A Letter from Bernie, A Letter from Ben, by Willa Schmidt

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Editor-in-Chief

Leslie Jill Patterson Nonfiction Editor

Elena Passarello Poetry Editor

Camille Dungy Fiction Editor

Katie Cortese

Literary Review Nonfiction Trifecta

2017

Managing Editors

Joe Dornich Sarah Viren Chen Chen

Associate Editors: Chad Abushanab, Kathleen Blackburn, Margaret Emma Brandl, Rachel DeLeon, Nancy Dinan, Allison Donahue, Mag Gabbert, Jo Anna Gaona, Colleen Harrison, Micah Heatwole, Brian Larsen, Essence London, Beth McKinney, Scott Morris, Katrina Prow, MacKenzie Regier, Kate Simonian, Jessica Smith, Amber Tayama, Robby Taylor, Jeremy Tow, and Mary White.

Copyright © 2017 Iron Horse Literary Review. All rights reserved.

Iron Horse Literary Review is a national journal of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. It is published six times a year at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, through the support of the TTU President’s Office, Provost’s Office, Graduate College, College of Arts & Sciences, and English Department.

Photographs: shutterstock.com.

A Letter from Bernie, A Letter from Ben

H

e only had one eye and that kept him out of Vietnam. Knowing Bernie, he wouldn’t have gone anyway; he’d have fled to Canada like a lot of guys or starved himself anorexic. He wouldn’t have let himself be drafted.

It took me a while to figure it out. Actually, I didn’t; he had to tell me. Once he did, I understood the reason for the asymmetrical gaze.

Then I saw it more and more, how one eye was lively and mobile while the other stayed locked in place.

But they were so well-matched, both the same glossy dark brown, that it was easy to forget. He always sat on my right, at the movies, any time we were side by side. Once, in a restaurant, his careful arranging annoyed me, and I insisted he sit left. He didn’t object, but I saw how he had to turn his head all the way around to talk, to even see me, and I felt guilty. I’d never thought about why he sat where he did.

He’d lost it as an infant, had no memory of an operation. Some sort of growth that had already spread to the other eye but was caught just in time.

I learned that one-eyed people can get drivers’ licenses, but they must compensate, be extra vigilant because their vision is two-dimensional. Few students owned cars then, anyway; I didn’t ride with Bernie until later, if at all.

Sometimes in meetings, sitting with people he didn’t know, he’d tap on it with a ballpoint pen. Clickety clackety clackety-click. “It’s hilarious. They stare. They look at each other. What can they say?” He had a devilish side, that épater la bourgeoisie thing. I was the opposite, inclined to appease.

How did he look without that fake eye? I wondered. But that would have gone beyond our intimacy threshold. I thought of him as two-eyed.

Willa Elizabeth Schmidt

1

W

e met at a gathering of the German club, a newly formed campus group. It was September, and we, too, were new, more or less, I back in school after three years away, Bernie a recent transfer. New and uncomfortable. Somehow, I got appointed club secretary, and he came up to me after the meeting with his skewed gaze and suggested coffee. I was lonely; he seemed harmless; we went to the Student Union.

We sat in the Rathskeller, with its cavelike arches, surrounded by chess players and smoke. It was 1965: the jukebox played early Beatles, Dylan, Petula Clark: where all the lights are bright, DOWNTOWN, waiting for you tonight. . . . He asked about Washington, D.C., where I’d worked for two years, and Germany, where I’d lived after that. Though an English major, he devoured literature of any stripe, most recently Kafka and Brecht, which had sparked his interest in German. What a letdown to be back in the Midwest, I sighed. Little old Madison, the provinces, ho-double-hum.

For him, it was different. For Bernie, Madison was Mecca, escape from a Catholic upbringing, his up-north Polish-American tribe. The house he’d grown up in devoid of books. He’d started at the Oshkosh campus and done well; the flagship was a logical next step.

It was the beginning of a friendship that lasted seven years off and on, longer than the German Club, which after a few beery meetings died a deservedly quick death. Saturday mornings after Phonetics, I’d dash down Bascom Hill through swirling leaves, a stiff wind off the lake. He’d be at one of the Rath’s heavy tables, books piled precariously around a plate of

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eggs and toast. Steeped in warmth and odors of grease and steamy wool, we’d review the week. I recited Walther von der Vogelweide; he dissected John Barth.

Sometimes friends would join us: Rolf and Georg— linguistics students, monosyllabic and caustic in turtlenecks and patched jeans. We were the alienated, a paler version of the Beats, happily above the Philistine crowd.

Willa Elizabeth Schmidt

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N

ot big, not small, wiry body, large head. Straight black hair slicked back with oil, white skin, aquiline nose. Dark, haunted eyes—eye. Something of the gnome about him, that cool, demonic smile. (Ben, where were you then? Some things one cannot know.)

No photos, not a single one, until recently, on the Internet. A young face, smiling. Face that wouldn’t grow old.

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M

y childhood was rich in books. Furnishings were plain in our Chicago bungalow, my parents frugal but also voracious readers. My father built a bookcase that spanned the living room wall. Playmates marveled: who on our street had such a wall?

Christopher Robin, Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland: I owned every kid’s book that existed. My aunt managed the Book Department at Wieboldt’s department store and kept us supplied. My mother read me Brothers Grimm, Max und Moritz; I pored over Babar’s jungle clan, with its elephant kids and wrinkly-trunked grandparents. The Daily News, National Geographic, Readers Digest. For years, my father didn’t allow a TV. I became a librarian, aspired to be a writer. Bernie would experience many passions, brief sometimes, always intense. Drama is essential to my life.

A mover and seeker, he traveled a riskier road.

