a Purple Heart!"
We got to the door. It flew open. We headed out into the street. The sunlight was blinding.
Liya Li
The Lonely Village Mental Hospital (-Gujia Zi Jing Shen Bing Yuan)
I was only ten years old when I visited an asylum for the mentally ill for the first time. It was in the midst of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution in November of 1966. Two of the Red Guards who had taken my father away two weeks earlier came to our apartment one evening and notified my mother that father had been sent to a mental hospital. It was the decision of the New Revolutionary Committee, they declared. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in June of 1966, the New Revolutionary Committee had been formed by a group of zealous, semi-literate factory workers anointing themselves as, "Chairman Mao's Red Guards." They removed father as the head of the second largest research institute on computer automation in military operations. They then jailed him for being a Capitalist Roader, one who followed the Right Wing in the Central Political Bureau of the Communist Party in Beijing. "We didn't torture him," they assured, but he has refused to eat or sleep for a week. "We think he had a mental breakdown," the Red Guards told mom.
The mental hospital was in a town called Gujia Zi , the Lonely Village, about 35 kilometers from the outskirts of our city, Shenyang. This was an impossible distance for mother to reach on her bicycle, the only private means of transportation in those days, in the bitter November. In addition to the distance and cold weather, the city was also unsafe to travel. We could hear daily machine guns being fired when different factions of Chairman Mao's Red Guards got into conflicts. My Laolao, grandma, told mother that going to Gujia Zi by herself was out of the question. She insisted that mother take me with her. The next morning at 5:00 o'clock, we set out on the city bus to the Long Distance Bus Depot. Our journey to the mental hospital had started.
In the narrow unlit hallway, mother and I groped our way downstairs from our second floor apartment. More darkness and biting cold swallowed us outside. My teeth chattered; my fingers and toes soon turned into frozen carrots even though mother had wrapped me in layers of cotton padded trousers, coats, scarves and mittens. The night before I had cried myself to sleep, but I hid my head inside the quilt so Laolao would not hear my sniffling, although I'm sure she felt my body shaking next to hers.
The Lonely Village lived up to its name. Even the long distance bus only went there once a day in the morning and returned to the city at noon. We arrived after a half hour ride in the ice-box of the non-heated bus and found ourselves inside the red jaws of a brick building, whose waiting room was filled with the smell of cheap cigarette smoke and people waiting for buses. All were men and peasants, who had no privilege to stay in Zhaodai Suo, temporary lodging places for government employees. They had spent the night in the waiting room, sitting or lying on hard benches or concrete floors without heat. At 6:05, a Russian-styled bus was pulled into the station. The peasants swarmed on board, as soon as its two doors swung open and occupied most of the seats with the loads of goods they couldn't sell in the city the day before. We immediately noticed that we were the only city passengers. The men stole glances at first, but soon all were lost in exhausted slumber in spite of the sub-zero temperature. The bus labored on bumpy dirt roads of ice for about two hours and finally we arrived at Gujia Zi. Somehow like magic, the peasant passengers scattered and disappeared in just a few minutes. Mother held my hand, lost and bewildered. After standing at the bus stop for about 10 minutes, we saw an old peasant picking horse manure on the road, who gave us directions.
From a distance, the hospital appeared as a row of match boxes lined up in the midst of deserted corn fields, now covered with snow in the dead of winter. A thin wolf tail of black smoke was slowly swirling from the chimney on the roof. As we approached, I saw the small windows along the sides had bars, including the entrance door. Mother peered in through the bars on the small door window and tapped. A guard let us in. He knew instantly we had come from the city to see father. He told us father was a VIP since the hospital had never had such a well-educated man and a big director as a patient. Those imprisoned were poor peasants and factory workers. Indeed, my dad was given the VIP treatment. He had his own room, ten by twelve square meters, with one mattress. The rest of the patients were squeezed into small rooms along both sides of the hallway. Those who were deemed nonviolent shared rooms, with five or six in each; there were no beds, only mattresses. Meals were mass-produced by a small kitchen crew, who fed their inmates like starving pigs: corn bread, salty pickled turnips and vegetable broth with only a little cooking oil.
Dr. Gao, the head doctor, received us in a small office he shared with another colleague and three nurses. In the center of the crowded room stood a coal-burning stove, a luxury to keep the medical team warm. The doctor, a top graduate from a prestigious medical college, asked mother to move Dad out as soon as possible. Otherwise, he might not be able to last another month. He recommended a mental hospital in Kai Yuan County , where his best friend was in charge. He also warned us not to get upset when we saw him. He explained that they had to use heavy sedation to tame him since he fought like a lion when the Red Guards dragged him through the entrance.
