I Am Your Passing Guest

It was a particularly hot spring day and Travis, country born and bred, had not yet adjusted to the muggy air that cities belched forth, or the fetid, stagnant atmosphere that clung to the dining room at LIA when the heat arrived. He was sweating like a stevedore when Louise sidled up to him and asked him—told him, really—to join her in the courtyard out back for a smoke.

He followed her out, grateful for the excuse to leave the room now that the guests had all been fed and it was time to clean up. He could not imagine lifting the soup pot, even empty, in this heat.

He declined her offer of a cigarette as they sat together in the shade of a small elm that had somehow found its home in the grubby little flagstoned yard behind the house.

“You shouldn’t be offering me a cigarette,” he said to her, once again surprised at the actions of this woman, who was unlike anyone he had met before. Offering a cigarette to a minor? It had never happened to him before.

“Kid,” she said as she sucked in a double lung full of the soothing smoke, “the words ‘should’ or ‘should not’ are no longer part of my working vocabulary.”

“You shouldn’t be smoking,” he said nonetheless. “Not with that cough of yours.”

As if on cue, or to mock him, she coughed, hard.

“Part of my heritage,” she wheezed.

“How so?”

“Ahm an injun, son,” she said, and cackled. “Hell, you knew that. I look just like every cigar store Indian you ever saw, don’t I?”

“The thought did occur to me,” Travis said. “What tribe?” She didn’t look like the Indians he had met in Maine.

“The biggest one left, Navajo” she said. “My daddy said I was born to the Rainmaker clan, but we were part Hopi, too.”

“How did you wind up in New York?” he asked.

“It’s a long story,” she said.

Travis sat in silence and waited. He knew—because people were always telling him—that he was a good listener for someone so young.

She told him that she was born on the Navajo Great Reservation in Arizona but didn’t know much about her native tradition, since she was sent away to a Catholic boarding school at an early age, where she was fortunate to get a good education and graduate from high school with honors.

“And I graduated a virgin, which was even more important to me,” she said. “Those nuns were tough, boy. In fact, they were the ones who taught me how to cuss with eloquence. Cajuns mostly, out in the desert pissed as hell at God.”

“You were taught by Cajun nuns in Arizona?” Travis asked.

“Hey, stranger things have happened, even to me,” she said, and she went on with her story, about how she graduated and, faced with a return to the family hogan outside Tuba City, took up with the first man who would have her even though, as she said, while she was looking for freedom and some adventure, and maybe even love, he was out for snatch.

“Snatch?” Travis said.

“Yeah, snatch,” she said to him. “Boy, you really haven’t lived, have you.”

Now Travis was blushing and hating it.

“You know,” she said, “Pus---“

“Got it,” he cut her off.

“He had a car and a destination,” she continued. “New York, the city of dreams.”

But he also had a habit and it wasn’t long before she found herself one, too. His drug of choice was heroin; hers was sweet, cheap wine.

“So you dumped him,” Travis said.

“Hell, no, boy,” she said and what began as a laugh ended as a growling cough.

“You really are young,” she said when she had caught her breath.

“I married him,” she said.

They lived in the Bronx, taking odd jobs—her favorite and, as it turned out, the one with the most helpful skill set, was waitressing—and being high on the Grand Concourse well into the night.

“Then he left me,” she said. “One day he was there in that filthy apartment on Lorillard Place and the next day he was gone, gone, gone.”

“And then what happened?”

She seemed to be eying him carefully for a minute.

“To be honest,” she said, “I am not exactly sure what happened next.”

Travis waited.

“The next thing I remember is going to confession here in town at the Magdalene church.”

“So, you’re Catholic,” he said. “Baptized at the boarding school?”

“Nope,” she said. “I am still genuine, one-hundred percent heathen.”

“Then why did you go to confession?”

“I have not a clue,” she said. “Maybe it was because I was at rock bottom and I saw the sign for the church and remembered the Magdalene whore and—how do they say it?—I identified.”

Travis shook his head.

“I know,” she said. “Seems weird to me, too.”

“Not weird at all,” he said. “That was God, drawing you back.”

“Let me say it one more time,” she said. “Boy, you are really, really young.”

Before he could object, she added, “That’s how I met Jonah. He was working the box that afternoon.”

“The confession box,” she added, since his confusion was apparent. “I dried out, I lived for a while in a settlement house in Albany, and when Jonah and Carla were fixing to start up this place on the other side of the river, they told me they had a job for me here and here I am.”

