Straight On 'Til Morning

Not sure I remember too much about actually graduating from high school, but I do remember that summer after. Those first three months after – when I could finally say something like 'Free at last, free at last, God Almighty – free at last!' – and not feel like a complete idiot. Of course, only an idiot would think that – but suddenly life, and everything about it, felt so different. The idea that the drudgery of school was somehow over and done with, that life would be smooth sailing ahead, all clear skies and fair winds off the stern rail – forever. I think it was the certainty I felt that seemed so entrancing. That everything going forward would just be – better. Better than the last four months had been, anyway.

There was only one cloud on my horizon, yet she had been, I thought, behind me.

Her name was Jen. Jennifer, and we'd broken up midyear, in December – though I didn't quite know it at the time.

I'd gone to Colorado for Christmas break, that ritual parole from boarding school purgatory I looked forward to – beginning some time in September – and I said goodbye to Jen knowing full well that when I got back to campus life would resume right where we'd left off. She was going to the Caribbean to meet her father – sailing, I think, was the original plan, but of course she met someone. A kid from St Paul's over in Concord, and they, presumably, fell in love. By the time we got back to campus there was nothing left to say; I could see it in her eyes, as I had seen it with my own. As soon as I saw them, as a matter of fact, I knew we were done. My Tink had flown away...

Boarding schools – or more to the point, co-ed boarding schools in the 60s – were seething caldrons of hormones, stirred constantly by needful, fragile egos. They're living plays about small town life writ large, with a cast of characters that included a collection of beady-eyed con-men and more than a few cheating housewives, the lid screwed down tight by underpaid staff who would rather have been somewhere, anywhere else. From the moment you arrived in the Fall until the moment you left in early summer, there are two things you thought about: why did my parents send me here; and when was all this bullshit going to be over and done with.

Of course, there was an easy remedy not so easily had. For boys, nirvana lay just across the quad – in the girl's dorms. The Holy Land, the Forbidden Zone – and images of Steve McQueen sliding out of a dimly lit tunnel and onto that drab motorcycle in The Great Escape ought to come to mind right about now – this was where teenage salvation lay. Just a few hundred yards away, supposedly just out of reach. We, of course, saw each other in class and at meals, and for those who kept up their grades, during 'study hall' in the library after the evening meal, yet sooner or later we all discovered the secret routes out of our dorms – into the sweet embrace and warm breath of our desire.

Jen and I had hooked up early in our junior year and we'd been 'an item' since. We were inseparable, or so I thought. We ate together, and on weekends I'd sit on a sofa in the commons room with her head on my lap while we read Milton and Vonnegut together. When it was warm at night we'd sneak out to the fields on the other side of Greenfield's Road, and some nights we'd even take a moment to look up at the stars. After a year together I was sure I'd discovered the gossamer contours of forever, my very own womb with a view, but things change. They fall apart in the widening gyre.

As summer came to us that first year, the prospect of so much time apart was shattering, and we parted that spring vowing to write every day, but I cheated. I wrote two, sometimes three letters a day – though usually at night – and in just a few weeks I started getting a couple a day from Jen. I'd look at the postmark, from Galveston, Texas, rip the letter open and start reading.

We had it, I think you could say, bad, but her's was a guiding light, and she led me on.

That summer was my third flying, and I was working on my multi-engine rating that June, so was in ground school most mornings and flying at least three hours a week – more on the weekends, with my father. When time came for me to make my first extended solo cross country flight, the choice of destinations was easy, and obvious. Galveston, Texas, here I come!

I made the flight in my Dad's Beech Travel Air, an old if reliable twin engined airplane, too well equipped for what it was, and I left Addison Airport, on the north side of Dallas, around midday. Heading almost due south, I skirted Austin and San Antonio, leaving them to the west of my line, and I arced west of the Houston area and slipped on into Galveston before two in the afternoon. Before the really big thunderstorms formed, in other words. So as soon as I had the Beech tied down I called my instructor, then my father, telling them that big storms were moving in and that I'd fly back the next morning.

"Good call," said my flight instructor, admiring my cautious nature.

