Morning Is a Long Time Coming (25 page)

Then it wasn’t true what I had feared. After Germany I felt far too splintered to ever again, on my own volition, give anything away. From me there’d be no pennies to the poor or bread to the hungry or words of cheer to the lonely. I couldn’t possibly give anything away because, as it was, there was already too little left that was me.

With you, Roger, I don’t think it was like that. At least with you I still had something to give, didn’t I? And funny thing is, I have felt neither depleted nor deprived for the experience.

At the same time the bells of St. Sulpice began solemnly stroking out the morning hour of eight, Roger and I strolled into Jacques’s café. The oversized espresso machine emitted soft, throaty sounds while the pungent smell of the coffee seemed as reassuring as a small-town scene painted by Norman Rockwell.

As soon as Jacques spotted me, he rushed from behind the counter, welcoming me with “Encore à la café du Jacques, et encore à votre santé!” He wiped his hands on his morning-fresh, around-the-belly white apron before offering them to me. Even after I assured him under direct questioning that I was beginning to feel good again, he told me that to feel good again it was absolutely necessary for me to regain my lost weight.

Roger and I slid in next to each other at a window table and although we were acutely alert to one another’s presence, neither of us broke our mutually cherished habit of
morning silence. He read
Le Monde
while sipping espresso and I sipped Jacques’s steaming café au lait while watching chilled pedestrians walk with long quick strides down Place St. Sulpice.

After a while, I stopped staring at the Parisians and he stopped reading the newspaper. “We didn’t talk much last night,” he said. “You haven’t as yet mentioned your trip. Was Germany everything you hoped for?”

“Not what I hoped for, no. I was seven months late. Mrs. Reiker died in June.”

“Oh,” he said, covering my hand with his own. And I wondered if we had ever achieved more intimacy than now. It was true, and yet how could that be? Handholding is still primary-grade stuff. And in these months hadn’t we shared our bodies and our beds? A lot of external visions and a few internal fears? Now our possession-in-common is only a moment of shared sorrow.

“Roger, I want you to know how I feel,” I told him, while emotionally rushing from the scene. “Only ... I can’t talk about it ... not yet.”

Leaning his head back, he closed his eyes without releasing my hand. “I think I can guess how you feel. It must feel something like being forced to climb an unscalable mountain. Ignoring cold, hunger, and fatigue to continue that ascent to the very summit. Only to discover, once you get there, that it’s all been for nothing. Because there is nothing there for you.”

“... nothing there for me?”

Roger looked enormously surprised. “Was there? Something?”

I heard myself sigh. “I guess not. I don’t know! Maybe.”

“So you did,” said Roger, breaking into an I-caught-you grin, “find something there, didn’t you?”

I breathed in deep enough to activate what energy I had. “Only that I could do it. That I, surprisingly actually, had the strength to do it. Also there was that view from the heights. That’s when I saw—clearly saw—that there was more than one mountain in my life. Some could be seen and some couldn’t be, but just the same, they were all out there. All out there waiting for me.

“But what was climbed was already climbed, and I understand now that I’ll never have to chase that vision or scale that particular mountain again.”

Also by Bette Greene

- Summer of My German Soldier

- The Drowning of Stephan Jones

- Philip Hall Likes Me. I Reckon Maybe.

- Get On Out of Here, Philip Hall

- I’ve Already Forgotten Your Name, Philip Hall!

A Biography of Bette Greene

BETTE GREENE was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on June 28, 1934, and grew up across the Harahan Bridge in Arkansas cotton country, thirty-five miles west of Memphis. Bette’s first twelve years were spent in Parkin, Arkansas, a town of 1,100, with two streets and no stop signs, in the very buckle of the Bible Belt.

With the birth of the family’s second child, Marsha, the care and protection of four-year-old Bette became the responsibility of the family servant and housekeeper, Ruth, with whom Bette came to share a child-mother bond. Ruth, a long-suffering, spiritual black woman, engaged Bette’s precocious curiosity with stories and songs. In Ruth’s arms, Bette knew unconditional love, but also felt the fear and anguish instilled by the nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan.

Bette’s elementary school classroom was a place of despair: She and her classmates, many of whom were the shoeless and hungry children of sharecroppers, learned straight from the chalkboard with no access to books. When the last bell of the day rang, Bette knew many of her fellow students would join the black children in the cotton fields, working until dark.

At age seven, Bette, tired of the ten-mile walk to the nearest library from her small town, was allowed to travel to Memphis to visit her grandmother. After riding the train alone from Parkin to Memphis, Bette was met by her grandmother, Tilly, and a chauffeur, and driven to the Peabody Hotel. Tilly, the family matriarch, took Bette into her world. Their love and trust for each other grew over many lunches and conversation punctuated with Yiddish phrases.

On one such occasion, Tilly gave Bette a four-inch-thick dictionary. The gift fed Bette’s voracious hunger for knowledge, and she promised Tilly that she would learn every word. That same year, at Tilly’s request, Bette wrote a letter to Pope Pius XII begging for his help in locating Tilly’s brothers, missing in battle in Lithuania during World War II.