“No more wine?”

“Kid, I am one stubborn bitch,” she said. “When I put my mind to something, it happens. Not one drop since the day I met Jonah.”

A truck rattled down Fourth Street and drowned out the next thing she said. Travis sat quietly enjoying the faint breeze that slipped through the new leaves on the tree over their head.

“What?” Louise barked. “I have to tell you about my life story but you don’t have to tell me anything about you?”

“I’m sorry—“ he began.

“Two more words I left behind years ago,” she said.

“I didn’t hear you,” he said. “I’m kind of hard of hearing in one ear.”

“I said,” she raised her voice slightly, “How the hell did you get the name Travis, anyway?”

“Oh, it’s a long story,” he said.

“You ain’t twenty yet,” she barked. “It can’t be that long. Besides, I am giving you a reason to skip cleanup, and from the looks of you, you should take it.”

“I look that bad.”

“Go on in and get me a cup of coffee and get yourself a glass of water.”

“Talk to me,” she said when he returned. “Tell me a story.”

And so he did. He was a direct descendent of William Travis, the famous hero at age twenty-six.

“Famous for what?”

“William Travis was the commander at the Alamo,” he said.

“How can you be the direct descendent of someone who died that young at the Alamo, boy?” she asked him.

“William Travis did die young,” he said. “But he also married young, and to a woman who was sixteen. They had a son and his wife was pregnant with a daughter when he died, and I am descended from that daughter, Susan Isabella Travis.”

“I thought you were Catholic,” she said. “Far as I know, there weren’t a lot of Catholics in Texas back then, except Mexicans, of course, and you ain’t Mexican.”

He told her the rest of the story, how Susan and her brother were raised in North Carolina by William Travis’s wife and her second husband; Susan married a man from Savannah and so she raised her family in Georgia, and somewhere along the line, some of the family came into the fold.

“You ever hear of the writer Flannery O’Connor?” he asked her.

“Jonah reads her and says I would like her stories,” she said. “He says her sense of humor reminds him of me.”

“Well, I can’t prove it, but we may be related to her,” he said. “She was from Georgia, too.”

Two guests Travis didn’t recognize appeared at the door to the kitchen with shopping bags of trash and looked around for where to put them. He got up and pointed the way to the trash pen. Louise made no move to get back to work, so Travis sat down with her again. They sat in silence as the men tossed the bags into the trash cans, clanged the lids down and returned to the kitchen.

“My man Travis was a hero, all right,” he said. “He died for his country, something anyone should be proud to have done.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not sure dying for your country is the best way to be a hero,” Louise said, and Travis sensed he had hit a nerve. A lot of the people associated with the house were more liberal than he was in these matters, and what with the war and all, he had learned to tread lightly in conversations like this. He silently kicked himself for bringing the topic up. But Louise didn’t seem to want to pursue it, either.

“Travis ain’t a saint’s name,” she said. “Don’t Catholics have to be named after saints?”

“Well, yes, they do,” he said. “And I was.”

“So your ancestor was not just a hero but a saint, too?”

“No, no, my middle name is a saint’s name,” he said. “That’s good enough for the Church.”

“And your middle name is . . . ?”

“George,” he said. “Travis George O’Connor at your service.”

She felt her pockets for her cigarettes, found them and made to light another one.

“My second husband’s name was George,” she said. “Now, there was a saint.”

“Really?”

“Would you want to be married to me?”

“Where is he now?”

“Good question,” she said. “They told me he was a POW in Korea, and he never came back.”

“I’m sorry,” Travis said. “Did you have any kids?”

“One son, Reggie,” she said.

“And where is he?”

She shook her head and smiled. “You’re a veritable fountain of questions, ain’t you, kid. You are overflowing with curiosity.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I didn’t mean to pry. I was just being, well, neighborly.”

“No problem,” she said. “I like that in a man, curiosity.”

She got up and stood there. Even with her standing and him sitting, they were at eye level. Louise had a piercing way of looking at you; Travis met her gaze and held it, though.

“Reggie’s like his father in many ways, some good, some not so good,” she said. “Where is he now? Beats me. He’s a POW just like his dad was.”

“Wait,” Travis said. “Your son is a POW now? In Viet Nam?”

She turned and headed for the door. Then she stopped and turned back to him.

“As you can probably imagine, I’m not a fan of war heroes,” she said. “The real heroes are in there”—she pointed to the kitchen. “Carla’s a hero. Jason and Gruff, too. Hell, you stick around here long enough and you’ll be a hero, too.”