Willa Elizabeth Schmidt

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W

e went out Saturday night, every week, always the same routine. I’d walk from my room west of campus and meet him at the Rath. We’d hike up State Street to the Majestic Cinema off Capitol Square. Afterwards, we’d have pizza and beer and discuss the film—Bergman or Fellini, a young Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back. Bernie liked it; I didn’t. The rudeness, the arrogance, the trashing of the hotel room! He smiled, bemused at my rant. We’d sit for hours at the Grotto, a long-vanished basement bar where the jukebox played opera and the elderly Italian proprietor sang along.

Love, and especially sex, were abstract topics; our lives were lived in books. “Carpe diem, Willa, carpe diem,” he’d advise with a grin, and “Memento mori, Bernie,” I’d counter in melodramatic tones. “Remember you must die.” We’d crack up, tickled at our cleverness. Latin! We converse in Latin!

We never kissed, or even hugged. It was comfortable, if unexciting. At the end of the evening, I’d ride a bus home. Once, before digging into the pizza, we clinked beer mugs and he said, “Here’s to pretty Willa.” Where had that come from? I was flattered, but it seemed inappropriate.

On another of those weekend nights, or maybe over coffee in the Rath, I expounded on my newly formulated theory of men. As if I knew! But that didn’t stop me from holding forth, to Bernie or anyone else who’d listen.

It had its home in literature—of course! The Literary Theory of Men. It went like this. There are three types: the Epic, the Lyric, the Dramatic.

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The Epic, like a lengthy saga where difficulties are surmounted and all eventually ends well, is the reliable, steady mate, the promise of security, the one you marry. The Lyric is sweeter: you stroll together through springtime meadows and gather flowers, mystical harmonies ringing in the distance. He is the artist, the one to dream with, but not too long, lest you starve to death like Bohème’s Mimi or Elvira Madigan of the super romanatic Swedish film (which I saw later, but not with Bernie).

Finally, the Dramatic—ah, the Dramatic. The Dramatic is the wild man, the dangerous one, who takes you where you shouldn’t go but you love him, need him, cast off all others, because he lifts you out of the everyday. He steals your innocence, conquers your bed. Emma Bovary knew this, and I did, too, though poison wasn’t in my plan. The Dramatic was what I longed for, though I kept that quiet. The Dramatic was Sex. “So, which am I?” Bernie asked after my heated recital— how could I not have anticipated the question?—and I was at a loss. I hadn’t thought about it, I mumbled, a cop-out reflected in the look on his face.

Were I to give this recitation today, which I wouldn’t unless hopelessly shitfaced, I’d change the order and make Epic guy last and most important. It’s the long haul that counts. It’s where one should end up. The others, though thrilling, are half-pictures. Getting stuck with them will bring you poverty, cyanide, a momentarily rapturous but unfulfilled existence.

Yet, yet. Who would forego them—the Lyric, the Dramatic? Doesn’t literature offer a measure of truth?

Willa Elizabeth Schmidt

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B

ut where was Ben, the one I didn’t know? Too soon, too soon. What happened next was this: after a long winter, spring sweetened the air, and my studies had gone well. I was granted an Assistantship, teaching German to undergraduates five days a week. There were slackers and sloggers and a few who flourished, including a budding engineer with inquisitive eyes. A foreigner, with beautiful olive skin.

Bernie and I still met, but we were busy with future plans. I was heading to Washington for the summer to revisit old haunts. I’d finance my stay by working at a hospital, gaining experience outside of books. Bernie was going home in June, but in August, he’d head for Hamburg and a year of teaching English, with the program I’d worked for on my stay abroad.

I helped him prepare, reviewed his letter of application, told him what to expect.

In May, lilacs budding, we sat in the Union cafeteria, eating supper, gazing through tall windows at Lake Mendota shining in the sun. I’d cut my hair very short and wore a white cotton blouse, cap-sleeved with eyelet trim around its scooped neckline, a clingy navy skirt. I felt daring, pretty, and pretty daring. Bernie was talking, talking. He didn’t notice me looking past him, across the room. He talked while I stared at V., who was sitting at a table with some fellow Turks.

I willed the future engineer to turn and see me. Finally he did, and we gave each other a long look, and that is how one thing ended and something else began.

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B

ernie wrote from up north, before he left for Germany. He felt stifled at home; his parents didn’t understand his love for books. Life up here is a fantastic drudge, and I yearn to get started, just to be active again. He thanked me for showing him a way to go abroad. If it had not been for you, I would in all probability be facing the prospect of teaching in some backwoods high school.

My eternal gratitude to you.

I sent an encouraging reply, with phrases like You will do well and Things will be fine. The tone was friendship, and in that spirit, I signed it Love.

The letter that came back was unexpected. Really? Can it be so? He’d taken the carelessly scribbled word in a way I hadn’t intended, busy as I was losing my virginity with the Turk. A recent move from the west side to a campus apartment offered more privacy.

My father used to scold at my casual invitations to neighbors or acquaintances: Let’s get together. You’ll have to come over. “Don’t say what you don’t mean,” he’d grumble—so literal, so German.

“They understand,” I’d protest, his American daughter. “I’m being friendly. It’s no big deal.”

Bernie didn’t bear a grudge. I don’t know how or if I responded, because the next letter, telling of his life in Hamburg, included a retraction.

Perhaps, by now, some of the shock of my last letter has worn off. You know, I am rather unused to being regarded affectionately, and therefore the excesses. He was enjoying his stay, not so much the Gymnasium, where there were too many English teachers and he felt useless, but the city itself and its wealth

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of culture—concerts, opera, theater—at reasonable prices. Moliere’s Misanthrope, Lessing’s Nathan, Mozart, Carmen, Fledermaus: not your typical Wisconsin fare. Though he complained that German students seemed aloof and hard to know, he lived with a schoolteacher couple who were welcoming enough and happy to show him around.

Later, he wrote of student trips to Italy and Paris, and lamented not having time to see more of Germany, although one of the girls I met on the trip invited me to stay in Heidelberg for three days. Very nice, indeed.

Language difficulties frustrated him. After all these months I am yet stumbling along with spoken German and using the dictionary too often. I sometimes feel as if I am floating above the German language and culture, rather than in it. What kind of cure is there?

