Chapter Forty
A year in review
ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE SPRING SEMESTER IN MID-January, I entered Jeff’s office and handed him a letter of resignation, effective at the end of the academic year. He begged me to reconsider. I told him I would think about it, but he and I both knew I was done. And I also knew that he wanted what was best for me.
When spring break arrived, I went to the island of Maui by myself, just like I said I would. Just relaxed, read, and wrote on the beach for six days. I barely even went sight-seeing. Shortly after that, I received news that My Father’s Letter would be released at the end of the year. I had gotten a publishing deal while the work was still unfinished, which was rare for fiction. But Sam and I, being published authors and known in our field already, had a little bit of clout in that regard. A buzz was already circulating for the story outside the novel—Sam’s tragic death and my picking up where he left off, literally and metaphorically. I insisted that we be credited as co-authors: A novel by Sam Vanzant with Andrea Vanzant. Despite all the work that I had done, it was still Sam’s novel as far as I was concerned.
***
When the spring semester ended in May, I celebrated my resignation with a trip to Italy. This time, Joey, Tony, and my mother stepped off the plane with me, and the four of us spent two weeks touring Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Capri, and back to Rome, taking lots of pictures and eating until we busted a gut. Surprisingly, we all got along (with the exception of occasional annoyances typical of traveling with family). Even Mom and I got along. We threw coins into Fontana Di Trevi and made wishes together—we even hugged afterward.
La bella Italia. Magic.
When I wasn’t hanging out with my family, I spent most of my days sitting in outdoor cafés and bistros, writing; it seemed to be all I ever wanted to do anymore. I wrote travel essays about all the places we visited. I even recounted trips Sam and I had taken to New Hampshire and Vermont and Maine and Cape Cod and Boston. I wrote letters to Sam’s brother Kevin, to Maggie, Miranda, Jeff, Piero, Julian, and Melody. I wrote to David too, but didn’t send the letters. I did break my rule once and sent him a postcard from Florence; I didn’t write anything on it, however.
After Italy, Joey and I went to Spain for a couple of days. We arranged to stay with contacts of David’s, all very hospitable and cordial and gracious. In Madrid, we looked at the architecture and museums that both David and Julian had told me about. From there I headed to London, on my own again, where I visited all the traditional tourist sights without the assistance of tour guides. My fear of going out into the foreign world had subsided quite a bit. I stayed for four days.
When I came home, a package awaited me. My mother sent me a box of photos, all of my father—photos of his youth; wedding photos with Mom; family photos with my brothers and me. Indeed, my father had been tall, dark and handsome, and so much younger than I remembered. I studied his features and saw that I resembled him in some ways, although I looked more like my mother. She had the same glimmer in her eyes that I had in all my photos with Sam. She must have really loved my father. And yet, it couldn’t have been easy for her either.
Every night I went through the photos, one by one, scrutinizing them with such curiosity and contemplation, and even framed a few. It was during those nights that I finally grieved my father’s death, and made peace with him too. Then I called Mom to thank her for sending them.
“You have no idea what that meant to me, Mom. Thank you so much.”
“He would have liked seeing you interact with your brothers in Italy. I don’t think I even realized how close the three of you were until then.”
“It was a great trip. I’m glad you were with us.”
Mom paused. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out with you and David.”
“Me too,” I said. “I miss him.”
“Maybe you can try again?”
“Maybe.”
She paused again.
“You know, Andrea, you have a lot to be proud of, the way you’ve worked so hard to get past your husband’s death while still keeping his memory alive. And doing it all on your own, too.”
I took in a breath, a lump forming in my throat. “I wasn’t exactly alone, but I know what you mean. I didn’t have children to worry about. You’re the one that had it so tough.”
“Still,” she said. “You didn’t let it stop you from moving on. I’m proud of you,” she said after a beat, her voice choked with emotion.
Tears filled my eyes as I too choked up. “Oh Mom,” was all I could say.
***
Shortly after my return from Europe, I went back to NU to speak to Jeff. It turned out that I may have been too hasty in my resignation, I told him—I wanted to teach again. Part time.
“Not Comp,” I said more emphatically than intended. “But I was wondering if there was something in the Creative Writing program, or even just an upper-level course in rhetoric.”
“I’m sure we’ll find something for you to do,” Jeff said. “NU takes good care of its own. Trust me—the door didn’t slam behind you.”
“Just one course,” I reminded him again.
“One is all you’ll need.”
Meanwhile, Miranda suggested that our book club read Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl—a much heavier read than most of our selections, but we all decided to go for it. I vaguely remembered reading it in college for a psychology class; I also remembered needing to put it down because I couldn’t see past my tears to read the words clearly. This time I wept again with the same intensity and empathy, but also had an epiphany that I shared with Melody.