Travis felt as though he had to say something but he had not a clue how to respond.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean, I mean, I meant . . . .”

She waved his apology away. “No, no, NO!” she fixed him in place with this sudden burst of passion. “Feed the hungry. Smell the poor and don’t walk away. Hell,” she laughed almost to herself, “sit down and listen to an old broad rambling. That’s what it means to be a hero.”

As Louise went into the kitchen, Travis found his mind wandering to the John Wayne movie, The Alamo. William Travis had a big part in it—he was played by one of the stars, Laurence Harvey—and Travis grew up engrossed by the film whenever they showed it on television. He was proud of his ancestor, who died for his country, even though the country he died for was, well, Texas. He was proud of his uncle, currently serving outside Saigon. Worried about him but proud.

Proud. Yes, he was.

“Travis,” Carla called. “Can you come into the kitchen? Gruff’s not here today. We need you.”

Not feeling particularly heroic, and knowing he had not avoided an encounter with the soup pot from hell, he went in.

++++++++++++++

“Hear my prayer, O Lord,
and give ear to my cry;
do not hold your peace at my tears.
For I am your passing guest,
an alien, like all my forebears.
Turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again,
before I depart and am no more.”

--Psalm 39:12-13 [NRSV]

[Up next: “The Devil’s Daybook: Carla.” Thanks to Joe of the Bronx for creating the backstory for Travis in even more detail than I was able to incorporate here.]

The Devil's Daybook: Origins

If he hits one more pothole like that one, I thought but did not say, there won’t be enough left of CloudBoy’s ashes to scatter.

I know that people consider the deserts of the American Southwest to be among the most beautiful vistas in the world and, I admit, even I, the urbanist of urbanites, can take some solace in open space on occasion.

But Jesusmaryandjoseph, couldn’t they figure out a way to keep the roads paved? This was the interstate, after all.

Luke was doing the best he could. And I loved Luke. The hair long and golden back then, the way the skin of his gold-dusted arm, palest of the pale in its natural urban state, warmed in the sun from the slightest shade of pink through a buff orange and then to a nice even brown, like bread from a mother’s oven. Ummm—Umm. Good enough to eat.

Which I did. Regularly.

We were lovers then. Lovers on a mission from someone else’s God.


+++

“That’s not the way you want to start this,” Carla said.

“Why not?”

“Don’t give me that naïve shit,” she said and then she grunted as she hauled her number one soup pot out of the industrial sized sink I had gotten her last year. She was grateful when I found her the sink, even if it took us two months to find a guest who could install it.

“Make yourself useful,” she said, but before the words were out of her mouth I was heading to the rack of dishtowels drying in the corner by the stairs.

I love Carla.

“You don’t want to start your book by rubbing everyone’s nose in the messiness of your sex,” she said. “And what’s this ‘I loved Luke back then’ stuff? He’s not dead and gone. He’s just in Italy for the semester. You writing a historical novel or something?”

The two of us toweled the pot dry and Carla stashed it away.

“First of all, young lady,” I said, “who are you to tell me what I want to do, please?”

Luke’s cornflower blue eyes stared back at me from under her—how do they put it in novels?—under her knitted brow.”

“Get us some coffee, old man” she said. I was four years her senior. “We’ve got about an hour before the next round arrives.”

I walked across the scrubbed gray linoleum of the dining room to the hundred-cup perpetually grumbling coffee machine and filled two chipped ceramic mugs of indeterminate color and brought them to the near end of the closest of the long tables that filled the considerable room. If we had to, we could feed seventy-five down here in the basement.

“Here’s the thing,” she said as she sat down across from me. “Do you, or do you not, want people to read your book? I mean,” she cut me off with the wave of a hand before I could speak, “real people, not just our kind.”

“Are we not real?”

“You know what I mean,” she said. “You have a story, we have a story here that needs to be told. Jonah can’t do it, and so you volunteered.

“As you know, I didn’t exactly volunteer.”

“Well, whatever it is you are going to write, if you want people to listen, you shouldn’t repel the reader on the first page.”

“Why not?” I objected. “What planet do you live on, lady? Shock and revulsion sell.”

“In your case—in our case—it also misrepresents.”

She took a long draft of the lukewarm coffee and I knew she was missing a cigarette, two years after she gave them up.

“You could fill this room with people who think I’m revolting,” I said. “In under an hour. Easily.”