By what miracle did I save these letters? Reading them over I hear him again, marvel at his ability to capture his feelings, his inner self, in eloquent, living words.

Willa Elizabeth Schmidt

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H

e returned in the fall of 1967. He’d enjoyed his stay in Hamburg so much that he decided to abandon English and enroll in the German Department. I was reading Goethe and Thomas Mann. I’d wrapped up the summer in Washington and come back to Madison to study for the PhD and reunite with V., my olive-skinned engineer, who translated Turkish poetry and prepared eggplant, okra, and stuffed grape leaves in my tiny apartment kitchen.

One afternoon, I arrived at his boxlike quarters to find the tip of a calf ’s tongue baking rosily in his toaster oven, a special treat. Another time, it was lamb kidneys, the vapor of urine so strong it strangled my appetite, though the chef, a man of eclectic tastes, gobbled them with pleasure.

Bernie, too, was transformed. He was no longer the solitary individual I’d once befriended, but more and more a man of the devilish grin, the clever quip. Several females were openly smitten. We met again for coffee, and he mentioned, in his bemused fashion, that his Hamburg hostess had made a pass, throwing her arms around him and kissing him on the mouth.

Nothing further ensued, he claimed, but I found myself stirred by jealousy. Though my German was better, he seemed to have been accepted in a way I never had.

Every two years, the German Department put on a play, with faculty and students participating, and that year’s choice was Leonce und Lena, a goofy nineteenth-century farce that no one not studying Germanistik is likely to have heard of, much less read. In it, the stylized blond couple of the title undergoes various inane trials before a happy end, finding them-

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selves constantly upstaged by the Devil, a scheming, meddling court jester who manipulates the action with fiendish glee.

Bernie played the role with relish. Nobody cared if his accent wasn’t perfect; his slick black hair, the crazy eye, and his wicked grin seemed Lucifer personified.

He blossomed. He went to parties; his popularity soared. We saw each other less. I was at different parties, feasting on kofte and baklava with the Turkish crowd. We had crawled out of our books. In our campus microcosm, we were exploring life.

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I

n the macrocosm, meanwhile, turbulence reigned. The Vietnam War refused to end, and protest swelled, at the university and throughout the country. Draft cards and flags were publicly burned; young men fled across the border or starved themselves below the fitness limit. Dick Cheney, a UW polisci student at the time, found such actions revolting. President Johnson assured us the United States was winning.

On a clouded, windblown October Wednesday, Dow Chemical, maker of napalm incendiary bombs used in the Vietnam fighting, was on campus conducting job interviews. Antiwar students flocked up the hill for a sit-in at the Commerce Building to block access. It was no secret that such bombs were inflicting horrific injury on civilians—though only in 1972, with an AP photo that made all the major papers, was that horror brought gruesomely home to the majority of Americans: a group of children running in terror, led by a small girl with mouth wide in a scream, her clothes torn off in a desperate attempt to stop the flaming pain.

Neither Bernie nor I were at the demonstration. I didn’t do such things.

I went to class and studied and, like most of the campus, hated the war but was never sure that student protests were appropriate. Where Bernie was that day I wouldn’t know; though rebellious enough, he followed his own quirky lights. I happened to be eating a late lunch at one of the corner diners that lined University Avenue when a crowd of students burst in, yelling about pigs bashing heads on Bascom Hill. Resistance, police brutality, blood: Madison made the national news, and the anti-war movement mushroomed.

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The Turks I socialized with deplored the war, too, but were more concerned about their lack of money, since the checks they received from companies at home usually arrived late. It wasn’t their war, and hanging around with them, I didn’t have to think about it either. Bernie seemed taken up with his newfound niche. We kept to the sidelines.

I was surprised, therefore, when, one afternoon several months later, he appeared at the table in the library where I was studying and announced he had dropped all his classes. It was late February, the semester five weeks old. “I don’t see the point,” he fumed. “What does German literature, any literature, have to do with reality? There’s a war going on, and we’re sitting here reading books.”

He made it sound like a dirty word. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Well,” I answered, “no. I mean, yes, of course, the war bothers me, but what exactly am I supposed to do?”

“Come along,” he said. “Get on the bus.” He was leaving everything to take off on the McCarthy campaign. With sentiment against the war increasingly swaying the mainstream, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota had recently announced his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination on an antiwar platform. Here, at last, was a politician whom students could relate to. Whereas the marching, chanting masses of protesters with their bullhorn-toting leaders often seemed more akin to anarchy than a movement of peers, Gene McCarthy was an intellectual, a poet, an urbane thinker in the political tradition of Europe.

What a contrast to boorish LBJ, with his homespun Texas drawl! Maybe Bernie’s break with literature wasn’t as clean as he liked to believe.

Yet, he went off to New Hampshire, and I didn’t. I wouldn’t have thought of dropping my classes, sacrificing tuition, not to mention my steamy romance.

Still, a part of me envied that ability to cut loose, strike out on a mission, take off into the unknown for a worthy cause. Carpe diem.

I was the practical one, the one who finished what she started. Memento mori, Bernie. Don’t forget. There’s that, too.

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M

cCarthy did well in New Hampshire, but everyone knows what happened next. Looking back it seems like chaos, that year of 1968, and in a way it was, although in the broad, sleepy Midwest, even in fired-up Madison, one could still watch it all like some horror movie playing out among deranged people elsewhere.

The war got worse. In March, Robert Kennedy declared his candidacy, and Lyndon Johnson withdrew. In April, Martin Luther King, Jr., preaching nonviolence, was assassinated in Memphis. McCarthy followers rejoiced when their man won Wisconsin and Oregon, but gnashed their teeth at Kennedy the spoiler, especially when he seemed a shoo-in for the California primary on June 4. He won and had barely finished his victory speech when he, too, was blasted by an assassin’s bullet. “How can you live in this country?” the Turk wondered, as we listened to the news from my pullout bed.