“Frankl says that between stimulus and response, one is free to choose. Do you know what that means? It means I can choose the way I respond to Sam’s death, to my mother’s behavior, to my students’ writing. And when I think that that’s how he survived the concentration camps, when he realized that that was the one thing no one could take from him, that one essential freedom…”
My eyes welled up from the magnitude of the moment. So did Melody’s.
This was what Melody had been trying to tell me all along. In the face of powerlessness, that was my ticket to freedom. I could choose to be eaten alive by grief, to spend the rest of my life living in fear of that powerlessness and the unknowable; or, I could respond differently. Not react—respond. I could either keep Sam alive in me and others, or bury him along with his physical body.
I could choose to forgive, too.
Forgiveness wasn’t a one-shot deal, I learned. Rather, it was a lot like the revision process; it involved re-seeing a person or a situation in different ways, of looking past the surface errors and finding the real meaning, finding truth. Once accessed, that truth could be transformed into compassion, understanding, love.
The hardest person to forgive was the drunk driver. He would’ve been graduating college by now; instead, he was serving time for manslaughter. He fucked up his life and knew it. Hell, he fucked up my life, and all this time I’d assumed he didn’t give a shit about that.
Since Sam’s death, I had written so many letters to that kid. Angry, hate-filled, horrid letters in which I wished his own death on him. The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty—we all have it. Thank goodness I had never sent any of them. Thus, my first step in forgiveness was to destroy those letters. As they burned in a pile of leaves in my backyard, my anger raged right along with the flames. I wanted to kill him myself. And then I cried cathartically, once again, for the loss of my husband, my best friend, our life together. But I also realized that this kid had taken his own life too, metaphorically. We all lost something.
I began writing letters again, and this time I sent them. Some began angrily but moved towards a gesture of willingness. I’m willing to learn to forgive you. Willingness was always a good starting point, whereas hate and bitterness and resentment took up too much energy. Sam had come to realize that right before he died. I think his novel was the beginning of his forgiving his own father for leaving. And he had come to take a position on war that had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with forgiveness. “Imagine if we had forgiven the terrorists instead of bombing the wax out of the ears of innocent people,” he’d said. “Imagine if instead of a ‘war on terror’ we had a “forgiveness of terror’.”
I’d been against war from day one; throughout my life, really. But I hadn’t truly heard him that day. “Thank you, John Lennon,” was my response. In hindsight, my ignorance and dismissal must have hurt him deeply. “Forgive me, Sam,” was my present plea.
A few weeks later, the kid responded, expressing his utmost remorse. My first reaction was that his grammar and spelling were atrocious. My second was that of pure cynicism. Of course he’s remorseful. He’s stuck in hell and an orange jumpsuit and can’t even take a shit without someone watching him. Serves him right. The hell he’s sorry. He’s sorry Sam got killed, maybe, but not for getting so tanked in the first place.
Choose a different response, I heard a voice within me say. I’m pretty sure the voice was Sam’s.
I wrote back to the kid, one line: Do you like writing?
He wrote back. No. My teachers in High School told me that my writting is terrible and the only way I would pass collage was if i cheated my way thru.
And that’s when I began to see him in a new light. Was it possible that he had gotten so tanked that night in order to forget who he was? Was it possible that he took to heart that the only way he was going to get through life was by cheating himself and others? No kid deserves to be told that.
He wasn’t born wanting to be a drunk driver. He wasn’t born wanting to kill my husband.
I wrote to him again. Would you like to learn something about writing?
He responded. Yes.
I then sent him a composition notebook, the kind used in elementary school with black and white squiggles on the cover. I also gave him his first assignment: Write about your history with reading and writing, and enclosed a copy of one of Sam’s literacy narratives. Thus began the long-distance tutorial by mail. How completely bizarre and ironic that my first composition student since leaving the field of composition was the one who had caused me to leave in the first place.
I had also tracked down the students from the class in which I’d had the meltdown. I mailed each of them a handwritten apology. One of the boys had dropped out. Another graduated. A third emailed me to tell me he’d gotten wasted that same day, then woke up in the middle of the night after having a vivid dream about my husband. “I quit all of it,” he wrote. “The drinking, the pot, everything. Been clean ever since. I never want to be the cause of someone having a nervous breakdown like you did that day.”
I cringed upon reading the words “nervous breakdown”. Students can be quite perceptive.
Hayley, whose sister had had Sam for a teacher, came to visit me in my office one afternoon.
“Thank you for your note. I’m so glad you’re doing better,” she said. “I had heard so many good things about you as a teacher. That’s why I tried so hard to get into your class. If I could, I’d take another one, but I’m graduating this semester.”