The five minutes we waited for father felt an eternity. When he finally shuffled into view, I felt a snake had bitten me. My blood froze. I wanted to run to him, but my legs failed. The first change I noticed was the pallid hue of his face; his dulled eyes set off darkening bruised eye bags underneath. He even seemed to have lost control of the movement of his eyeballs. With his arms hung by his sides, he looked more like a broken robot than my thirty-seven year old father. I could tell the Red Guards had bound him with ropes. His navy blue Mao style, padded jacket had holes with white cotton tufts peeping through, showing where the restraining ropes had bound him tightly. He shivered in a pair of pants without long underwear or socks. Mother flew up to him, clutching his arms, shaking his drugged body as if the shaking would wake him up from a bad dream. She cried, "Ruixiang, I've brought your daughter here. Do you recognize her?" But, no, the magic word "daughter" produced no effect. His gaze remained fixed on the dirt floor. Mother's hand trembled so much she had trouble lighting a cigarette, but she would not cry. She put the cigarette between his lips and made him smoke. It was only then did she remember to take off her overcoat and wrap him in it. Father puffed on the cigarette and then held it between the unsteady index and middle fingers of his right hand. Mother and I watched in silence. When he finished the cigarette, she sniffled into her handkerchief, repeating, "I'm taking you home."
When my sobs subsided, mother told me to go to fetch Dr. Gao, who came back right away. Was it possible for us to take father home? asked mother. He shook his head and said father needed medical attention, but promised he would try to reduce the dosage of father's medication. "You must get him to Kai Yuan," he reminded her, "as soon as possible." Mother insisted that father be properly dressed and fed before we would leave. She immediately gave money to one of the kitchen men and asked him to buy warm clothes and some food from the local peasants.
Dr. Gao told mother he had been exiled to this outpost because of his Capitalist father, who owned a large textile factory in Shanghai before the Liberation in 1949. He handed her father's medical report, and urged her to take it to the New Revolutionary Committee. His report strongly recommended that the Committee consider giving mother permission to transfer father to Kai Yuan County Mental Hospital: "Capitalist Roader, Reixiang Liu, has gone completely insane. His violent tendencies may endanger the well-being of the working-class patients housed in the Lonely Village Mental Hospital." Mother repeatedly assured father that we would soon return to move him out. "You must behave," she said, since Dr. Gao had told us that in his desperation, father dumped a brimming chamber pot over the other doctor's head when the doctor tried to give him an injection. Before we left, mother thanked Dr. Gao in tears and apologized to the other doctor, begging him not to be angry with a crazy man.
We left the Lonely Village Mental Hospital around 11:30 to catch the 12:00 o'clock bus. Father trudged behind, like a child, to the main entrance. When the door was closed, he held the window's iron bars with both hands, face pressed to the barred window. He watched, and watched, and watched till our shadows merged into the snow-covered horizon.
Neal Kreitzer
DuncanDuncan once said his life would be perfect if only he had a live-in psychiatrist and Saab mechanic, preferably the same person. He insisted his Saab was gyroscopic and could take a corner at twice the speed limit. He took me for a test drive that was scary but exhilarating until we spun out on a sharp curve, pirouetted three times and ended in a picnic grove. Shortly afterward he flipped off the road and landed upside down in a shallow river with a couple in the back. Although it deeply shook his friends and permanently damaged his friendship, his Saab needed only a bit of body work.
You might say it sobered him up, only Duncan never really sobered up. I had read about people like F. Scott Fitzgerald who couldn't take a drink without getting drunk. That was Duncan. He was from an upper class family in Nebraska and brought up in style: private schools; church on Sundays; country club membership and manners to match. Even overweight and out of shape, Duncan on a tennis court was balletic. Generations of breeding shone in his elegant returns. I once saw him play in street shoes and wrinkled khakis. Despite his being a bit paunchy, the other players in their expensive tennis gear looked overdressed and outclassed. Effortlessly he returned the most unlikely serves with uncanny grace.
Duncan was a chameleon who always "knew a guy." He knew a guy who fixed his Saab at the cost of parts, plus. He new a guy who sold him a portable Olympia typewriter probably at a loss after they agreed on the virtues of the sturdy German machine over the stylish but unreliable Italian Olivetti. Duncan had irresistible charm. When he talked, his direct stare and frown lines conveyed seriousness while his flickering smile invited you into an amusing, shared secret. He was a guy's guy who talked sports to sports guys and a graduate school intellectual who argued phenomenology: Heidegger, Husserel, Merleau-Ponti, Bachelard, the avatars of that decade. I imagine him swapping auto lore with the Saab mechanic about the quirky but lovable Saabs: exactly how much oil to mix with the gas, the fun of inserting the key into the floor. He mock sneered at our friend's bulbous but elegant Karmann Ghia that wouldn't start below freezing in Northern California. At a party once I saw Duncan drink a glass of local winery red, put his glass down on the floor, and not notice that the runner of the rocking chair he was sitting in was noisily crushing the wine glass into shards. He looked so happy, beaming beatifically from his perch while telling a story---his youthful religious retreats for teens, for example, that ended in hilarious experimental debauchery--that no one wanted to spoil his illusion. We held our collective breath as if we were watching a guy on a ledge, a potential jumper, and none of us wanted to be the one to precipitate his fall.