McCarthy’s effort fizzled, leaving party hack Hubert Humphrey to pick up the torch. During the Democratic Convention in August, TV networks showed cops clubbing protesters on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue.

Humphrey got the nomination, Nixon won the election, alternatives were quashed, and the war went on and on.

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E

arly that summer, Bernie returned to Madison. He’d enjoyed the campaign and deplored its demise but shed disappointment with little regret. The German department welcomed him back; he took courses in education to renew his teaching certificate.

We met for coffee as usual, and then V. became jealous. A friend of his saw me with another man, and that seemed to bother him more than the platonic nature of the relationship, which he understood, far as I could tell. I didn’t tell Bernie. He would have found V. ridiculous, not to mention my deference to some irrational code. Bernie himself showed no jealousy at all. He’d never again brought up his pre-Hamburg letter, or my lack of response.

I was living on Henry Street that summer, in a sunny second-floor room with kitchen and bath down the hall. V. was on Randall, near the Engineering campus, but we were often together, mostly at my place. We listened to music, drank wine, made love. Spent a lot of time—too much—on all three. Sometimes he’d bring his books and we’d start out studying, but it didn’t last long.

Bernie stopped by occasionally, and one day when he was there, V. made an unexpected appearance. He wasn’t the sort to make a scene, but there was an initial chill. Bernie chose not to notice; he chatted on about this and that, and somehow made it clear he wasn’t a threat. He raved about a recent discovery, marijuana. “Want to try some?” he asked V. “I bet you’d like it.” V. happily agreed, and they arranged a time.

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Contrary to ideas of Middle Easterners and hashish, the Turks I knew didn’t do pot. Punishment at home was severe, and they weren’t inclined to risk it in the U.S. either. Still, V. joined Bernie in an evening of getting high and loved it. “Colors! Music! Everything is more intense, more beautiful.” Who was jealous now? Why not this beautiful experience for me? But I knew, of course. I wasn’t adventurous. I didn’t try new things. Except love—I did try love, or was it only lovemaking? That’s what Bernie surely thought, or perhaps, perhaps— was this Ben? Ben now, no more Bernie? What did I know, really, about him?

How much do I know now?

Drama is essential to my life, he wrote once in a letter, and it was always true, even back then. During that crazy political summer, was he political, too? Or did he give himself over to weed, like so many others? There was no euphoria when I tried it; maybe Bernie had better stuff. I do remember his ill-fated affair with a fellow graduate student, a divorced woman who fell for him hard. It started out well, but after a month or so, he bailed, offering no explanation.

She knew I was his friend. As the GOP Convention blared across TV screens in early August, she pumped me for details. He’d fallen asleep while making love; what was that about? I couldn’t help, I answered. I didn’t know about his love life; we’d always just been friends.

Bernie was angry. “Don’t talk to her,” he said. “She wants to trap me. I don’t need that.” The mediator’s job is thankless, to be avoided whenever possible.

In any case, it was true I knew nothing. Nothing at all about Bernie’s loves.

Willa Elizabeth Schmidt

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B

y September, he was gone again. Bored with academia, in need of cash, he’d applied for teaching jobs and ended up with a choice of two. The first, near his home town, offered good money and a reasonable workload; teachers were in short supply. Perfect, if it weren’t so goddamn depressingly familiar, so up north conservative and dull. “Deer season, hey! I can bag me a buck, meet my buddies at the bar. How about them Packers? Do teachers go to the bar?” A spacious apartment, fantastically low rent. “Let’s check it out,” he said, flashing that grin. “This is my mistress, I’ll say. She’ll be staying with me.”

In the end, he chose the other: an inner-city school in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Less money, leap into the unknown, but he’d hate himself if he turned it down. Good-bye, Madison. No more Wisconsin. He left for good and didn’t look back.

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I

n the fall of 1969, I left, too, though I would return. Our paths had reversed—Bernie craving other futures, bigger cities, while I remained rooted in the known. I’d been awarded a Fulbright and took off for Vienna to work on a dissertation.

Life was quiet there; I spent my time in libraries and cafes, avoiding my poorly heated room. At the University cafeteria, I ate dumplings and gristly meat with other Americans; we attended concerts and stood through operas, the only tickets we could afford. I visited my mother’s relatives and, during the winter break, rode the Orient Express to Istanbul, where the Turk was back at home, fulfilling his obligation to the company that had financed his education.

During an emotional few weeks, we vowed to stay together, not knowing exactly how.-After my return to Vienna, communication grew more difficult, and day-to-day concerns gained precedence. I waited impatiently for letters that arrived only rarely, until, soured by frustration, I wrote breaking off the relationship and submersed myself in my work.

News elsewhere was worse than ever. In November, the story had broken of a massacre of hundreds of women, children and elderly by U.S. troops at My Lai. Protests continued at home, with deadly results. On May 4, 1970, four students were shot dead by members of the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University. In August that year, radicals blew up a building on Wisconsin’s Madison campus that housed the Army Math Research Center, killing a late-night researcher. Nixon was President, and the war went on and on.

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I

left Vienna in late 1970, after a fifteen-month stay. We’d kept up a sporadic correspondence, so I knew Bernie had moved from Connecticut to New York. I wrote that I’d be landing in the city on my way home, and on December 4th, he met my plane. He looked the same—eyes, face, hair—but seemed happier, laughed more. New York agreed with him. I, on the other hand, had been lonely. I longed for a friend, maybe something more.

He borrowed a car. We stashed my luggage in the trunk and drove to Greenwich Village for dinner at an Italian restaurant, where, over wine and pasta, we caught up on our lives. The Turkish romance was finished, I told him, a casualty of time and distance, different worlds. I’d visited Turkey and we’d had hopes, but letters back and forth were slow, prospects for the future difficult. Bernie spoke of Bridgeport, the school he’d hated—not the kids, who were tough, yes, but the administration that demanded rigidity, discipline, results. He wasn’t cut out to be an authority figure, he admitted. We had that in common; I understood. After a string of turbulent months, he made his way to the city, looking for anything more palatable.

