Protected: Broken: Judgment and defense

I don’t know you that well, it’s true. We’ve been colleagues for a few years, have chatted at department lunches about your past, which could be turned, with the right writing, into a memoir of passion and pain: teenage pregnancy, riding the railroad, abusive men, waitressing and God knows what else. Stories that document a time, a place, a certain way of being. I like that about you, your so-different past, the way you turn it to humor. I’ve never said, as the would-be-judgmental me might, “So what right have you to criticize my child-rearing when you abandoned your son for years?” I’m never pointed out that you’ve had three husbands, so what right do you have to scold me for my divorce?

And yet there you were, on Friday night, digging into a past I’ve been trying to forget: “You broke him,” you said. “He’s broken because of you.”

I didn’t break him any more than he broke me. Our marriage was cracked years before Nada showed up, though God knows I didn’t show it. “Don’t wash your dirty linen in public,” Mum said. (What am I doing now but that?) And I didn’t. No one would have believed me, anyway. I didn’t believe it myself. Surely I was responsible for his moods, his periods of silence, his muttered anger. That silence was so familiar it almost felt comfortable, like returning home. They do say one tends to marry one’s father. And here he was, older than I, “a rock,” Mum called him. “Count me as a member of his fan club.” Everywhere I went, people told me how lucky I was to have him as a husband. “Does he have any brothers?” they asked. Yes, two, but believe me you don’t want to know them. “If only more men were like him,” they said. “The world would be a better place.”

And it’s true. He’s a good man. A kind man. He’s a marvelous teacher, as his awards over the years prove, and as his students will testify. He was not a bad husband. But he had his demons, as we all do. What he presented to the world was not what he presented at home. I started attending the UU Church with my daughter so that every Sunday morning he could have time for himself, to garden or fish or potter about the house. A regular time that was guaranteed every week so he could center himself, be calm, escape the darkness that filled him. I hoped it would help give him space to reconnect so that he could love Zeke and me calmly in between his moods. For a while I thought it was working, but really it was only a Bandaid for much deeper problems.

When Zeke was two he went to Alaska with his best friend for five weeks. I begged him not to, because Zeke was a difficult two-old-old, volatile and always active, still not sleeping through the night. I said, “Please wait till she’s a little older. I don’t know if I can do this alone.” I was pregnant and sick and exhausted, and I wanted him to put me ahead of his best friend for once. Just once. But he went anyway. I had little support, no one to turn to. And the pregnancy turned out to be ectopic. He did come home a few days early when he heard the news of the loss, but I don’t know that he ever forgave me for asking him to.

There are so many things I could say, that might show the beginnings of cracks, that might show that what he presented to the world was not what I knew. But what’s the point? He was a good man who fought the demons instilled by a dreadful childhood. He drank to escape them. Sometimes he took his anger out on me, on Zeke. When he felt bad about it, or sometimes just because, he bought me flowers or a mocha at work, and what people saw was the flowers, the mochas. Not the moods, the anger, the long dark silences.

No, I am not perfect, as you pointed out so clearly on Friday. Yes, it’s true that I had an affair. But not till long after he’d been accusing me of one just because I happened to be in email contact with a former student. I hadn’t seen that student in months, had had no contact but the emails we sent back and forth. And he was accusing me of an affair, insisting in the face of my demurral that if I wasn’t having one, I would. What would you have done? Would you have allowed a man to dictate who you could email and who you couldn’t? Who you could see and who you couldn’t? You with your feminist anger and bitterness? Tell me you would have meekly told your student friend that you could not help him in his attempts to return to college. Would it have been so different for you?

And then I found out, almost a year later, that all that time, and even before then, he’d had a former student friend — the woman who is now his wife. The difference between my friend and his is that his friend was a secret from me. I always told him everything about my friend. But she, she was a secret from me, as was the fact that he had a key to her house, that he was looking after her cat and her plants when she was on vacation, that when I thought he was fishing or just “driving around to get centered” he was actually with her. Was he having an affair? I don’t know. Maybe not. But she was a secret from me, and that’s all I need to know.

I didn’t want to have to defend myself the way I did. I didn’t want to have to be mean about him. And yet I was. The hurt of having to acknowledge a broken marriage, and the anger of recognizing that even now, after three years, people still see him as the gentle man wronged by a flighty and unthinking and even cruel woman, these things coalesced in me, till all I wanted to do was tell you everything — and in the doing so hurt him beyond the pain he endured as a teenage boy, son to a violently abusive and alcoholic father.

