Together again, for the first time

by David Benjamin

 

“A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.” — Mark Twain

 

MADISON, Wis. — Last weekend at my 55th-year high-school reunion, I drifted from the crowd and found, alone at a table, a woman whose name tag—featuring her 1967 yearbook photo—read Linda. 

Hesitantly, I sat with her.

The last time I’d spoken to Linda was the weekend of November 22, 1963. We were both freshmen. I spotted her one day that week because a) we had adjacent lockers and b) she was far prettier than the average gangly ninth-grade girl. I can’t recall how I accomplished the miracle, but I somehow inveigled this lovely Linda into the idea of a date, to be consummated on Saturday the 23rd. 

Here was the problem. Linda’s home was off Buckeye Road on the far east side of town. I lived on Simpson Street, seven miles away. We were both fourteen, with neither a car nor a parent inclined to abet the romantic fortunes of two kids too young for romance. Also, the day before our prospective rendezvous, the President of the United States had been gunned down in Texas.

Nevertheless, I persisted. The day after JFK’s death, I phoned Linda often and lengthily, parsing bus schedules, proposing that she walk to a midpoint somewhere between our far-flung homes where we could meet on foot. I asked how she felt about a two- or three-mile bike ride (she did not bicycle) and even proposed riding my own bike all the way to her. “To do what?” she probably asked. This was likely the question that ended my quest. It also killed our “relationship.” In four subsequent years sharing the corridors and classrooms of La Follette High, Linda and I were strangers. 

But, 55 years on, I remembered the entire fiasco. When I sat down with the present-day Linda, I wondered if she, too, recalled our non-dating date. As I expected, she barely remembered me, much less my bungled assignation. But we talked. I learned something of her life since ninth grade, she a little of mine. And I came away oddly buoyed. It was nice to know that I wasn’t one of Linda’s dumber memories. She had no idea—nor did I intimate—that my failure to connect with Linda had planted in my head the seed, many years later, of a novel. 

Linda became grist for fiction because she had interfered with history. On that long-past weekend, my desperation to debut as her boyfriend smothered my awareness of the awful event that had paralyzed the nation—the world—and had changed the course of human events for decades to come. 

Of course, I eventually put that bloody weekend into perspective. I came to appreciate how the spell of adolescent solipsism had made the company of cute little Linda far more significant in my life than the murder of a national dream. My wooing of Linda became the thematic focus of a novel, They Shot Kennedy. Set in that November of ’63, my story juxtaposed the petty concerns of a cast of high-school kids against one of America’s profoundest tragedies. 

Also depicted in my comedy is a clash between my protagonist, Cribbsy, and a vengeful football player convinced that Cribbsy has publicly insulted his girlfriend.   This plotline derives from a callow cruelty that I committed, in writing, against a classmate—which, of course, I’ve long regretted. At a previous reunion, I approached her, offered my umpteenth apology and confessed that my offense against her taught me the importance of tempering the power that lurks in the written word. This did not penetrate. All my penitence has fallen on stony ground. She has nursed her teenage grudge for lo, these 50-odd years and, as an unintended side-effect, exhausted my remorse.

One of the blessings of the reunion last weekend was that she was not present, or, if she was, she avoided me deftly and I was spared her stiff greeting and withering gaze. This freedom from ancient censure bestowed an impression I hadn’t experienced at previous reunions, a sort of mellowness that bordered on love. I felt good about these people. All of them!

There were about a hundred of us, perhaps a third of our graduating class. We covered the full range of high-school demographics, from the greaser faction represented by guys like Dave and Roger, to the college-bound Honor Roll regulars like Dick, Patty and Cheryl—and all the other subgroups clustered in between, like Mark, Jeri, Doug and me.

It occurred to me, among all these disparate exemplars, types and paradigms, that we had somehow, along the way, muddled our distinctions. All those differences that had separated and distinguished us and our groups from one another—that had triggered resentments, insults, misunderstandings, gulfs of empathy and even the odd fistfight—had melted and puddled, crusted over, dried to dust and blown off into the mists of memory.

The most prominent item in the room where we milled and mingled was a pair of displays on easels, mounted with the graduation photos of all seventy deceased members of the ’67 La Follette Lancers. This exhibit was sobering and nostalgic but it also served, strangely, as a bonding device. 

In school, we had discerned and jealously nurtured divisions that glassed us into a hodgepodge of circles that barely touched and rarely intersected. An exception to that siloed diffidence erupted in the fall of ’66 when a kid named Sonny became the brightest high-school football star in the state, zig-zagging the Lancers to five straight stunning victories. Under Sonny’s spell, we suddenly formed a pep club and rallied ’round Sonny, and our team—and everyone around us. We entered into a brief delirium of equality and fraternity. 

This hugfest ended one Friday night in October, when a quartet of pituitary goons on the Racine Horlick defensive line bent Sonny unnaturally backward,  shredded his knee and sent the rest of us limping back toward reality.

Last weekend—although he’d stayed away from the reunion—there was a sense of Sonny’s spirit among my classmates. We were united again, with intimations of that magical football interlude. This time, however, our bond was the guilty pleasure of still being alive, with a common beginning and a clear memory of the place, time and travail of that beginning. 

One friend, John, enlisted in the Army in 1968 but lucked out with a deployment to Korea. Bob and Jim had dodged the horror in Vietnam thanks to student deferments and high lottery numbers. On the other hand, Dave had enlisted right out of school and had no luck. He was shipped summarily to Hell and, though he got out alive, was hurt in ways that never heal. In past days, we might all have clashed over the circumstances and meaning of service versus deferment versus my status as a conscientious objector defying the Draft and opposing a war that ineffably altered every one of our lives. But, after 55 years, it seemed as though we were reconciled, at last, to all the divergent roads we had trod. Without articulating it, we shared the sense that we had left school to twist and shout—involuntarily—as puppets to a power too immense to effectively resist, except to survive its sardonic dance. Haunted by a vast injustice with which we were too young to cope, the emotional oasis we finally reached, a half-century later, was the recollection of our innocence and the mutual sympathy that comes from losing it.

After our conversation, I took Linda’s hand. I told her how pleased I was that I’d found her again. I thanked her for forgetting what a putz I’d been, calling her up and plotting a comic rendezvous on the day after Camelot died. 

What I didn’t mention to Linda, because it didn’t dawn on me ’til later, is that I have more high-school friends now—at least among the living—than I had when I was in high school.