Now, he wrote encyclopedia entries for Compton’s, one of those grunt jobs popular with English majors seeking a Big Apple foothold. Poorly paid, a cubicle existence, but he was here! Here in the happening place; that was the main thing. “It’s not like I don’t get depressed,” he said. “Sure, I get depressed. But like some sage once said, I’d rather be depressed in New York City than anyplace else in the world.” The grin flashed, genuine.

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He’d made friends. He had a decent apartment and, in true New York fashion, had found himself a therapist. I wanted to know if he’d indeed turned away from books. “Therapy through books, Bernie—whatever happened to that?”

“Books can’t save you from your old, self-destroying ways. A mentor is important.” The grin was gone; his voice held an edge. “By the way, it’s Ben now.

Everyone calls me Ben.” We drove to his apartment, which was in Brooklyn, on Fort Greene Place.

“Fort Greene Place,” he said. “Doesn’t it sound grand?” It was dark; I couldn’t make out much except bare trees and gloomy buildings on either side of the street. His apartment was on the second floor of a brownstone, which, like the others, had seen better days. When he unlocked the door, I got my first surprise.

“Meet Jim, my roommate,” Bernie said. A tall black man stood there greeting us. We shook hands. Jim was slim and handsome, younger than Bernie or me. His smile was warm, but his eyes seemed sad, a look that hung around whether he was serious or smiling.

Why hadn’t Bernie mentioned a roommate? The three of us sat down to an awkward silence. Jim shifted in his chair. Bernie began to talk, rambling on about who knows what, not explaining anything. I felt exposed. With thoughts of more than friendship, I’d worn a see-through knit top with black bra. In the restaurant’s dimness, it hadn’t been so obvious, but now, I sensed both men’s eyes on me, and my attire seemed ridiculous. Seduction was not in the picture.

Bernie talked on, as if nothing were out of the ordinary. He grinned. He likes this, I thought; he wanted to shock me. Épater la bourgeoisie.

Remember to call him Ben.

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I

stayed four or five days and slept on the couch. Jim didn’t sleep at the apartment. I don’t know where he went; either he had another place, or he crashed with friends. During the day, he would drop in to see a kitten he’d recently acquired, which pranced gleefully across my face early in the morning. I like cats; I didn’t mind. I liked Jim, too. He was from Virginia, I learned, a state so conservative he grabbed his first chance to get away. I don’t know where or if he worked; no job was mentioned. I also can’t recall where Bernie was during these conversations—at work, probably, or off on some errand? Still confused, I hesitated to ask many questions. Bernie, when we were alone, called Jim a “big baby,” a “pussy-cat,” but provided no further clue.

He was otherwise an excellent host, fixing elaborate soufflé breakfasts and taking me to his favorite restaurants and haunts. We walked a lot, talked as in the old days. He encouraged me to move to New York. It was tempting, a much more attractive prospect than returning to Madison and writing the dissertation. I agreed to think about it, though I suspect we both knew that nothing would come of it.

The day after my arrival was a Saturday, and that evening, the three of us went to a play. It had two main characters: crotchety old men in a nursing home, played by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, old by then and no doubt crotchety themselves. My first Broadway play! Cab-clogged streets; a bustling theater (the long-gone Marosco; I’ve saved the playbill); the glamorous, perfumed crowd.

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All that is a pleasant blur. More clearly, I recall a scene that took place shortly before, as I was getting ready for our big evening out. I had the apartment to myself. Bernie was off somewhere; Jim would meet us in time to walk to the subway. I had put on a brown wool dress I reserved for special occasions, a long-sleeved sheath that ended just above the knees. It had a deep V-neck that showed off my fair skin, though I was too flat-chested for décolleté. Not bad, I thought, even without cleavage. I wasn’t quite ready to give up hope.

My hair was my best feature, a sweep of shiny chestnut halfway down my back. I combed it out and studied my makeup in front of a full-length mirror in the hallway between kitchen and living room. I turned and preened and adjusted, assuming I was alone. Then I glanced at the living room, and there, silent as a snake, sat Jim. He lounged in an armchair, staring at me.

I must have started; he saw my shock. “You look very nice,” he said. Nothing more. When had he come? Why hadn’t he spoken? I sensed resentment, maybe hatred, though his manner was always polite. It was all too strange.

Bernie’s key in the door broke the tension. I found my coat, and we left for the subway.

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O

n Monday, Bernie went out early to his job in the city. I agreed to meet him there, then go to lunch. He gave me instructions on where to get off and how to find him.

Today, Fort Greene Place is gentrified and trendy. One sees Internet images of spruced-up brownstones overhung by leafy branches, but in 1970, the avenue between Atlantic and Fulton had fallen on hard times. Its dark facades looked seedy; stark tree trunks rose from ground devoid of grass or other vegetation. Cracked sidewalks and litter amplified a scene of general neglect.

Drugs and crime were prevalent. In Bernie’s apartment, a floor-anchored bar clamped the door in a super-lock that he told me to always keep in place. I listened to Simon and Garfunkel and stared out at the bleak street.

When I ventured forth around eleven o’clock, I walked fast and didn’t look around. The neighborhood was quiet, and I saw no one at all until I reached the subway.

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I

n 1970, there were so many things we didn’t yet know: personal computers, cell phones, SUVs. Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, the family Bush, and even Dick Cheney, who’d been in such close proximity, right there on our own university campus. Café lattés, crack cocaine, crystal meth. Global economy, global warming, skyrocketing gas prices, living green. 9/11, Al Qaeda, Homeland Security, AIDS. Did it already exist then, AIDS? It did, but mostly elsewhere—in the jungles and cities of far-off Africa, in Haiti, in a few mysterious cases closer to home. It was coming though, and soon, it would burst out on our unsuspecting America in all its deadly rapacity, a stalker of men and women as devastating as any war.