I started to tell you. But in the end, it’s his word against mine. And if you’re so convinced if his nobility, then nothing I say will change it. Do you know I lost a sister over it, my sister Rachel who still barely speaks to me? Do you know I almost lost Leah? Do you know the darkness that flickered in my dad’s face when he learned that Greg was remarrying? “To whom?” he asked.

“A former student,” I said. “They’ve been friends for about nine years.”

My father is astute. He saw then, for the first time, the possibility that perhaps the breakup was not all my fault. But when I bit my tongue and turned away from you on Friday, after my first flare up, I knew nothing has been settled for you. Will you ever see that perhaps I’m not all to blame? Will I ever be able to walk into the department where we both work and know that I’m not being judged?

Summer said it, later that evening. “Maybe you should stay in Decker Hall. Maybe things will be less complicated that way.” I moved there two years ago because of my asthma, but in a month we’ll all be moving to a brand new building, and once again I will see him and his new wife every day. And I’ll see you too. And everyone else who has seen him only as he presents himself to the world. Once again the judgment. Once again the whispers. It frightens me, it’s true. These two years in Decker have been a haven, a place where I can work and feel safe. I’ve almost been able to convince myself that it’s all in the past, that people have forgotten and moved on.

Till Friday. Till you said it. “Broken. You broke him.”

Finn: Cannibalism, I know it

OK, it’s not the Third Day. It’s not even close to the Third Day. But I’ve finally finished Finn and am ready to write about it.

Let’s start with R.C., my colleague, who pushed the book into my hands about two months ago and said, “What do you think?” He was referring to the advance reviewers’ copy, which had showed up in his mail box at work a day or two earlier, and specifically to the first page or two, a conversation between Finn and Bliss, the perennially inebriated blind distiller from whom the hero of the story got most of his poison. “I just hate this guy’s style,” R.C. muttered, “even if the premise is interesting.”

I hated the style too. Overblown sentences, wheeling off into diversions and redundancies, a constant sense of breathlessness. I wanted Jon Clinch to just STOP, sometimes. Just let a sentence be. But despite my discomfort with his style, like R.C. I got pulled into the story, which wove its way through scenes from Mark Twain’s original novel, and then digressed off to create a life and reason for Huck’s no-good daddy, Pap, reinvented as Clinch’s Finn.

In Clinch’s rambling tale, in which chapters revealing the grown Finn are interspersed with chapters flashing back to his youth as son of the hard-headed and brutally racist Judge, Pap’s backstory comes clear. Rather than a disreputable and abusive drunk, he can be seen as the victim of circumstances beyond his control. Always rebellious in the tightly controlled household run by the Judge, he runs afoul of his father over and over again, until he commits the ultimate crime, according to the racist elder Finn, and falls for a black girl.

****Caution, Spoiler follows****
Perhaps the most controversial premise of the novel is the suggestion that Huck was the daughter of the girl Finn brings home, a black runaway slave whom he rescues from slavery and seems for a time to genuinely love. Some of the gentlest and kindest writing in the book flows from the scenes in which Clinch describes Finn loving Mary, and later on in which he describes him taking the toddler Huck fishing. There, for a time,  young Finn seems to brim with promise, perhaps not the studious and obedient son whom his father desired to forge in a kiln of disapproval and cruelty, but still a human being with potential for kindness and grace. The moment at which he decides to protect the name of his young son is the turning point in the book. When Finn attacks Huck’s detractor and is sent to jail, something in him changes irrevocably. He returns brooding, and brutal. From then on, his life is marked by increasing alcoholism, violence and isolation.

For my taste, the transformation from the young Finn, who was potentially capable of finding salvation, to the brute devil who dies at the end of the novel happened too rapidly, and not quite seamlessly. The humanity Finn exhibits before his incarceration is too quickly erased. This, along with an affected tic from which almost all the characters seem to suffer, a propensity to say, “I know it” in confirmation of whatever needs confirming, keeps the book from my fully enthusiastic endorsement. The cannibalism too strikes me as a little too risque, too forced. Finn is a brute, true, but would he really skin a woman and serve her skin campfire-fried to an old blind man called Bliss? (Ignorance is….what a play on words).

