Anthropology of an American Girl (80 page)

A new round of crying begins. It takes minutes for the crowd to settle down. “I didn’t travel seven hours to make anyone feel worse than they do already. I came because you are all assembled together just this once, and I embraced an opportunity. If anyone is too distraught to listen, you are welcome to take a walk around the block. It’s a beautiful day.” Father McQuail lifts the stem of a rose from the fence alongside him and inhales. He waits, but no one leaves.

“I don’t have to have known Jack to know that he was difficult. Mrs. Hanover, his grandmother, whom the boy is said to have resembled, is extremely difficult. Ours is a strenuous friendship. Some might ask,
Why bother? Life is short, don’t work so hard
. To me that is tantamount to saying,
Life is short, don’t grow so much
. If Mrs. Hanover is acerbic, she is brilliant. If she is self-righteous, she is uncompromising. If she is stubborn, she is trustworthy—if I am made irritable by the fixedness of her opinion, I depend upon the fixedness of her ethics. If she provokes me, she expects to be provoked in kind. If she questions my meaning, it is because, indeed, my meaning needs to be questioned.

“If my relationship with her were any
less
difficult—if she did not challenge me, did not test me, if she accepted me too easily, at face value, then she would not be a friend but an acquaintance. Certainly, at this level of intensity, one cannot have many friends. This is not a bad thing. Reduced circumstances are a consequence of truthfulness.

“I don’t have to have known Jack to see that he chose his friends carefully. Obviously he chose well. Surely he started out as all children do,
giving what they hope to receive. An unfortunate misconception is that as we age, we need to move beyond the perfection of that childhood barter to something more abstruse. I am going to wager that Jack was terrified about making the transition into maturity that you all made with relative ease, that he claimed it was a compromise, and that he tested you—unfairly, no doubt. Some of you moved on, retreating to the safety of acquaintanceship. Terrified by your distance, your
politeness—
he removed himself in kind. He didn’t need narcotics to feel alien; he felt that way already. Narcotics confirmed his feelings and numbed them.”

Father McQuail paces absently in front of the Flemings. Elizabeth is shaking, trilling really, like a cold dog, and Mr. Fleming is slumped with his face in his hands. Jack’s mother’s head is like stone. She is a bust of herself.

“There are things that cannot be held to common external standards,” Father McQuail says, “because they possess an uncommon internal nature. To be kind, to be compassionate, to be a
friend
—if, in fact, it is a friend we want to be—we must struggle to look past outward manifestations in order to see the essence of what we admire.”

He rests an elbow on the lectern and looks out at us as if memorizing faces. “Being Jack’s friends, you’re probably resistant to simplistic analogies. However, I beg you to indulge me. If one is a gardener, one cannot treat a rose as one would any other flower. A rose wants coddling, and to be sure, few people have the patience for it—so much of the product, so much of the time, is a wall of thorns. Why does God give us the rose? To humble us, to better us, to encourage forgiveness and understanding. And for those who show forbearance, the reward is divine. Yet it occurs to me that the rose is not only the
reward
, but the
acknowledgment
of the success of our efforts—the sensitivity, the tenacity. It is the proof of the virtue of faith.
The rose singles out the tender
. God has strategically placed the pure in the midst of the perilous to separate out those who can and will strive to reach for an ideal. My suspicion is that once you have been called upon to love this way, once you have proved your capacity, you will be called upon again.

“I traveled down from Boston to let you know that your experience with Jack was not a failure; it was an
experience
. We can’t rewrite Jack’s
life. But we can redouble our efforts the next time we meet someone like him. I ask you to be courageous of heart. I ask you to remember that if you were hurt in this instance, it was not because you deserved to get hurt, or were foolish to get hurt, it was because you
risked
getting hurt. I ask you not to forsake the willingness to risk.”

Elizabeth looks ravaged. Her eyes are swollen and pink and big for their sockets, like thyroid eyes. The pace of her speech is the opposite of Father McQuail’s. She speaks into the microphone as if she is sedated, though having spent the afternoon with her, I know she is not. She is simply determined to own up to her part.

