A Hero Named Harry

 

My sense of life is that of being in a roaring, rain-swollen river, hanging onto a low branch, and trying to tell the people I love that I love them, as the river takes everything we once held sacred. Speed, sound, velocity, and the heavy rain of dagger thin communications loosen the earth until even the heaviest, oldest trees start to come un-rooted.

One shouts across email, text, phone borders to old beloved friends and family, and everybody knows the other is hanging on to a branch of his or her own, while memory, time, history rushes past.

Can't it ever slow down? Can we form memories online, via text messages, or only in person, in real time, rapidly eroding?

It's the tempo this is the great threat, and the din, the noise that blocks deep responses.

You can only fall in love, for example, at a very slow tempo. You can only grieve at an even slower tempo.

And how can you ever make amends, across this rushing tide of river, tell people what you wish you'd done differently?

I have been thinking about ceremony lately, with a vague anxiety about primarily funerals. In the novel 'Love and Garbage," the Czech novelist Ivan Klima identified a core anxiety of the modern age as the anxiety of transformation to garbage. Garbage represents a promise broken — a cycle of value disintegrated. Klima wondered if this could happen to love.

My mother dated a man named Harry in the late 1950s, when she lived in Queens and worked as a Pan Am stewardess. He was a fraternity brother of my father, and called my father one day to impart the great news that scores of Scandinavian stewardesses had moved into his building in Queens. He suggested a double date. "Great," said my father. "Who's my date?" Harry told my father that his date would be a Norwegian woman with the unfortunate name of Molfried Myklebost. Then he grew serious. "Barrry," he said. "My date is a Swedish woman named Ulla. I know you can take her from me, but please don't. I love her very much."

Nature took its course. My mother fell in love with my father, and left Harry for him. Through the wild rubble of our family lore, the catastrophic ruin that reduced us all to screaming animals in the post-apocalyptic, post-feminist, post-sanity 1970s, and 80s, we always preserved our little stories, like all families do. One story I frequently heard told was the one that had my mother turning to the kitchen sink back in those early days, with my father near her, and saying, in Swedish, "grannen kommer," which means, "the neighbor is coming." (My father, a scandofile, spoke Swedish.) This was the signal to my father that she would be his.

But the story doesn't end there. This particular story has an arc so magnificent it is like a prairie rainbow after a storm.

My parents had a very deeply troubled marriage, and that is putting it mildly. They separated in 1968, and battled formidably and flamboyantly for the next decade or so: Guns, arson, kidnappings, the works. I used to say to my mother, gazing at photogaphs of the two of them at their most glamorous: "I know it was a disaster, but you both looked great."

Harry was a kind of comma in history. I always appreciated his forthrightness, but thought no more of it. My mother made her choice, as females do. Not right or wrong — just the choice. "Turn the page," as my father would say.

August 21, 1999. I made my father call the apartment in Karlstad, Sweden, when the hour arrived and the flower-watering friend, named Viola, had entered with a key. I'd been calling in a continuous frenzy for two days. The fact that my mother had not called Viola to thank her for watering the plants while she was away in New York, visiting us, meant one thing only.

I saw my father's mouth drop open, as it does when he is struggling not to cry, and I heard him say "No," in Swedish, in a broken voice.

At her memorial service, in New York, my father took my arm and pulled me toward a man. I don’t remember what he looked like, because my tears made everything watery and vague.

"This is Harry," my father said. "Harry, this is my daughter Celia."

We embraced, and he held his hand to the back of my head. We did not speak. I later learned that my father had called him in North Carolina to tell him about my mother's death, and the details of her memorial, and he'd simply said, "I'll be there."

He was the road not taken, and had he been the road taken, I wouldn’t be here, so he was the road not taken that made my life possible, but that isn't even my chief gratitude to Harry.

It took years to appear in my mind. It is now 2009 — 10 years later.

Not until the world was down to near-dust, not until I'd lived to see the rise of a God more ghastly almost than totalitarianism — the age of the broken promise, of distraction, escapism, nothingness and vanishing bonds — would I write down the name "Harry," on a piece of paper, and begin to think of him in a wider light. His act, his arc, his promise not broken, to my mother — it all took shape over my head as a near miracle.

In today's world, Harry would be more than excused for forgetting my mother, or making garbage of her memory. She was, after all, a brief girlfriend who left him for his fraternity brother forty years ago. Instead, he held the arc, held the promise, even through loss, humiliation, forty years, a happy marriage, five children of his own, and a geographical distance. I started to think of him as a very quiet hero representing a lost civilization.

On Christmas eve, 2008, I asked my father to give me Harry's phone number. He went and looked it up, and scrawled the number on a scrap of paper. In the clean-up after the meal, what my father calls "all the violence," the scrap was lost. I called him a few weeks later and asked for it again. He found it, again. I had it on my desk, for weeks. Now it is here somewhere, in one of my folders marked "urgent," or "now."

One of these days, I'm going to call him; On behalf of all women everywhere, young and old, and especially the very young, who are left looking at cell phones, re-applying mascara, being brave, wishing for an insect-creep scrap of attention from a man whose attention span is more pulverised even than hers — beaten like gongs with a nasty book and film glorifying his diffidence and her disappointment, called "He's Just Not That Into You."

The truth is, he's just not that into anything.

And were he more of a man, he would have the decency to at least not be so proud of it. Were he from an earlier era, his instincts would have been honed enough not to mess with 100 girls he can't quite bring himself to text back, never mind marry. He'd play to win, and he'd know how to lose. He'd have relegated spite to an un-manly realm, and love to a sacred one.

Thornton Wilder ended his book The Bridge of San Luis Rey with the following prayer:
"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
One of these days, I am going to call Harry.

After 22 years in journalism, after 22 years of chasing stories and characters I believed would give meaning and weight to our incoherent world, Harry's name is the only one on my notepad, the only one I really want to talk to.

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