As Luck Would Have It (24 page)

Two Saturdays later they all came to dinner, including if you can believe it, Edna and Harold Klein.  When everyone had arrived, my aunt made us feel at ease by saying she had wanted to do something nice to make up for her earlier behavior
;
let’s just forget what happened, let bygones be bygones, I’m happy you all decided to come.

Christian ran straight for the Steinway that had been in Jack’s family since before the depression and started playing a few chords.  Get your uncle’s guitar, Doreen suggested, Joseph you play too, Clifford, where is that beautiful harmoni
ca that th
e Casslemonds gave you?  Soon we were on stage, imagining that we were famous, but knowing better.  Yet for some reason, when we broke into
Love Me Do
, it sounded better to me than it ever had before; with me harmonizing more or less in sync with Christian as he sang the melody, shaking his head like Paul, Joseph doing a decent job at imitating George on the guitar, and of course me trying my best to sound like John did when he played the harmonica.  Everyone clapped when we finished and called out for an encore.  We bowed in unison just like the Beatles always did when they performed; if only I could have seen them
live
on stage
just once.  Maybe the four and a half decades of intervening time had altered my recollection of how it really was that night, but can you honestly tell me that luck had nothing to do with any of this?

Now if you are thinking that my aunt’s remarkable
personality transformation was nothing short of a miracle, perhaps you are correct in making that assumption,
but we might never
know for sure because neither of the two parties with actual knowledge of what really went on was willing to reveal any clues
.
  I also had to consider the possibility that there was no real transformation at all, but that my aunt’s mood swing was to be temporary in nature; that she felt better after spending a day with Mr. Casslemond’s wife, but as we all know from our own experiences in life, such good feelings can be short lived and that I had better not rule out the likelihood that our relationship might revert back to where it had been before Doreen had become friendly with Mr. Casslemond’s wife and gone shopping with her.

But over the next few weeks it seemed clear to me that something fundamental had occurred on that day
,
and that at least to some degree the changes we’d been observing with respect to my aunt might in fact become permanent features, and if that were to turn out to be true, we might have to quite seriously ask ourselves what
marvel had Mr. Casslemond’s wife pulled off and how had she done it?  Or could it be that luck simply intervened on my behalf, which it now seemed in the habit of doing
?
  Could luck have in fact, with an assist from Mr. Casslemond’s wife of course, caused Doreen’s persona to be so drastically altered in such a short period of time?  Things like that don’t just happen, right, how can they?

Yet that seemed to be just the case in this situation; my aunt’s bitter moods had softened
, her
acerbic commentary and sarcastic
observations
seemed to have vanished pretty much in front of my eyes.  Stop questioning it, I kept telling myself; don’t jinx it either, luck might have a ruthless side, its wrath might appear suddenly to take vengeance out on those who doubt it.  Just believe in its power and accept its omnipresence, lest it turn against us in some dreadful way with a fire, an earthquake, or flood; or worse, another accident to claim
the
life
of someone we love
and ruin the lives of those it left behind.

But whether it was good luck or the good nature of Mr. Casslemond’s wife, things now were
beginning to turn
in a more positive direction, some 15 months after Mr. Casslemond’s unfortunate skidding episode when he would have preferred being at home where it was warm, with his wife and the grandchildren instead of driving the produce truck making deliveries on a cold and snowy Sunday evening.  But retribution can come in so many forms; redemption elusive and disguised.  It’s so
effortless
to place blame,
but
seemingly impossible to
forgive and forget
. 
Isn’t that right Mr. Casslemond; you were at fault, why didn’t you slow down, couldn’t you have been paying more attention, you carry the burden of what you have done for a lifetime, with my parents’ lost souls on your conscience for an eternity.  Wasn’t this what Aunt Doreen had been saying all along; how can you stand to be with those people?  But you can only lay guil
t
for so long and justice can only go so far; you have to absolve eventually, it was an accident after all and wasn’t he doing his best to put things right?  H
e
never
mentioned the accident or my parents with me; he couldn’t bring himself to do that, but hadn’t he shared his home and his family when I needed them so badly?  Hadn’t he given me a harmonic for Christmas and
explained to
me that ther
e
would be both good and bad days and that he would be there for both, not down in Florida, but just a few miles away instead?

But it had turned out to be through Mr. Casslemond’s wife, somehow, that Aunt Doreen was to get some release from her suffering, from burdens so deep I was to learn, enough to smother a person.  It was through the kindness of Mr. Casslemond’s wife, her patience with my aunt, her maternal presence perhaps that helped bring Doreen back among the living, from way back, not just since she lost her only sister.  I had never
been able to comprehend the implications of this, how could I as a child growing up know what losing a parent actually meant.  Of course I knew that my maternal grandmother had died at a young age in a factory accident during the war and that the girls had grown up with just their father to look after them, much like Mr. Casslemond’s wife, except that there were no elder sisters in this case to help with the parenting.

My grandfather toiled in the steel foundries for long hours and longer years and had little energy for anything except the bourbon when he came home; exhausted much of the time and without a wife to help soothe his pains or care for the girls.  He was content to drink and listen to the radio, or entertain the other men from work who came to the house in the evenings so that he didn’t have to drink alone.  It was in this environment that the young
sisters
were to form a bond that would only strengthen as they moved through adolescence and into adulthood.  These two women, so different on the surface to the casual observer, and certainly to me even, were extremely close as adults.  If others saw the dissimilarities in them and wondered why they even bothered with each other, it was because their connection could never be anything but a mystery to an outsider.  Who else could have known of the hardships they had endured as youngsters, how they had depended on one another so entirely, and how they had only themselves to turn to for comfort
,
with their mother gone and their father nearly paralyzed, even if through no fault of his own.  How can we possibly understand
the circumstances of others; it’s difficult enough to recognize our own, confusing as life’s twisted turns usually are, confronting us constantly with nameless dangers and epic predicaments.