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Jason, even at your worst you’re not one person, one kind of person. There are all kinds of folks in there.” She pointed to my head with a calloused finger. “But pornographer is not one of them. Let them out, the real ones. On the page. Now.”

She was right. Carla is always right.

We sat in . . . I almost said “silence” but that would be an untruth. Even in the basement we could hear the traffic on the highway up the valley past the university to the Land of the Very Rich and the Very Unhappy.

“You need to talk to Jonah,” she said as she got up.

I was grumbling as I got up, but Carla was right.


++++++++++++++


I found Jonah, as expected, on the veranda of the faculty club, an open space of brick-red walls and a broad slate floor with the best view in town; from this point on the campus, one looked out over the whole of the valley and across the river to the city, hazy in the distance with the smog of late spring and early summer. Up here the air was still fresh and the noise of traffic could be confused, with only a little effort, with the passing of a breeze through the birch and maple woods of the lower campus. The song I could hear faintly in the distance—must have come from a radio in the kitchen—had it right: Air Supply was droning on, yet again, referring to a very different context about “afternoon delight.”

He was sitting with Marian, the two of them seemingly lost in thought after a good lunch as they gazed out at the view. I startled them, though their pleasure at seeing me, I hasten to add, was genuine.

“Bless me father,” I said once I had situated myself at the table for my share of the panorama below. “I need help.”

“Not today’s headlines,” he said and took a long pull from his water glass. “This
would be about the book.”

“It would be indeed,” I said.

“You don’t know how to start,” he said. “Happens to me every time.”

“Au contraire. I know how to start,” I said. “But Carla won’t let me.”

“Not the sex, Jason,” Marian said. “Don’t start with the sex.”

“Carla and Marian won’t let me.”

Marian called herself “just a housewife” who never went to college because early on she met a rich husband, but she was sharp all right.

A crow flew past us, out beyond the terrace. May you be the Holy Spirit in drag, come down from above to enlighten us all.

“You priests are prejudiced against—“ I began, but Jonah cut me off.

“Prejudiced against sex?” he said. “Don’t go there. That’s—“

I graciously maintained the higher ground here, mouth shut, as a young waiter, serious looking in horn rimmed glasses, with nice wide shoulders and a crisp lilt to his step, brought me my own tall glass of ice water. As a rule I don’t care for polyester, but his tight brown pants . . . .

“Jason!” Marian shouted at me as the waiter hustled off.

“Hey, he’s probably a graduate student,” I said.

“You are thoroughly shameless,” she said and fumbled in her purse for a cigarette.

The wind lifted Marian’s smoke out into the wide space before us, rustling the trees below. I am the city incarnate, but I had come to appreciate the sound of the wind in the leaves. Especially on a warm night with the windows open, lying in the arms of—

“How exactly do you write a book, Padre,” Marian asked Jonah.

“Dull as it sounds, you just start,” he said. “The prospect may be wearying, but eventually you write yourself into it.”

He lit a cigarette and his smoke joined Marian’s, wafting out into the great beyond.

“Mostly, it depends on what you’re writing,” Jonah said. “A book about the origins of Fourth Street, that was Carla’s idea, not yours, right?

I nodded. “I mean, I’m open to doing it,” I said. “I said I would, and it needs to be done.”

“And you might be the one to do it. But I’m not sure that’s how you should begin. Not,” he said, “if the purpose is to get your mind off your troubles.”

In the corner of my eye I could see Bubble Butt at the other end of the terrace, escorting my old linguistics teacher and his equally elderly wife to a table.

“Maybe what you should do is start with a daybook,” Jonah said.

“What’s a daybook?” Marian asked.

“It’s hard to say. That’s why it’s a great way to start,” Jonah said. “It’s a place you can put down anything.”

“Not like a diary, right?” I said. “All full of feelings and sh—stuff. If there’s one thing I don’t want to do to get my mind off things is to hash and rehash them out in a diary.”

“No, that’s not what a daybook is,” Jonah said. “Think of it as a mental scrapbook, a place where you jot down your observations of all aspects of your life—conversations you have with people, ideas that occur to you and you don’t want to forget, books you read, movies you see.”

He put out his cigarette in the glass ash tray on the table.

“Anything that interests you is grist for that mill,” he said, and he made to leave, probably for a class. “And if after a while you turn it into an account of the founding of the house, all the better.”

“My take on theology?” I asked, and Jonah nodded.