At age eight, Bette submitted an account of a Parkin barn fire, complete with burning cows, to the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
. The story was published and Bette received her first byline—and twenty-four cents—making her the youngest professional journalist of her time. Bette’s experience growing up in the only Jewish family in a suffocatingly small Southern town would later inform her award-winning novel
Summer of My German Soldier
.

After entering the University of Alabama in 1952, Bette became a consistent betting winner, putting her money on Coach Bear Bryant’s Crimson Tide. But when the English faculty ruled that Bette could not be admitted into the creative writing program until she completed courses of English grammar, Bette said, “Bye, bye ’bama!”

In 1953, Bette began school at Memphis State University. She became feature editor for the
Tiger Rag
while also writing for United Press International and publishing stories worldwide.

Then, in 1954, Bette took her tuition money and fled to Paris, France, enrolling at Alliance Française and spending a year studying French, life, and love.

In 1955, Bette returned to Memphis and began work as a freelance writer for the
Commercial Appeal
. At the same time, she turned down an invitation from Colonel Tom Parker to write about a new talent he was managing, an unknown singer named Elvis Presley, as it was known that the Colonel didn’t pay. Bette soon left for New York City and entered Columbia University to study writing. She quickly became Columbia’s “rising literary star” and was offered a significant publishing deal for her first novel,
Counter Point, My Love
. Unhappy with the novel, rather than accept the deal she tore up the manuscript and watched it burn in her fireplace.

Bette married Dr. Donald Sumner Greene, a neurologist from Boston, in 1959. Leaving her Southern roots, she moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, where her two children, Carla and Jordan, were born. In the security of their family home, Bette wrote
Summer of My German
Soldier while studying creative writing at Harvard University.

In 1973, after thirty-seven rejections,
Summer of My German Soldier
was published. The novel garnered numerous awards and honors, including the first Golden Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers, and the Massachusetts Children’s Book Award. The novel was also named a
New York Times
Outstanding Book and an ALA Notable Book, and was a National Book Award finalist.
Summer of My German Soldier
was translated into ten languages.

The television film
Summer of My German Soldier
would go on to win the Humanitas Prize for human dignity, meaning, and freedom in 1978, and that same year, Esther Rolle won an Emmy for her performance as Ruth. The screenplay was written and adapted by Bette Greene and Jane-Howard Hammerstein.

In 1974, Bette published her second novel,
Philip Hall Likes Me. I Reckon Maybe
. It was named an ALA Notable Book and a
New York Times
Outstanding Book and collected numerous additional honors including the Newbery Honor, the
Kirkus
Choice Award, and the Child Study Association of America’s Children’s Book Award.

Inspired by her readers, who demanded more adventures of Beth Lambert and Phillip Hall, Bette Greene wrote two more books in the Phillip Hall trilogy:
Get On Out of Here, Philip Hall
and
I’ve Already Forgotten Your Name, Philip Hall!

In 1978, Bette published her sequel to
Summer of My German Soldier, Morning Is a Long Time Coming
. In 1983, Bette was awarded the keys to the City of Memphis. That same year she published
Them That Glitter and Them That Don’t
, a novel inspired by the real lives of Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, which received the Parents’ Choice Award.

In 1991, Bette published
The Drowning of Stephan Jones
. This book, based on the true story of the death of Charles O. Howard in Bangor, Maine, was banned, censored, and challenged by school boards, libraries, and parents across the country. To this day, the Eckerd Wilderness Camps use
The Drowning of Stephan Jones
as bibliotherapy, giving copies to campers who have been victims of abuse.

By 2010, Bette Greene’s readers had taken it upon themselves to create a Facebook page for her, as well as a page for
Summer of My German Soldier
, which includes performance videos about the love between Patty and Anton and even rap songs about Hitler.

In 2011, three years after the death of Dr. Donald Greene, her husband of fifty years, Bette discovered a manuscript for a book series long-forgotten in her computer titled
Verbal Karate
. She trademarked the title and earmarked a percentage of the book’s income for the Phoebe Prince Anti-Bullying Foundation, and returned to her island home and writing sanctuary to begin the final edits of
Verbal Karate
.

As a twenty-first century master author with four decades of fans worldwide, Bette Greene uses electronic media platforms and social networks to reach out and embrace her readers.

Bette Greene and her mother, Sadie (far left), organizer of the townspeople of Parkin, Arkansas, answering the nationwide call for scrap metal destined to become ammo for the war effort in 1942.

Bette (far right, wearing cowboy boots) next to her mother, Sadie, and across from her father, Arthur, “the best-dressed man in Parkin,” in their store, Evensky’s Dry Goods, in 1941. Evensky’s Dry Goods was the inspiration for the Bergen Department Store, the epicenter of
Summer of My German Soldier
, where Patty meets Anton.