I congratulated her. Then I added, “I’m sorry I ruined your expectations, and that I let you down.”
“It’s okay—it wasn’t meant to be,” she said.
***
My Father’s Letter was released Columbus Day weekend (how appropriate) to mixed reviews, but captured a lot of attention thanks mostly in part to interviews I did with National Public Radio in Boston, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Globe, and both NU and Edmund College’s campus newspapers. I also did book signings at both campuses, as well as Harvard (Sam’s alma mater) and independent bookstores in Amherst and
Harvard Square
before hitting the road for a New England book tour that ended in Manhattan and my hometown on Long Island.
In addition to the reading, EdmundCollege held a small remembrance ceremony for Sam. And there I read the finished eulogy:
I grew up on Long Island, not far from the Walt Whitman birthplace. Back then, the house remained unguarded and exposed to the public. It looked like your typical colonial house—and yet it inconspicuously sat in the midst of commercial supermarkets and shopping centers and delis and the International House of Pancakes. Years later, after some vandalism occurred, the Town of Huntington set out to restore the Whitman house and build an accompanying museum. And a wall, too. Sadly, one can no longer see the house from the street (then again, in those days one had to be looking for it in order to see it at all).
Every visit to every new town or city or state was an adventure for Sam. He would Google information on histories, traditions, events. He’d talk to the locals and go to the places that weren’t on the tourist maps. He’d bring a camera, but would take only those pictures that best encapsulated the essence of the experience because he much preferred seeing the world through his own lens.
On one of our many weekend excursions, I took Sam to the Whitman house, now obnoxiously named The WaltWhitmanBirthplaceState Historic Site and InterpretiveCenter. He went through the museum methodically, reading every placard and perusing every document and intensely studying each artifact. A fountain of knowledge all things Walt Whitman, he augmented much of the docent’s comments with his own bits of trivia, much to my delight and the docent’s dismay for being shown up.
But when we went into the actual house, Sam was awestruck. He pointed to the antiquated wooden desk—“Just think of all the words that came pouring out of him while sitting at that desk!” he said. Then he pointed to another piece of furniture. “Just think of the conversations he had there!” And so on. I sauntered through the house less inspired, although tickled by his childlike thrill.
“Doesn’t this excite you, Sweetheart?” he asked me. “We’re standing in Walt Whitman’s house! One of the greatest poets of all time! One of the greatest citizens! I’ve seen you more excited walking through a shoe store.”
“Sorry, Sammy,” I said, “but I’ve seen it many times. I’ve been here on school field trips, when I got my driver’s license, breaks from college... it’s like going home to me. And all the hoopla from the museum and the walls and the preservation has kind of taken something away from it all. I liked it better when it was more ordinary, when it was lost in its surroundings.”
“But that’s precisely what makes it extraordinary!” he exclaimed. “That desk, that table and chair, this entire house—it was all once ordinary. Just one house owned by one family. How could Walt Whitman have possibly known that generations of generations were going to pass through these rooms and marvel at the greatness to come from something so ordinary? Imagine that—imagine generations to come walking through our house like that. Will they ever know our greatness?
“What makes us so great?” I had asked.
“Because we’re here. Now.”
Alas, that was Sam—always willing to appreciate the past and look forward to the future without ever being absent from the now. He believed in greatness. But greatness was found in flaws. He believed that flaws, even the horrific ones, made humanity truly worthwhile. Without flawed humanity, there could be no revision. There would be only one way of seeing the world, of relating to one another, of creating a piece of art. Art that is not flawed is not beautiful, he would say. Even Walt Whitman was flawed. Perfection to Sam was the balance of strengths and weaknesses. Love and fear. Feast and famine. He was a Yin and Yang guy all the way.
As a writer and teacher, his own flawed humanity came out on every page that he wrote and shared with his students, and his students loved him for it—he was “real” to them. He was real because he was ordinary. And he was extraordinary because he saw greatness everywhere.
I miss Sam every day. He wanted to travel and see more of the world. He wanted to write novels. He wanted to answer the “what-if” questions that he posed to his students, his friends, me, and the world. He was not in the world—the world was in him. And what I’ve come to realize is that he’s not left the world, he’s become the world.
We may never have visitors ambling through our home one hundred years later, our rooms carefully preserved and roped off for protection, gawkers pointing at our couches and tables and chairs, but Sam has clearly left his mark. My heart swells to the bursting point when I think of all the students he’s touched, all those who are better people, less flawed, because of knowing him, even after meeting him for a few seconds. Certainly I am a much better me. It’s up to us to pass on the best of Sam to everyone we meet and know. That way, he can’t and won’t ever leave us, and his greatness will live on.