Even understanding why they stayed so close, both emotionally and physically, Doreen and my mother never living more than a mile or so from each other, you could still spend a lifetime trying to figure out why their personalities surfaced in such different ways.  Why was it that my mother was kind-hearted and accepting of others, while her only sibling became so bitter and resentful?  Was it their nature, or had life’s troubles pulled on their spirits in different ways and torn some of the strands of their beings, but left others unharmed, like the tornado that flattens one side of the block, but barely moves the shutters across the way.  And please tell me who or what decide
s
how those pieces should be moved about the chess board, causing happiness and misery at the same moment; based on what, luck?  No Clifford, you are probably saying, there must be something else, something divine, something sacred, some other explanation for why Doreen
seemed
so tormented with life, yet my mother, rest her soul, was so content with it.

In some way, Mr. Casslemond’s wife must have been able to glimpse some bit of truth that was invisible to everyone else and use it to help Aunt Doreen
.  How was that possible, I wondered; I needed to understand this better, but she just shrugged when I brought it up when I visited the Casslemonds one weekend in April, when the frigid winter had finally conceded defeat, and she had taken Joseph and me to the zoo and bought us popcorn and cotton candy, while we watched the great ape exhibit in amazement.  Doreen just needed a friend to listen, was her explanation, but that provided no more insight for me than my pondering the thoughts that might have been running through the mind of the gorilla that stared at us through the bars of its enclosure.

She had appeared to me to be in no great need of friendship; quite the opposite actually, she had driven her friends away.  Was this ape capable of thoughts even remotely similar to the ones I was experiencing?  What else had Mr. Casslemond’s wife perceived about my aunt that revealed the clues to reaching her?  As we talked, the giant primate seemed somehow fascinated with our conversation; was he in any way deriving clues from our voices about what we were up to?  Did he analyze his predicament somehow or think about what he might want to do if he ever found a way out of his confinement?  Had Mr. Casslemond’s wife recognized something in her own past when Doreen spoke; had she been able to relive some prior experience in
her own life
for the benefit of
all of us?
  The gorilla cannot speak, but can it reason things out in some sort of organized fashion that would
amaze
us if we could decipher its co
de
?  Or is its thought p
rocess so scattered and disjointed that it wouldn’t astound us at all, except for its simplistic and rudimentary character?  Mr. Casslemond’s wife would not reveal the answers to these questions any more than the gorilla would.  Joseph munched away at his popcorn while attempting to engage the ape in some form of communication, when suddenly the big monkey picked up a piece of
its
own shit and tossed it right through the bars, glancing off the side of Joseph’s White Sox cap and barely missing Mr. Casslemond’s wife as she ducked just in time. 

All the shrinks, all the antidepressants, all the relative’s best wishes, all the kings horses, none of them could put Aunt Doreen together again; it seemed that she had been too badly broken for that.  What an irony then to consider the least likely of all people to intervene successfully on her behalf to figure out how the pieces might fit.  Such an incongruity is best appreciated in a humorous context, but up until now, no one had felt much like joking, or for that matter even laughing since the tragedy.  But now the air of gloom had been lifted, at least a little bit, and Aunt Doreen and Uncle Jack decided that since they hadn’t been to the movies in well over a year, they would take Joseph and me to see
Blazing Saddles
one Sunday afternoon that spring.

Christian had seen it
months
earlier and pronounced it to be the greatest comedy ever produced.  His tendency was always to gravitate towards the superlative, and one had to wonder what qualified him as an expert in comedic cinema, so my expectations were tempered.  But there should have been no doubting him
as a critic, as it was in fact a great movie, but it was my aunt who cackled hysterically throughout the film, tears streaming down her face at the end.  Afterwards, while we were having ice cream at 33 Flavors, Joseph with a double-dip sugar cone coated with nuts and sprinkles that my aunt insisted he have, she claimed that she could never remember laughing so hard, not even when she saw Allan Sherman perform live while
they were
on vacation to in Minneapolis in 1964.

It was gratifying to see her able to laugh again, but all of this caused me to think about her attitude towards Jews, which I couldn’t believe would permanently change overnight.  More than that even, if she was so enamored with comedians like Mel Brooks and Allan Sherman
,
why had she adopted such negative views in the first place?  Perhaps it is the nature of bigotry itself
;
maybe it isn’t the people
t
hat are loathed, but rather what they represent.  It’s not what they say or do or produce that
is offensive
, but rather the image conjured in the mind of what the person
must
actually be like.

If negative imagery is the basis which forms stereotypes associated with a particular group, can you like Milton Berle for his comic genius, but dislike him because of the associated image he embodies?  And if stereotypes are in fact nothing more than unfair exaggerations of a group’s generally perceived characteristics
, are the negative feelings associate
d
with that group necessarily exaggerated concurrently as well?  I would propose to you as the reader, that my aunt’s dislike for Jews had nothing to do with any actual experience with Jews, but rather was the result of an impression inked into her mind of what a Jew is, which may have nothing to do with any
real experience she ever had, or any
person she ever knew.  If someone hates Joseph because he is gay, I’m saying it has nothing to do with Joseph; it has nothing really to do with gay people either, and if that is true, then homophobia has no rational basis
.
Bigotry, all by itself, is irrational.  It may have served, or maybe it still serves some evolutionary or adaptive function, but it is still not rational and therefore should be eliminated or at least constrained by rational thought.