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B

ack in Madison, I moved into an apartment with other grad students and, after a few days, put New York out of my mind. Theoretically, I was working on my dissertation, but there was much to catch up on. Off in sleepy Vienna, I’d missed the revolution’s final throes; the university was both familiar and changed. Protests and violence—Dow, Kent State, the Army Math bombing—were mostly in the past. Student strikes were shakily resolved; department schisms had made bitter enemies of old friends. The campus had lapsed into an uneasy lull, from which, as winter gave way to spring and summer, emerged the escapist bliss reflected in a June letter.

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T

o Bernie, June 3, 1971. (I never thought of him as Ben. He probably hated that.)

My mood is better now than it has been in ages. I feel like a new person, meeting new people, open to new ideas and feelings, and generally positive and more uncritical and tolerant than perhaps ever in my life before. Good things are going on in the student community. The trend is away from academia and traditional ways of life to more community spirit and more just living and being than studying.

I wrote of yoga, tennis, guitar lessons. My newfound cheeriness went on and on: Even Madison looks beautiful to me, now that it’s summer. I feel like I’ve just relaxed and started to live, with no thoughts for the future or “furthering myself ” or all that crap. I enjoy what is.

Bernie’s mood was less sanguine. He’d written of struggles with feelings and relationships—I wonder at this point if I know who I am? This week, I went to my therapist quite confused and depressed. His therapist had recommended joining a group, and I asked about it, for all my youthful assurance sounding painfully priggish and old:

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Now, my friend, forgive my long ramblings and tell me how you are progressing. How is the group therapy affecting you? only to swing back to me, in the same sovereign tone: Another thing I care little about is my age. For a while, I kept thinking about approaching thirty, having children, etc. Now it means little. There are so many years to do things in and so many kinds of things to do. . . .

So many years indeed.

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H

e invited me back to New York, but I didn’t go. I found companions, mostly female, all in the same dissertating boat. We arranged dinners, hit the tennis court, drank wine and sang along to I am woman, hear me roar. Women’s Lib was the movement of the day, Ms. Magazine its newly minted screed.

Feminist picnics were the rage. There were countless enjoyable ways of avoiding the dissertation.

The euphoria, predictably, didn’t last. By fall and throughout the winter, I became ever more directionless and, instead of settling down to serious writing, went to movies with my roommates and haunted campus hangouts, hoping to run into friends. I missed the passion I’d shared with V.; several brief, unsatisfactory relationships left me disillusioned about ever finding a partner again. There was a drunken one-night stand in the sparsely-furnished room of a fellow student that left me with little memory of the sex but a lasting image of his ailing pet snake in its glass cage, barfing up, first, a recently swallowed mouse, its white fur damp and spikey, and, promptly afterward, the brownish blob of one eaten some time before.

Though our correspondence continued, Bernie was rarely on my mind.

The opening of his August letter bristled with annoyance.

It wasn’t so much that you didn’t come in June to visit me, as the way in which you told me. One excuse would have been persuasive enough, but a list is overstating the point, and one wonders what the

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point really was. In addition, it was a period in which I felt that I needed a great deal of support.

Conflicts about his homosexuality and the relationship with Jim had culminated in him trying to get myself killed and almost succeeding, he wrote, without further detail. In desperation, he’d finally come out to his parents, fearing the news would devastate them, surprised at how well they reacted. The whole situation upsets me more than it does them. He went on to describe at length the benefits of psychotherapy and the group experience, the need to destroy his “old self.” You, too, could use a guru or a group, he suggested. Had I ever considered it? One does need a teacher—whether a single person or a group. We too often deceive ourselves.

He signed his letters Bernie, never Ben. This one was signed, Love, Bernard.

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T

hroughout late 1971 and the following year, other letters arrived, mostly concerning his therapy and abortive attempts at courses of study. In one, he spoke with enthusiasm of returning to academia and English literature, in hopes of teaching again. By February, he was enrolled in Hunter College, studying psychology, with plans of becoming a therapist. Nothing lasted more than a few months. Drama is essential to my life.

My own life was decidedly undramatic; I was trying to finish what I’d started. Perhaps a guru would indeed have helped. I frittered away that spring and early summer, looking for love, trying to write, getting nowhere on either front. I existed on temporary jobs, translating articles, grading correspondence courses. The weather was good, and sitting on the Terrace

by Lake Mendota in Madison’s lovely, short warm season was vastly preferable to the dark, stuffy library or a visit to tortured Bernie, who could no longer give me what I wanted.

Then, in August, a sudden, sad event jolted me out of my complacency.

Up in the north woods, my father died of a heart attack, and I had to grow up. I’d been close to my father, but in recent years, we’d spent less and less time together, something I regretted now. My mother had died years ago, and I was an only child. Suddenly, I found myself the reluctant owner of a house and land and a lot of decisions for which my experience hitherto had left me totally unprepared.

Months went by in which I had no thoughts for anything except meeting the demands of my new situation. Amidst trips back and forth to the

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north, discussions with lawyers, signing endless documents, I longed for my father’s calm wisdom, his stoic discipline, the practical advice he would have offered. Now, it was too late.

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G

radually, I settled back into writing, to tackling the task at hand. As fall and another seemingly endless Wisconsin winter passed, I recovered, aided by work and friends. I found renters for the house, the dissertation was progressing, and with spring beckoning, I needed a break. In April, a fellow student and I took off for New York City, to visit her sister in Queens. I wrote Bernie to let him know.

We hadn’t seen each other in over two years. Sometime in 1972, he’d left Brooklyn for the Upper West Side—another brownstone, a kinder neighborhood than Fort Greene Place. He sent me his new address. Following his directions, I took a bus and met him at his West 84th Street apartment.