I could let go of that now, too.
***
Living alone did not have to be the purgatory I’d always believed it to be. I now went by myself to all the places I went with Sam or David—The Coop in
Harvard Square
; the North End of Boston; the lake at NorthamptonUniversity, to name a few. I took myself to the movie theatre. I took myself to dinner. I took myself to Cape Cod for a weekend. I sat in Perch with a book or my laptop, perfectly content. I strolled down
Main Street
in Amherst and basked in the sunlight. Indeed, I kept myself good company, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that I was actually courting myself.
Miranda noticed that the sadness in my eyes had all but disappeared lately. Melody was happy to hear me talk about the future with hope rather than hollowness. I told her that I was going to end our sessions. Didn’t need them anymore.
She agreed. “You’ve arrived,” she said.
We embraced in her office, and my heart was filled with gratitude for her.
Maggie said I sounded like “the old Andi,” but better. “You’ve learned how to be your own best friend,” she said. “Magnificent.” Even Donny Most curled up in my lap and brushed up against my ankles affectionately.
The ache for Sam never went away, but it became a part of me that I chose to accept and live with. And oftentimes, especially when I wrote, Sam was with me. He kept good company too. Still.
I fell in love again, too—with novel-writing, that is. Not long after the first one went to print, I started writing a new novel about a woman who meets several people while hiking the Appalachian Trail; its working title was Walking. And, like most hikers on the Trail, I wasn’t sure where it was going, or what else there was to do besides walk. I had discovered that hiking the Appalachian Trail was something else Sam had wanted to do. I contemplated trying the Trail myself, but the idea of not being able to plug in a blow-dryer anywhere was unappealing.
The dialogue between these characters was interesting, however. It was an exploration, albeit too soon to tell of what. A lot of it seemed to stem from conversations and relationships I had or wanted to have with all the men in my life. With each new person the protagonist encountered, I felt as if I was walking with a different person as well.
It was about moving forward, really.
***
In the fall I went back to teaching at NU. Jeff gave me one course called Autobiographical Writing. The class consisted of fifteen students, all upper level, and I conducted it workshop style. I assigned both Sam’s and my collections of creative nonfiction prose, and began a new series of essays—I was finally writing about Sam, and not to eulogize him. It occurred to me one day that I was writing love stories. Everyone, including myself, contributed writing on a weekly basis.
It was nice to be back in the classroom again, especially in this way. Maggie and I were even thinking about a compilation of texts for a graduate level class on the rhetoric of life, death, and regeneration. Jeff said, “Welcome back, kid.”
I refused to date anyone, but had started spending time with Julian the Spanish professor again. We’d meet after class for coffee or attend Foreign Film Fridays at NU. One night afterwards, he walked me to my car and kissed me goodnight. I never saw it coming.
“That’s cute,” I said afterwards. He looked at me, puzzled, and I grinned. “Thanks,” I said. I liked him.
But I missed David. Not a day went by when I didn’t think of him.
I found out through one of NU’s textbook reps that the art history book with the chapter he wrote had been released, and she got me a desk copy. I read every word of his chapter. Since we’d broken up, I read every word of every one of his columns as well.
I wondered if he was seeing anyone. I only hoped that if he was, it was serious and not some fling, even though I was contemplating a fling with Julian. He and I went out on one more date, and I kissed him one more time. He smelled like eucalyptus. He was also a good kisser.
But I decided not to have a fling with Julian. I’m not fling material. Never was. And that was the last time he and I went out.
***
In November, as the last of the fall foliage piqued and slipped off the trees, I treated myself to the Boston Museum of Art exhibit Monet in Normandy. Dressed in new blue jeans (I was fitting into size six again), suede boots, and a soft, v-neck pink sweater that Maggie sent me from one of the New York boutiques, I graced the Boston sidewalks as if they were fashion runways. My hair grew long and fell in natural ringlets. I felt free. Alive. Bellisima.
Because it was a Friday night, Monet aficionados filled the exhibition galleries. However, this was not the most ideal way to look at the paintings, since, like David, I preferred to view the works from various angles and distance points around the gallery. In the second gallery, I backed up, only to turn around and spot the tall figure, in his black leather jacket and Gap blue jeans, trying to get a good look at one of the cathedral paintings.
I beamed.
Of course he was here—where else would he be? And I was pretty sure that I had wanted to find him.
At first, I watched him with delight. Watched him for a good five minutes, maybe more.
Then, as patrons sauntered from one painting to the next, I sidled next to him and looked ahead. Totally absorbed, as always, he never even noticed me.
“Don’t you just adore Monet?”