“And the sex?” I continued. “I could put in the sex?”

Jonah shared a glance with Marian.

“In your daybook, just tell the truth. If that involves theology or sexuality, or even a theology of sexuality, put it down,” he said. “But my suggestion would be to do it in a way that will help a reader, Marian here for instance, to understand what you are talking about.”

“Padre,” Marian said, “you’re telling Jason to--.”

“To teach you about sex, yes,” he said. “And theology.”

“This won’t be very orthodox, you know,” I said, and he chuckled.

“I said you should tell the truth, right?”

The truth was settling in for Marian.

“Oh, dear God,” she muttered, and reflexively reached for her cigarettes.

“I’ll take care of the check on the way out,” Jonah said. “Why don’t you two sit here a bit longer and enjoy the view?”

“For sure,” I said, looking for the waiter.

“Jason!” Marian squawked with mock displeasure.

“A daybook,” I said to her.

“The daybook from hell,” she said.

Yeah. I can do that.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“I think no man can go with his thoughts about him, into one of our churches, without feeling that what hold the public worship had on men is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection of the good, and on the fear of the bad.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” July 15, 1838.

Intermission

Hi, folks! This is your story teller, taking a moment out from the narrative for a couple of reasons, now that the blog is up and running. For one thing, the promised Devil’s Daybook is giving me more trouble than expected and I need a bit more time. For another, a number of people reading this are new to the world of blogs, so I need to note that on arrival, the best way to read this is to go to the list to the right of this text and begin with the posting titled “Introduction,” and then follow the posts down the line in order.

But the main reason for this intermission is the fact that my friend Joe of The Bronx who has been reading this—he is the follower called josephley in the line up to your right (hey, Joe, give us a picture already!)—called earlier this week and I wanted to share some of that conversation.

I had told Joe that he was the prime inspiration for the Travis character, and sort of off handedly asked him, “Do you have any idea how Travis got his name?” My original backstory was that Travis was conceived (unlike Joe!) in the back seat of his parents’ car before they were married, when they were going through their country western phase. For a variety of reasons (taste included) I had jettisoned that one (be forewarned: taste will not normally be a criterion for editing stories).

Well, Joe took my question seriously and came up with a great explanation for Travis’s name that I am tweaking a bit but which will appear shortly as a separate post. Here is why I am bringing this up: Joe’s suggestion demonstrated to me—and will, I hope, remind you of—the capability that we all have to imagine, and promoting imagination when it comes to important values and issues is, to be honest, the primary reason for all of the work I do.

Consider letting your imagination run free a bit and sending suggestions to fill out or bolster the plot. One of you has already suggested that we all write the story together; I am a bit unnerved at losing all control over the narrative (and having to deal with bruised egos as things get tweaked, edited or dropped), but hey, I am open to that if enough people want to jump in. Another reader has volunteered to add some original poetic commentary on occasion, and still another—Janice of Texas, a/k/a Juanita Technologia—wrote and suggested the map now found at the bottom of this page so we can get a sense of who is reading with us.

I am hoping that as we go along, others will enter what I want to be a conversation, with suggestions for plot and character, yes, but also ways to improve the blog site, links of common interest to add, and most especially, commentary on the issues raised by the story (I also would appreciate corrections of grammar, typos, anachronisms, and the like, but I would ask you to spare my pride—and other readers’ time—by sending those to me privately at jlanci@comcast.net). If you are a bit shy about sharing your plot suggestions with the universe, do feel free to send them to me at that address and we can chat and perhaps develop your ideas.

Doing this blog over the last few weeks has opened my eyes to the very diverse (dare I say weird?) community of people I know and enjoy in the many different social worlds I inhabit. So far, readers include—among others—a couple of grad students, a poet who works in a prison, some undergraduates on summer holiday, a marine biologist, a UPS driver, a couple of just-exonerated library trustees, some old style housewives, a school bus driver, a couple of college professors and an archaeologist or two, as well as my friends Janice and the other poet, and my only blood-related sibling. The thought of some of you being in conversation with each other, and not just me, boggles (should I say bloggles) the mind.

Think about it.

In the meantime, in honor of the fact that so many of us were born in August and are thus, to a greater or lesser degree, contemplating mortality, here is a bit of poetry from—surprise—Mary Oliver. It is taken from the poem, “To Begin With, the Sweet Grass,” found in her newest book of verse, Evidence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009) 38-39:

“What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
though with difficulty.

I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).

“And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

“And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.”