As Luck Would Have It (21 page)

I may have been a somewhat
naïve
teenager, but it was pretty clear even to me that the reason Aunt Doreen was staying with Mildred had less to do with her
grieving
over my mother's death, or even with the Casslemonds necessarily, but rather with the deteriorating condition of her marriage.  While she was seeing a therapist for her
depression, I was guessing that a good deal of the therapy had to do with salvaging her relationship
with my uncle.

While I
knew this in the back of my mind, it was Mr. Casslemond's wife who would help crystallize it for me, and in the process, help everyone concerned in dealing with one another and the thorny issues that continued to confront us just one year after the accident.  This process began to take shape on Christmas Eve, when she and I were alone while we waited for Mr. Casslemond to return with the brandy he needed for the eggnog he would make, and for Charles and her other sons to arrive with their families.  If Mr. Casslemond's wife had at first appeared to me to be a somewhat plain, simple woman, she was to provide me with all the proof needed that first impressions can be far from reliable.  With just a high school
education and
no career accomplishments on any resume, she was probably the prototypical housewife in her day; committed to raising her children and cherishing their achievements ahead of her own.  By December of 1974, when her life changed forever along with mine, she was 70 years old and had seen
six
grandchildren enter the world and grow with the family; so proud she was of them that she would light up whenever they visited.  She loved them all and doted on the younger ones especially, but I knew that Christian was her favorite.

Before the others arrived, Mr. Casslemond's wife explained how I would need to be patient with Aunt Doreen, whatever she did.  But wait, wasn't she herself angry when my aunt disrupted things at their house and made her cry?  Christian hadn't been exaggerating
that scene, had he?  She admitted that it had been quite upsetting, but also that the experience had reminded her of how they had dealt with a similar tragedy in her own life that had happened many years ago.  Mr. Casslemond and his wife had four children, not three; their youngest child, Allison, had died from leukemia when Charles was only eight years old.  Allison, poor thing, was only six.  The awful mix of guilt and grief had nearly ended their marriage and the thing that probably saved it, she said, was the intervention and support of her friends and the other family members.

She showed me faded photographs of her only daughter, a cute, smiling youngster whose life was swept out from under her before she had time to live it.  Her death had so devastated them that a dark gloom had settled over the family and it seemed that it would surely suffocate them.  Mr. Casslemond particularly could not be consoled or find a way to move past their loss, and the two of them could hardly endure the pain of even looking at each other, let alone managing the three boys, the eldest of whom
, Caleb,
was only thirteen.  His way of coping was to immerse himself into the produce business, which kept him away from home a lot in those earlier years, providing an escape from the dreaded void that seemed to reside permanently in their house.  For awhile, much of the child rearing fell on her shoulders; she did whatever she could think of for them in an attempt to compensate for the loss, sparing the
boys
nothing, praying each night and again at Sunday services that they would be alright without their baby sister and that one day the family might be whole again.

There was noise on the porch and just like that the somber mood vaporized and
was replaced by the gaiety of the holiday
, as most of the family
seemed to have
arrived at just about the same
moment
.  Now the living room was bursting with Casslemonds,
gifts, and the
Tupperware containers of food they brought with them; the old photo album with the pictures still fresh in my mind having been inconspicuously returned to its place on the bookshelf by Mr. Casslemond's wife, who hugged all the grandchildren and could not have seemed more joyful in having everyone there together.  I looked at her and realized that she had to be still thinking of her youngest child who never had the chance to grow up
or
share
such
happy moment
s
; for this was about as good as it could get really, with everyone laughing and crowding around the fire to warm themselves.  It saddened me at though to think of the little girl in the pictures and my parents also, wishing once again that I could be wi
th
them on Ch
ristmas, but I was happy at the same time being there with the Casslemonds who treated my like one of their own.  The implausibility of this seemed so apparent to me; what had luck done to arrange something as unliklly as this?  Who or what had steered the direction of things to land me here; it could not have happened just by chance, no something more was going on, something both disconcerting and comforting at the same time.  Before I could contemplate it much further, Mr. Casslemond came in with not only the brandy, but an armload of presents that he could barely manage, so I ran over to him to grab one just as it was about to fall.  That one is for you Clifford, Merry Christmas.

I sat on the floor by the fire while the others opened their gifts, the children so excited they couldn't sit still or even consider waiting until their turn came.  Mr. Casslemond's wife chided them gently for their lack of patience and then just smiled, no doubt remembering prior Christmases when her own children were so excited and energized.  It was finally time to open my gift, and maybe I should not have been surprised by it, but indeed I was.  Inside the box that Mr. Casslemond nearly dropped on the floor was a gleaming silver Hohner harmonica.  Christian howled and jumped up and down like the little ones had, then ran to get his own harmonica
from who knows where, so that we could try some duets.  How we would do that I had no idea, since I'd never actually played one before.  But of course that would not matter to him in the least; it was the making of the music that mattered, the purity of the art itself, not how good you were at producing it.  In Christian's world, art did not imitate life, but rather the other way around.

Joseph and I got to spend time with Christian over the holiday, which was great because now that he was in high school, it was harder to find time to get together.  He had made new friends there and was busy playing saxophone in the varsity jazz band and writing for the school paper.  He showed us an editorial he'd written about prejudices in their school and how att
itudes there might change with the times and become more tolerant.  I was both surprised and impressed with what I read, I had no idea he was such a gifted writer, or that he had given so much thought to the topic.  He explored the argument that racial and gender discrimination were nothing more than different sides of the same coin, and since there were clear laws regarding disparate treatment of African Americans for instance, any different treatment of other minorities, including women or gays could not possibly be justified from a legal perspective.