"Well, did you pack any goddamn rubbers?" my father snorted, admiring my foresight. Which was, all in all, odd – as I shouldn't have needed to pack anything for a day trip. It was, I'm trying to say, hard to pull one over on my old man, especially where the opposite sex was concerned.

And yes, Jen was waiting for me in the parking lot, behind a chain-link fence next to the little terminal.

With her father, by the way.

He was a professor of gynecology at the medical school in Galveston, and I'd met him in passing at Parent's Day that last October. We'd hit it off too, and he'd been impressed I was so committed to flying – and at such an early age, I guess. He, of course, wanted to see the Beechcraft so I walked them out to the flight line and gave them the nickel tour, and had to explain that I couldn't take them up for a ride as I hadn't taken my check-ride yet. He seemed satisfied that I was a responsible young man after that, then we hopped in his Cadillac and drove into town. He had a house not far from the seawall, maybe a block in, and I remember the lawn was half grass and half white sand. I'd never seen anything like this town. Galveston seemed a city perched on the ragged edge of survival, one hurricane away from oblivion, and the muddy water in the Gulf looked anything but inviting.

"Blows in from the beach," Dr Flesh said as I looked at the yard. Oh, yes, that was his name. Harry Flesh – and I kid you not. He tried to talk me into medical school later that evening, too. "You should think about, Spud. There are a lot of openings in gynecology, despite all the hairy situations you can find yourself in."

And as if right on cue, Jen rolled her eyes. She'd heard that one before, I guessed.

Yet I laughed until I cried. And I think I was his new best friend after that.

He took us out to dinner that night, to a seafood place called Gaido's, and I think that was the first time I'd ever eaten a pound of butter for dinner. Everything was slathered in butter, or drowning in bubbling vats of butter, and in my plate of sautéed lump crabmeat the poor critters were doing the backstroke through oceans of silky, golden butter.

He left us alone on the back porch after we got back to their place, and I guess that was the first time I'd noticed there was no Mrs Flesh.

"She died a couple of years ago," Jen told me, but she was evasive around the memory, like we were walking on dangerous ground now.

"Oh? What happened? Was she sick?"

She shook her head, looked away. "No. She was murdered."

I don't think I said a word.

"She was up in Houston. They found her in a hotel room."

"Found her?"

"Maybe a day after it happened. She'd picked up some man and gone to this hotel downtown, and he killed her. Took everything from her purse, which was how they caught the guy."

"Jesus," I whispered.

"That's when my dad decided to send me away to school."

"Were you close? With your mother, I mean."

She shook her head. "No," she said, and her voice was flat, dull – and barren.

"How's did your old man deal with it?"

"He doesn't. He goes to school, he teaches class. He comes home then eats dinner and goes to sleep. Then he gets up and does it all over again."

And that's all we said about it. She fell asleep with her head on my lap, and I rubbed her head until I too found sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night and she was gone; I passed her room on the way to the bathroom and heard crying in her bedroom. When I walked back to my sofa I saw Dr Flesh walking around in the kitchen, tying his necktie as he went about making coffee – yet for some reason it looked to me like he was working on a gallows's noose.

I tried to sleep after that, but found myself thinking about one of Dickens' characters, old Thomas Gradgrind, and I woke up later that morning with Jen by my side – like nothing bad had ever happened. Dr Flesh swung by after his morning class and took us out for breakfast, yet all he wanted to talk about was airplanes. So, we talked airplanes, then we drove back to the airport and they looked on as I made my pre-flight walk-around, then Jen ran out and kissed me, told me that she loved me, and that her father did too, then she ran back to the car and slipped away.

Dr Flesh watched as I started the Beechcraft, and I saw him on my takeoff roll, still standing there behind that little chain-linked fence, staring at me as I flew away.

I went down to Galveston a few more times that summer, but took the old Texas Chief down the next two times. Dr Flesh always seemed happy to see me, and he stayed up late with us one night and talked about his other passion – sailing. And the next day he took us down to his boat, Sirius, a huge wooden schooner built in Maine before the war, and he told me if I wanted the next time I came down he'd take us out.