She thanks Father Michael on behalf of her family, then she says, “I’m two years older than Jack, but Jack was ahead of me in everything. School, music, art, ideas, and now, suffering. He became a vegetarian when he was ten. That didn’t stop the rest of us from eating meat several times a week. I remember sitting at the table, tormenting him with steak. He would stare back with a blank stare, marveling at the spectacle of me being an animal eating an animal, and sure enough, I would start to feel like an animal eating an animal. After dinner I would make myself throw up. I never touched meat again after leaving for college. I can’t even stand the smell of it. I’ve moved from two apartments because of the odor of cooking flesh. I won’t let my parents cook it when I visit, or before I visit—and for my sake, they don’t,” she says, “though they didn’t offer Jack the same courtesy. I honestly don’t know how he coped.”

“At nine, he hung a sign he made from a torn sheet out of his bedroom window to protest the Vietnam War and the Kent State killings, and, at thirteen, he boycotted toothpaste containing nonessential additives. He used apples and dental floss for weeks until Dan found natural stuff at the health food store. My parents used to have him play piano like a trained pet at their cocktail parties until the time he said, ‘Here’s a little song I wrote just for you,’ and the lyrics were the ingredients of sliced white bread played along to this really bad piano bar tune. They never asked him to play again. In high school—I don’t even know why I’m telling you this—I used to hide my feminine hygiene products in a box in a dresser drawer. Once Jack walked in on me going through the box. I screamed for him to get out, but he only came farther into the room.

“‘Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘don’t be ashamed. Please. I’m saying this because
they
never will.’” She wipes her eyes. “
‘Please,’
he said to me.
‘Please.’

“Jack loved the blues from the time he was a baby, which was uncanny considering that in our house we never listened to anything but Bobby Vinton and the Carpenters. Just to show you what kind of an asshole I was, I used to tell him,
‘The blues suck.’
Last night I locked myself in his room. I don’t know how many of you have seen his room, but it’s the coolest space. I was on his bed crying when I saw his collection of albums on the floor. For the first time I thought to look at them,
really
look at them, and I did, and I, and I—couldn’t believe I, I never—there are milk crates full of—”

She bends over the lectern, supporting herself. I look away. Although she’s standing before a crowd, the moment is her own. I feel Jack in the tent—the leaden livingness, the way it used to be, with a premium on honesty. It comes like a minuscule change in humidity. Her father stands to help. She waves for him to sit.

“Full of rare recordings—seventy-eights, forty-fives, in perfect condition, alphabetized, labeled, exactly the way he left them, because he
loved
them.” She continues through her tears. “My first thought was to give them to Dan or Evie because I didn’t deserve them. Then I realized that Jack could have sold them when he needed money. But he
refused
to do that. He preferred to shoot himself. He must have known I would receive them. He must have.”

After helping Elizabeth to her chair, Dan takes her place. Minutes pass before people become quiet again. Dan waits patiently. The more patiently he waits, the more emotional everyone becomes.

“When I first found out,” he states simply, “I thought, I can’t say I lost anything. Whatever I lost, I gave up voluntarily, long ago. I actually felt
lucky
that I’d gotten out before getting hurt. I figured, nothing’s changed. His absence is his absence, and his presence—the things we did or the music we wrote, that’s still a presence, you know, meaningful and ongoing.

“But after listening to Father McQuail, I think it’s safe to say I fell seriously short.”

Dan tugs his shirt from his chest and adjusts his glasses. “I used to argue with Jack quite a bit. As we grew older, I stopped, because it was easier to not engage, and because I figured it’s what adults are supposed to do. I mean, who wants to be interfered with?

“The bizarre thing is that the more tolerant I became of his extremism, the more extreme he became. It was like he was begging me not to be mediocre, challenging me. Instead of recognizing his tests, I ignored them. The more outrageous his behavior, the more distance I put between us. As Father said, reactions like that terrified Jack. Especially in his frame of mind, especially with the company he’d been keeping.” Dan looks up at us. “I guess I could have worried less about the damage he might have caused me and more about the damage he was doing to himself.