More than his address had changed. The dark hair was feathered now, his features dispassionate and sharp. He wore a stylish suit, pale blue and perfectly molded to his slim form. He’d remade himself once more, and any mystery was set aside; Bernie/Ben was openly gay. Jim, it seemed, had been replaced by others. Details weren’t forthcoming, and I wasn’t inclined to ask.

Also new was his livelihood; he’d become an entrepreneur. After quitting the encyclopedia and giving up literature and psychology, he’d found a job to pay the bills, filling orders for a photo stock agency. Surprisingly, this proved interesting and lucrative enough that after a while he decided it was something he could do on his own. In his ground-floor studio, he was running his own budding business.

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He showed me boxes full of photographs classified by subject: animals, children, landscapes, flowers. He opened a magazine and proudly pointed to an ad with a picture of puppies. In tiny letters below: the credit, his name. (What would you think, Bernie, of this startling new age of Fotosearch, Shutterstock, everything available at the touch of a computer key?)

The best thing was his backyard, he said. An actual piece of green, in the middle of the city! He was right. It was a pretty patch of shrubbery and grass, a hidden garden with a high brick wall.

He’d gotten opera tickets, and two evenings later, we met at Lincoln Center, magnificent in its gleaming white. The piece was modern, something by Ginastera: enjoyable but bizarre, setting the tone for the evening. Ben wore lemon yellow, a well-cut jacket with wide lapels and a charcoal gray shirt. Clothes had become important. He’d engaged a tailor.

I made some remark about the marble stairways, how they seemed made for swishing down with élan. “Please,” he corrected. “My friends do the swishing.

I do not swish.” That was the most I would learn about Ben and his friends.

We parted amicably, I thought at the time, our friendship dated but worth holding onto for history’s sake. It was night. He saw me to the bus stop. We hugged briefly, then he turned and walked away. I watched the pale yellow back, the blue-black hair recede. He didn’t look back. Swallowing my nerves, I rode back to Queens alone.

It would be our final meeting.

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N

ew wars, Bernie—Iraq, Afghanistan. To the undergrads I served at the Reference Desk, Vietnam was as remote as World War II or Korea to us. These new wars seem endless.

During the spring of 2007, Vice-President Dick Cheney, erstwhile critic of those long ago Dow protests, visited the Mideast to buck up the troops and defend extended deployments. “The Army and the country appreciate the extra burden you carry,” he said—he who, deferred in 1967, carried no such burden himself.

Bombs explode; lives are shattered. Shiites and Sunnis, Sunnis and Shiites. Is war a given in a crowded world? Their oil—no, ours, our water, our land. NO BLOOD FOR OIL! I chanted in protests; you would have, too.

Thousands marched, sometimes hundreds or just fifty people, many grayhaired, a smattering of students.

The draft is abolished; students aren’t threatened. In the New Millennium, there is no war at home. As a recent veteran put it, “Americans don’t care about the war. They’re all shopping at the mall.” The gap yawns wider between rich and poor, and it’s clear whose sons and daughters will go to faraway places and do our dirty work, again and again and again.

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A

fter New York, I hunkered down to my task, the tedious piecing together of a thousand scribbled notes. In December, I defended my thesis and earned the PhD. Jobs were available, but I would have had to leave Madison. The same month, I enrolled in Library School.

That year brought more closure. V. visited briefly, an effort born of nostalgia, which we hoped might make our relationship permanent. Nostalgia, alas, is a thief of reason; too much time had elapsed. He returned to Turkey, and we didn’t meet again. I grasped at things, believing they would last forever. I wrote to Bernie, who hadn’t written in a long time.

I complained of boredom, aimlessness, not knowing what was next.

Not a letter I was proud of, but no different from many we’d sent, assessing, lamenting, philosophizing the way we always had. I still had conversations with Bernie in my head.

His last letters had been filled with continuing attempts to discover a true, better self. The job, the new apartment, were positive influences, but he was going back into therapy. There is much work that I must do on myself. Jim was in a mental hospital. My only problem at the moment is that he might get out before I can handle the situation. It sounds cruel, but it was a cruel relationship from both sides. My neuroses still haunt me.

Even after the cool, more self-assured man I’d found during the New York visit, I’d had no reason to believe our relationship had changed. But soon after receiving his reply, I tore it in tiny pieces. We don’t always know

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what to save, what might be useful later. For several days, I read it over, deciding whether to answer. In the end, I destroyed it, along with any hope of further communication.

He signed the letter Ben, and the gist was this: Oh well. “Oh well,” you say, like you always have, but do you ever actually do anything? That whining tone, I hear it so clearly, and I am sick of it. I can’t listen anymore. Get out of my life, you’re an annoyance, you bore me, shut up. Not in those words, but that’s what was meant.

I vacillated between fury and pain. Who was he to talk? Hadn’t we always been the seekers, the ruminators who worried life to death with words? Hadn’t I been privy, through his letters, to his agony, his therapy sessions, the unceasing drama of his life? Sometimes I think I did write back, something calm and conciliatory, but no, more likely not. Sometimes I wish I’d written back in rage, with words as lacerating and hurtful as his own. Was that what he expected?

In any case, there were no more letters. No more Bernie, only Ben now. That was all.

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Y

ears later, after I’d found my Epic man (the one for the long haul) and completed a career, as I negotiated middle age and cautiously anticipated its sequel, I sometimes contemplated Bernie Michalski. The letter’s sting had faded. I wanted to know where he was, what path he was following. Was he still in New York?

I didn’t go to New York, didn’t rifle phone books. There was another way, something Bernie and I never dreamed of in our youthful Rathskeller ramblings. I Googled (ridiculous verb that dominates our 21st-century lives) his name and New York City with little result—until, embedded in a news story, I found mention of a Ben Michalski House, in Manhattan, a residence for people with AIDS. Address and phone number were provided, and lo and behold, it was the same 84th Street brownstone where Bernie had shown me shoeboxes, some forty years before.

But Ben himself ? Nothing spoke of him, whether he was alive or dead.

The house seemed a memorial. I screwed up my courage and called the number, pondering what to say.