Unfortunately, the school had rejected it for publication claiming that it was perhaps a bit too controversial for
The Chesterton High Weekly. 
Instead of arguing the point, Christian decided to try another piece covering the editorial limitations of school newspapers and their reluctance to take on serious subjects, preferring to focus on superficial topics like who might be prom queen or why pizza should be served in the cafeteria more often.  Not surprisingly, that one never made it past the editors either, and you would think by now that he might have decided to abandon his journalistic aspirations and focus on the jazz band instead, but Christian had apparently not been discouraged one bit, because he pulled out the latest edition of the newspaper that featured this article on the front page: 

Making the grade - Why does high school matter?  By Christian Casslemond

Maybe high school mattered, but can you imagine what I might have come up with for our school paper if for some insane reason I found myself on the editorial staff?  Let's see, maybe something like
Middle School, Why Does Torture Matter
; or perhaps
A Practical Survival Guide
for
Grades 7 through 9. 
The only thing good I could say about being in the ninth grade was that it was better than the two alternatives, and by the time classes resumed after the
New Year
, I was all about being done with
middle school
.

If fearing the bullies and the teachers had served
their
intended purpose for the first two and a half years,
by now
the effects on me now had pretty much run their course.
I was toughened up enough by what life had served me with and I wasn't afraid of either of them, or Mr. Strickmann for that matter.  Now when he patrolled the halls I glared at him with a sort of confident defiance that I hadn't known about before and I refused to even acknowledge him when he walked by.  Looking back on it now, I'm sure he hated me about as much as the rest of the students who didn't suck up to him, or show him more respect than he deserved, but given what I had been through,
he might be reluctant
to come down too hard on me.  But as we will see, the same was not the case with respect to Joseph; it must have finally dawned on Mr. Strickmann who and what Joseph actually was.  For despite his 3.9 grade point, his dogged compliance with the onerous rules, and his good-natured personality, Joseph had been singled out by the SS commandant for special treatment.

Now that we were in the 9
th
grade, virtually everyone had reached puberty, and therein was where things really began to diverge.  In earlier years we had no real awareness and even less knowledge when it came to anything sexual; homosexuality was merely a concept with limited practical implications other than to use it to hurt someone, which we were all used to anyway.  Nobody I knew was immune to the insults, threats, or abuse, and being called a fairy was no more or less offensive than the other daily indignities we endured.  The teachers rarely bothered to even reprimand such verbal harassment unless it escalated into fighting.  Now, with the hormone levels surging in our classrooms, both the insults and the fighting increased exponentially.

To the extent that gay guys were left alone, it was only because they were either skilled in hiding their inclinations, or happened to be tough enough to discourage the attackers who lurked everywhere.  Joseph was not exactly blessed with either of these attributes, but by our third year in middle school, he would at least be ready to defend himself if he had to.  His brother Richard had seen to that.  Richard was straight as a ruler and maybe a little put off by his younger brother's demeanor, but he played winger on his varsity hockey team and had learned a thing or two about fighting.  Small and wiry, he might find himself in a physical mismatch, but on
e time
when a guy on the ice made the inauspicious mistake of throwing the word kike in Richard's direction, he responded without hesitation by sending the loud-mouth to the
orthodontist for a couple of implants.  The first time Joseph came home bloodied from school, Richard took it upon himself to teach us both how to fight; don't act like a sissy either one of you or I'll be the one to beat the crap out of you.  Did you at least hit the guy back, Joseph?  He had a set of barbells in their basement and he'd work out with us sometimes too, and even though Joseph was always going to be a little on the wispy side, the weight lifting did pay dividends, especially for me.  I was getting a lot stronger at 15 and as I have mentioned, was no longer intimidated by middle school.

That is not to say that I no longer hated it; I did, I loathed it.  My disdain for the teachers and administrators only worsened with time, though with luck on my side, I was never in any serious trouble.  For the first year I assumed it was because they felt sorry for me, but by now I realized that it was
also due
to the fact that they were for the most part cowards.  Fifteen years of life had taught me that if you stand up to a coward, they
will nearly always back down, often cringing as the
y
slither away, t
he great irony being that it is their nature to intimate, yet they are often
the ones
quite easily intimidated.

I’d also learned that fifteen
-
year
-
old boys are
very cruel creatures, although largely through no fault of their own.  Adult-age discretion trickles in slowly over the years, but the rush of testosterone floods the brain ostensibly overnight.  How can anyone expect a teenager’s emotional maturity to possibly keep pace with his physical development?  But the bigger question you should be asking is how could our educators, the people most experienced and presumably the best trained in dealing with a child’s brain in a grown up
’s
body not know this?  You’re immature Andrews, you know that?  Of course I know that, I’m still a child, dam
n
it. Let me enjoy being one before I grow up and have to enter the miserable world that you inhabit.  We’re impulsive, largely ignorant and bewildered much of the time
;
don’t you think we realize how screwed up that is?  Maybe you can help us out by teaching practical life lessons along
with the
text book lessons
;
instruct us in the value of both compassion and composition, charity and chemistry, hope and history.  Try
to show us both sides of being human, not just rules for the sake of rules; don’t get out of your seat, get up to the blackboard, sit back down, go to Mr. Strickmann’s office, get a hall pass, spit out your gum, come up here mister.  Why, what horrible thing did I do; I didn’t blow bubbles with it or stick it under my chair, so what if I wrote a note that says Suzie has big tits, is that so bad; I haven’t made spitballs with the paper, have I?