“I’ve known Jack since we were two. Jack did not stumble unconsciously into adversity. Jack chose adversity because he believed himself to be a casualty of prosperity. Unfortunately, heroin use is not the kind of thing anyone can control, and loneliness, well, loneliness accrues. I asked my dad how it happened, how Jack went from using drugs sometimes to using them a lot to committing suicide. My father said it’s a matter of
time in
. Like becoming a musician. Spend more
time in
than time out and you become an expert.”

Dan reaches into his pocket and removes a small strip of paper, unfolding it carefully while he talks. “There’s a book of his that Elizabeth gave me yesterday,
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, by Robert Burton. Here’s a quote Jack had underlined.
If adversity hath killed his thousand, prosperity hath killed his ten thousand
.”

Dan plays with the paper on the lectern. “Jack could scale any building. He liked to walk as the crow flies, and if a house was in his way, sometimes he would go straight over it and meet me on the other side. He might come down scraped up, but he would tell me how beautiful the stars were from the rooftop. When I heard he killed himself, the first thing I thought was how he always did like to walk as the crow flies. Next I thought,
I hope the stars look good from wherever he is.”

From the front, I can see most everyone, though it’s impossible to take them all in. Mr. and Mrs. Fleming are on my left, next to Elizabeth and Dan and Smokey Cologne, who is wearing a suit that’s briny green like a
cartoon ocean. Smokey maintained the closest contact with Jack until the end, and there are things he has in his head that he will not share. When he arrived this afternoon, I ran down the Flemings’ driveway to meet him, and he held me. I never figured we were close, but that moment helped me more than all the others. Holding him, I thought of Jack but also of Rourke and Rob, of their friendship, and I hoped in my heart that everything had been done for Jack that could have been done, but nonetheless I knew otherwise—and I started to cry.

Alongside Dr. Lewis is his wife, Micah, with Jim Peterson, from their band, and our old music teacher, Toby Parker. Dan’s babysitter, Bitsy, is wearing turquoise beads the size of golf balls. Dad and Marilyn are also on the left, back by the screened porch with Denny and Jeff and Denny’s mother, Elaine. Behind them, all the people standing. Mom’s friends take up two and a half rows on the right—Lowie and David; her handicapped friend, Lewis; Nargis; and several people I don’t recognize. Powell is there too, but separate. He’s standing at the end of the aisle in case he has to catch me.

I see teachers—Mr. McGintee and Principal Laughlin and Mrs. Kennedy and tons of people from high school—Alice Lee, Min Kessler, Marty Koch. Ray Trent and Mike Reynolds are there, and so is Dave Meese, who once borrowed fifty dollars from Jack and probably still owes it to him. Rocky Santiago and his wife, Laurie, who swam with dolphins on their honeymoon, are next to LizBeth Bennett, who worked at the movie house, who is standing with Rick Ruddle, the Outward Bound counselor from Portland. I never met Rick, but I know him from hiking pictures. Funerals are bizarre—Dino, one of the brothers from the pizza place who was always antagonizing Jack, is sitting next to Jack’s cousin, Monroe Fortesque. Monroe attended Phillips Academy in Andover, then Princeton. Jack called him “the Preppy Hangman.” I am horrified on Jack’s behalf to see Monroe there, all muggy and serious. Though Monroe is Jack’s relative, he is one of those types of relatives you never imagine when you are conceiving your own funeral. If Jack had thought in advance about the Preppy Hangman being invited, he probably would have looked down the barrel of the gun and said,
Jesus, it’s enough to make a guy want to think about living
.

I didn’t tell Mark about the service, so he is absent. But Alicia is there,
standing in back. I smile at her, then I adjust the microphone so I can be heard. I want my voice to go far.

“The Teton Mountains are in northwest Wyoming. The highest peak there is 13,766 feet. I’ve never been to the Tetons, but I know the average annual temperature at night and the average rainfall in May because Jack wrote it all down on the leg of my favorite jeans. Every time I washed the jeans, he would rewrite everything. I’ve never been to Yosemite either, but I know there are granite domes that look like hooded monks and sequoia groves that stand like clusters of elephant legs. There are boreal forests in Wrangell–Saint Elias National Park in Alaska, and carpets of wildflowers on the banks of Lake Clark in Anchorage, and petroglyphs of bighorn rams near the Arches National Park in Moab, Utah.