I was fascinated by this man now. He seemed a walking contradiction, and very unlike my own father. Studious in the extreme, yet cautiously adventurous, like Walter Mitty on the verge. Rather than spend his time off walking a golf course, he was getting his boat ready for an extended trip to the Caribbean, and as he led me around her innards I could see the pride in his accomplishment shining through the work he'd finished. I was envious, in the way someone clueless about boats is envious, but I was curious, too.

The last time I went to Galveston that summer I flew down early on a Saturday morning, and when they met me at the airport I took them out onto the ramp and helped Jen into the backseat, then I went up and asked Dr Flesh to follow me up the wing once I was seated. When they were buckled-in I started the engines and taxied out to the end of the runway, and I was feeling a little smug by that point, too. We took off and I turned to the northwest, and the doc asked where we were going.

"Get something to eat," I said, grinning, over the engine noise.

"Oh. How far?"

"Couple of hours," I said. "Each way."

"Oh."

The place was at once legendary – and yet almost mythical. A ranch house out in the middle of nowhere, there was a grass 'airstrip' by the main building – and nothing else. No way in, and no way out – unless, that is, it had wings. We circled the field once and I checked the orange air-sock by the house, then settled into a long final and touched down gently – as I knew my old man was out there somewhere, watching – then taxied up to the ranch house. There were a half dozen or so aircraft there already, and Jen was perplexed.

"What is this place," she asked.

"What place?" I asked.

"This place!" she asked, now clearly mad.

"Oh. This Place Does Not Exist," I said, then the doc got out and walked down the wing – his bladder about to burst – then I got out and helped Jen down to the ground.

"What do you mean it doesn't exist?" she groused.

"Just that. This Place Does Not Exist."

"What do you mean?"

"You asked me it's name. I told you."

"You mean it's called...This Place Does Not Exist?"

"You catch on fast, for a girl." She could hit pretty hard, too, for a girl. "Better cover your ears," I said when we were down on the ground.

"What? Why..."

But is was already too late. The silver P-51D roared by about twenty feet off the grass – then went into a ballistic climb, the old Rolls-Royce Merlin popping as my father chopped the throttle into his wing-over.

"Is that your father?" the doc asked, and I nodded as I watched my old man crab into an impossibly steep descent. He popped the gears at the very last moment and flared, touched down so gently it made my heart leap, and I kept them back until he taxied up to the Travel Air and cut the engine. I helped him tie the Mustang down, then we went over and I introduced my dad to Jen and her father. At one point he looked at his watch and then to the east.

"You expecting company?" Dr Flesh asked.

My father nodded, and pointed. "Yes. There he is."

"Who is it? Bill?" I asked.

Again, he just nodded, and a minute later a mint B-17 flew over, then circled the field and landed. We watched as the Alice From Dallas taxied up to the Mustang on two engines, then we tied that beast down too.

And then all of us went inside and had the very best steak in Texas, in This Place Does Not Exist.

+++++

When I got back to Massachusetts that September I could tell something had changed. Jen was a little more reserved in public, and downright quiet when it was just the two of us, and she didn't want to talk about it, either.

And she didn't, at least not for a week or so.

We were walking out of chapel one Sunday morning and she told me her father was sick.

"Sick?" I asked. "How sick?"

"Cancer of some kind. He told me..." she gasped, "...maybe...next summer."

I stared at her for the longest time, then we both started to cry.

+++++

My dad traded in the old Travel Air for a new Baron, and he flew the doc up for Parent's Weekend in early October. Even though Jen had made me promise to not let on I knew anything about the doc's illness, I found it hard not to stare when I first saw him that Saturday morning. The skin on his wrists and hands was a little yellow, the skin around his eyes was a little darker than I remembered, and maybe the eyes were deeper set, too – yet he was his same, boisterous self.

"Spud! Howya doin'!" he yelled from across the quad.

"Doc!" I called back – as I jogged over to take his hand.

But he wasn't havin' any of that. He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into a hug, a great big bear slapping hug, and after he pounded me on the back a few times he pushed me back gently and looked at me. "You ain't eatin' enough, Spud. You gonna up and blow away."

"Maybe we can fly down for a steak," I said, grinning.