“Ben Michalski Residence.” A woman’s voice. I said the only thing I could. “I’m an old friend of Ben’s from Wisconsin, and I’m wondering if he died, and if it was of AIDS.” Yes, she answered, yes to both, but wait, the director would know more. The director introduced herself as Stacey, and Yes, she repeated, Ben died of AIDS, in 1987. He left his home to friends, who gave it to the city to be made into living quarters for AIDS sufferers.

It opened in 1997, ten years after his death.

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Our conversation was brief; she told me what she knew. There’s a picture of him in the lobby, she said, of Mr. Michalski, a big picture. I thanked her, and we hung up.

From a 1997 New York Times article, I learned more: Another residence that is ready to open is the Michalski home on 84th Street, named in honor of an aspiring West Side politician who died of AIDS. The project was undertaken by the West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing and designed by Cetra/Ruddy of Manhattan.

It described a “snug basement dining room with skylight” dug out of a rear yard: the little plot of green. They would have had their reasons. What boggled my mind was the part about an “aspiring West Side politician.”

Somewhat later—in a new century—my search yields still more: a detailed portrayal of the completed project by the West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing, of which the Ben Michalski residence is now a part. It has undergone significant and impressive changes: The building is comprised of single rooms with private baths and designed as a congregate setting for persons living with chronic medical conditions.

Ongoing operating support is provided through contracts with the City and State of New York. The building is named in honor of Ben Michalski, who was a gay political activist on the upper West Side of Manhattan, involved in progressive politics during the 1970s and 1980s. He was committed to a multiplicity of issues, from mass transit to anti-gentrification. He died of AIDS in 1987. The residence is home to eighteen persons with a 24-hour staff to assist residents in their ongoing challenge to live full lives while coping with chronic illness.

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And here, too, is Ben in a plaid shirt, dark-eyed, bearded, and smiling handsomely in a reproduction of the photograph that appears in the building’s lobby.

Bernie, I hardly knew you; Ben, even less. What do we know of others? Do we know anything at all?

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G

race Lee Boggs, an old-time labor activist interviewed by Bill Moyers at the height of the Iraq War, remained optimistic. “I see the signs [of hope] in the various small groups that are emerging all over the place to try and regain our humanity in very practical ways. . . . Do something local,” she exhorted.

“Do something real, however small. And don’t diss the political things, but understand their limitations.” At the time of the interview, she was ninetytwo years old. She remained involved, giving speeches and publishing a book of her writings, until her death in Detroit, Michigan, on October 15, 2015, at the age of 100.

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I

thought I saw him once more. It was in Madison, and I was standing on State Street in front of the bookstore across from the library, deciding whether to grab a coffee before going back to my office. It was 1980 or 1985, after the fateful letter, a long time ago.

He wore a tan trenchcoat and stood on the Lake Street corner, surveying the scene. Students milled past, blocking my view. I was far enough away so I couldn’t be sure, but the black hair, the beaky nose were so familiar that I kept staring until he turned in my direction and seemed to smile, and then turned again, turned and walked away, disappearing into the State Street crowd.

What kept me from running after? Let’s say it was him, that he’d come back to what he’d fled, the University, the Midwest, to make a peace of sorts. I couldn’t have known about the illness; maybe he didn’t either.

Would he have wanted to talk? Wasn’t I part of all he’d left?

More likely, it wasn’t him at all, simply a strong resemblance, a stranger on a corner who looked like someone I once knew. Someone I’d love to see again. And we’d be the same as back then, yet we’d have the experience of our years. And could talk again and compare, be kind to each other and good, tolerant and understanding and honest, and wise and loving at last.

Wishful thinking, a dream on a ho-hum day.

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O

nce, Bernie’s sister visited Madison, and I happened to be there, too. He was renting a friend’s Mound Street flat for the summer, more comfortable than his monkish room. His sister was close to him in age, maybe a year or two younger, but she had brown hair and blue eyes and looked nothing at all like Bernie. Their easy camaraderie, the genuine affection of their interaction, surprised me. Her husband had come along, a stocky up north kind of guy; they’d brought fresh walleye, which they served up with potatoes and coleslaw. The three of them joked around, happy and relaxed. It surprised me how much he seemed a part of it, of that family he wanted to flee. I was envious.

After dinner, we all went to a bar and danced to strobes, a new experience. Our faces surfaced in flashes: Bernie, his head thrown back, mouth open and laughing; I, suddenly a fabulous dancer. It was our most physical moment, each of us roaming some private heaven.

What was life like, with that one keen eye?

Those bright flashes, I hear him say, seize them. They’re all we own.

Seize the day. Memento mori, I counter, my old ubiquitous drone.

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Willa Elizabeth Schmidt was a reference librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for twenty-five years and now serves as an ESL tutor through the Literacy Network. Her prose and poetry have appeared in journals including Bellevue Literary Review, Calyx, Kalliope, Potomac Review, and Passages North. Her fiction was included in the 2014 Best Short Stories from the Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest, and an essay is forthcoming in the Red Hen Press anthology, Two Countries: U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents. For several years she was Associate Editor of Timber Creek Review.

About the genesis of this essay, Schmidt says, “It was inspired by my curiosity about what had happened to an old friend, someone who had disappeared from my life years ago.

We had met at the University as graduate students, still young and full of hope for the future, not yet sure where it would take us and what we wanted from it. Our friendship never became a romance, though each of us at different times hoped it might be. More important to the story was my realization as an older woman how our temperaments had shaped our lives, eventually leading us in opposite directions. The turbulence of the 1960s and the war in Vietnam provided a backdrop and influenced paths taken or not taken. Cities including Vienna, Hamburg and Istanbul, but most importantly Madison and later New York City, played a role in our ‘sentimental education.’ When after long estrangement I took to the Internet in search of my friend, the result was a final surprise, unexpected and bittersweet.”

Willa Elizabeth Schmidt

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