Duncan loved tools, and not just any tools, but the best quality he could find. He bought only those made in America that would last a lifetime. He could not go into a hardware store without falling in love with some burnished hunk of steel that had some precise function, even if he wasn't sure he would ever use it. He kept his tools meticulously: in logical order, cleaned, oiled, ready for some project. His carpenter sized Sears toolbox weighed a ton. He said he loved his tools because their reality kept him grounded. They counterbalanced the abstractions we inhabited in our graduate school world: he needed something concrete, tangible, something of heft and substance that he could hold in his hand and from which he could make something real when the occasion arose.
When I told him that my wife (whom he knew) and I were expecting a baby, his first response was incredulity that we could make such a rash choice. Didn't we realize, he told me, we were creating a "hostage to fortune"? He said he could never bring a child into this world. That "world" was one of war, social upheaval, assassinations and lethal summer riots: Viet Nam's Tet Offensive, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Watts, Detroit, Newark. I saw his point. Duncan didn't shy away from marriage, however, having been married several times to attractive, intelligent women who gave up on him. His most recent former wife had been a nun who went "over the wall" as we said in the 1960's. For Duncan it was marriage, yes. Children, no. I suppose that and the alcohol took its toll. Yet soon after our "hostages to fortune" conversation, Duncan told me he had decided to make a wood cradle for our baby. It also gave him a reason to buy more carpenter's tools. He worked on it for many months--more than nine-- from plans for a nineteenth century American cradle. Although it wasn't quite finished when our daughter was born, he brought it over proudly a month after her birth. (In the interim we kept her in a plastic bathtub by our bed because Dr. Spock told us it was all right.) Duncan had created a sturdy, old-fashioned cradle that could rock or be latched securely stationary. Our daughter used it until she was one, and we left for Wisconsin and my first job. We passed it down to another expectant couple who were friends of Duncan. I hope it is still being passed down to couples with babies over forty years later. It was a symbol of Duncan's generous nature, even if he didn't believe in creating hostages to fortune.
I never understood what Duncan saw in me, but he sought me out for long, intimate conversations that were not about phenomenology. I was charmed, of course, and flattered but also somewhat puzzled. I was not a guy's guy, definitely not a Saab mechanic, and I found phenomenology pretentious, although I pretended in our graduate classes to find it interesting. The truth is, I didn't understand philosophy and didn't care to. Maybe Duncan enjoyed a low-key companion who did not take anything too seriously and who was not on the make about anything at the time. I guessed he enjoyed my company because I was not competitive about school and, truly, no competition. Once he surprised me, however, by telling me, very seriously, after only one mug of beer at a local rathskeller, that I was the most nonjudgmental person he had ever met, which he said made me unlike everyone else in our extended grad school crowd. He said I exhibited a Zen acceptance of everyone I met, even people he thought not worth my time, and of whatever happened with detached amusement. I wondered if he sensed that was my secret pride. How had he guessed that self-deprecation was my real vanity? I thanked him for the compliment but didn't know what to say in return. Shouldn't I tell him how much I admired his insouciance, his casual worldliness, his chameleon nature that appealed to so many different kinds of people? When he sensed I was about to say something, Duncan stayed me with a hand gesture. He said that part of growing up was learning to accept a compliment as a gift that need not be reciprocated.
A year later a mutual friend from California called me in Wisconsin to say that Duncan was dead. He had left a party drunk, having refused to give up his car keys. Apparently he took a curve too fast on a Napa Valley back road and crashed his car into a tree. I don't remember the details. I was furious at those so-called friends at the party who had allowed him to die alone and drunk. Had I been there, I knew, I would have been able to cajole him into handing over the keys to his Saab. He would have listened to me, I was certain. Much later I acknowledged that probably I would have done nothing and distanced myself by being "Zen." I realized that everyone had tired of trying to save Duncan. He didn't want to be saved; he wanted to commit suicide. The following summer I stayed overnight with the person who had called me; he lived in a rustic cabin in the redwoods near the Russian River. I had gone to see him harboring rancor, planning to demand explanations. Those feelings soon dissipated as he described events from the last year of Duncan's life, the subsequent sense of relief. After Duncan died his friends and colleagues discovered his book of poems, works-in-progress that a few of us knew he was always working on, tinkering with. His department colleagues printed a modest paperback selection of his more finished poetry. I still remember one poem. It was an epithalamion, formal and ceremonial, really quite beautiful, to honor the marriage of a couple when we were in graduate school. Duncan, dear dead Duncan, read the poem aloud at the wedding, having gotten the name our friend's wife wrong.