"Naw. I'm taking Sirius out next week. Bound for Mexico, Grand Cayman and the British Virgins by Christmas. Wish you could come – it's gonna be a slice."

"I know, sir. I'm envious."

The three looked on as I played goalie in a soccer game a little later, then there was a great lunch scheduled and we all sat together, reminisced about airplanes and steaks, and while Jen was certainly there – she was somewhere else, too. Someplace far away, and I couldn't help thinking she was in a hotel room, in Houston, looking at her mother.

+++++

And it was the same between us after Parent's weekend. The same, but different, like she was still someplace else. We were close, she was affectionate, but she had slipped away – to I knew not where. She flew down to Grand Cayman for Thanksgiving and came back wearing bruised, dented armor, and she withdrew behind hollow plates of cold withered iron after that, hiding from me now, lest the truth of her father's descent be known. The three weeks between vacations should have been all about prepping for exams – and the coming break – but I was consumed by her retreat, and by fear of what lay ahead.

We hopped the shuttle to Logan in silence, and when we parted at the airport she barely said "Bye" before she slipped into the crowd.

And, I don't know, maybe I knew we were done right then and there. Maybe I knew she'd find someone else down on those crystalline seas – where everything was the polar opposite of Massachusetts in late autumn. Snow had been late in coming that year, and we'd taken endless walks around campus in the interregnum, walks under leaden skies among black trees and dead leaves, yet her eyes, always bright and so full of life, had changed by then. They were dull now, gray and dull, and when we held hands her skin was like ice.

So, I met my parents in Aspen. Dad had bought a lot out on Woody Creek, and he was meeting with a local architect that week, and we all went down to the office and looked at the renderings – and we oohed over this detail and that – then dad looked over the paperwork and signed on the dotted line. We'd have our house late next summer, early autumn latest, and happy as larks we skipped out into the snow and walked over to the little park in the middle of town and had crepes made right there in a little rolling cart. We looked around and could see our future, and I could see my father's eyes just then as we ate and brushed snow off each others shoulders. I could see him looking at me, measuring me. And he never once asked about Jen or the doc.

My mother and I were not close. We never had been, and it just kind of worked out that way. As a kid, it always felt like she resented my coming into her world, like I was an inconvenience, and I always wondered what I cost her in physical terms – in the beginning, anyway, let alone the mounting cost over our first years together.

She'd gone to Hollywood right out of college, and yes, she'd made a couple of movies – but she had a problem with bourbon and that problem only grew out there. She'd met my father at Harvard and they married before he went off to war, but my father was a pilot – and he wasn't a drinker. They grew apart in time, because, I think, he had trouble with her drinking, and we, my father and I, came together in the vacuum their drift created. We flew together, we played tennis, we went to Red River, north of Taos, and learned to ski – together – while my mother enjoyed her memories of Hollywood with bourbon and orange juice. No other activity seemed to suit her so well, or so she told me once, and the whole Aspen thing had begun to weigh heavily on her by that afternoon – so she ate her crepe in silence and refused to smile at the future. I think now, as I look back on those days, that if I'd taken her hand that day I'd have found skin as cold as ice – as cold as Jen's had been.

But things change. It's a mistake to look at one moment and see the future as a shadow cast by any one moment in the present. There are too many currents pushing from too many directions.

And now, as I think back on those two women's lives, I look at the choices they made and see two kindred spirits, two troubled souls crashing through life – heedless to the damage they left in their wake. More troubling still, I look back from fifty years on and in Jen I see I'd unwittingly found an almost perfect clone of my mother. Easy to see now, from the comfort of another life, but what troubles me is simply this: was there no element of chance – and therefore nothing accidental – in our coming together? Were we drawn to one another through some innate genetic predisposition, something written in our code, if you will? What else could have taken us so close to the edge of the abyss?

+++++

I was waiting at the gate in Boston. Waiting for Jen to come off the plane from Miami. I saw her walking hand-in-hand with a blond headed guy, a long-haired freak, and they kissed once, passionately I might add, before they split and went their separate ways. Then she turned and saw me standing there, and I think she smiled just a bit, before she turned and walked off to the baggage claim.