The one regret I have about having read Finn now is that I haven’t read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in more than two decades, perhaps closer to three. I can’t remember enough about the book to know how closely Clinch’s scenes cohere with the original. I know his early chapters recreate some Huck Finn scenes from a different perspectives, Pap showing up in Huck’s room looking for the money, for example. And I know that he has painstakingly told the story of the house that Huck and Jim found floating down the river, including all the items within it: the milky white room with its walls covered in charcoal drawings of brute scenes, the gunshot body, the wooden leg, the women’s clothing. But I don’t know all the details well enough to feel confident in comparing the two.

R.C. is thinking of teaching both novels next fall. Perhaps I should sit in on the class, see what his students make of the classic alongside the contemporary novel. I just don’t know if I can take rereading those breathlessly redundant sentences again, or having to hear “I know it” echo in my head yet again.

Has anyone else read Finn? If so, I look forward to anything you might want to share about your experience of it.

Virginia Tech

Triggered by Mole:

“What are they going to do here?” my student asked anxiously, “after Virginia?”

I didn’t know. She was asking the day after it happened, during my first class. The college had no official stance on the shooting at that time, had not issued any bulletins. I didn’t know what to say. I’d been trying not to think about it. I don’t watch the news or get the paper. When the daily headlines from DemocracyNow show up in my inbox, I scan them and often go no further. So I knew nothing more than the barebones story: some guy gone berserk, people dead, a delayed response by the campus security team.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll issue a statement soon, but it’s too early right now.”

“Could it happen here?”

They were buzzing. Anxious. In all my classes the day after the shooting we talked about the shooting instead of what was on the agenda. They needed something, reassurance that they would not be rounded up and lined up and shot up.

What I want to do is to grab all those who argue for the right to bear arms and put them in a room and convince them that 33 people would likely be alive today if it weren’t for lax guns laws. But it wouldn’t make any difference. There’s something deep in the psyche of the people in this country that lets them say, straightfaced, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” As if that’s the answer. As if something so slick could have any significant meaning in the face of this tragedy.

Then again, as Dale says, people have been slaughtering other people for years. They will continue to do so. In Iraq, my taxpayer dollars are funding the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people. It’s all part of the same mentality that allowed for the shooting at Virginia Tech, that made it easy for a lonely, disturbed young man to buy what he needed to kill 30+ people.

I want to shine a light on the assumptions of the pro-gun faction in this country, but what use is it? It’s incomprehensible to me that people could trot out arguments for gun ownership in the face of the tragedies exploding through violence world-wide. But I suppose it’s incomprehensible to them that I shouldn’t recognize the Gawd-given raaght of every American to bear arms as is guaranteed in that there 2nd Amendment.

What I’ve been trying to do, to understand, these past months, is how helpless we are in the face of all of it — disappearing bees and the impending food shortage; peak oil supplies and the upcoming diminishment that the Bush administration denies; the degradation of an environment that even still catches me with its beauty, so that sometimes I can hardly breathe with the glory of light and color about me. All these things, and the anxiety on the faces of my students who think, anew, That could be me, soaked in blood, dead. Will it happen here?

In the end, what else can we do but acknowledge that we never know what’s going to happen, and that there’s no point living in fear of tragedy. Every day still the sun rises, pushing through even the densest clouds to light the world. Every day we could die, and every day that we don’t is another chance to do what we can to make the world better for others. In the end, crazed gunmen or cancer or a misplaced step or simple old age will take us away. In the meantime, what matters is compassion for all.

Making BC private

I’ve been busy with a lot of work-related and mother-related activities lately, and also somewhat frustrated by both technology and a certain amount of writer’s block. For that reason, I’ve been relatively silent. Yesterday, however, I finished Finn, which I had been reading for the Third Day Book Club, and began a review which I plan to post here soon. I also made my BC blog private. I will continue to write there on occasion, probably the more intense and uninhibited entries of my earlier blogging self, which I am less comfortable sharing with others right now. However those of you have been regular readers of my BC blog are welcome to become members and read there, if you wish. I’ve put a note to that effect on my first page at Blog-City.

I have been working with my friend Diana to figure out how I want to shape this blog. I miss it when I don’t write, but I’ve also felt frustrated for various reasons. I will be playing with it, and with different kinds of entries, over the next few weeks.

This past year has been a blogging roller-coaster, and one that I’ve enjoyed, though I know I’ve earned a few gray hairs in the process. Some of you have been loyal readers from the beginning, or from very early on, and I want to thank you for sticking by me. I hope you’ll stay on for the ride.