Handiwork (part 2)
A new installment of Hunted, an autobiographical account of God’s action in the life of a Vietnam War era radical activist. New to the series? This introduction provides context for the events described here. An index of other episodes, updated monthly, is also available. Click here to read Part 1 of the current episode.
I didn’t expect I would ever meet my friend Jim’s mother. When I learned on a dismal Saturday night in April 1974 that I was going to, it was a complete surprise.
The evening was dreary and wet. We were supposed to be going to visit Jim’s father, who had a new security job in the Hurt building in downtown Atlanta. We’d been to visit him before at other work sites. After a decade of estrangement, Jim and Elmer were rebuilding their relationship. I was Jim’s ally, confidant, and witness. We’d had a few rough nights hashing over old wounds, but the visits were getting better. Forgiveness was in the air. I wasn’t sure whether Jim still needed me there, but I didn’t have a lot to do on weekends, so when he called I agreed to join him.
He picked me up in the early evening. A couple of months earlier I’d moved out of the apartment he and I shared with another friend and was living on my own on the west side of Atlanta, closer to the Catholic elementary school where I was teaching. Before heading downtown we had dinner together at a small family restaurant nearby. Not exactly how I aspired to spend a Saturday evening at age 24, but better than eating alone.
We sat in a booth by the window, waiting for our meatloaf and fried chicken, watching the rain dimple the puddles that gleamed in the floodlit parking lot. I could tell Jim was distracted. He was moving his water glass gently back and forth on the tabletop so the condensation made a curved pathway on the formica.
“I guess my mother’ll be there tonight,” he said off-handedly,
“Your mother!”
He nodded disconsolately. I could hardly believe it was true. The one core fact I knew about Jim, or thought I knew, was that he was never, ever going to be in the same room as his mother again. She was the reason he’d been sent to foster care and his brothers into mental institutions.
I waited for an explanation. His father, he said with a sigh, had let slip that Jim and I had been meeting him. Mother wanted to see Jim, and Elmer had given in and told her what day we were coming. I could feel him wavering between blaming his father and not blaming him. Mother was unstable, mentally ill, and life at home had been hell until the state pulled him out at age 7. He hadn’t seen her since then. His father, and for a few years his brothers before they were institutionalized, bore the burden he had been saved from.
“Charlie, I’m going to be honest with you, I got a good mind not to go there tonight.”
That didn’t sound promising, considering he’d told his father he was coming, but I knew better than to argue. Whatever he said he had a good mind not to do was usually something that he knew at some level he should do. More often than not, if I let him ruminate long enough he would talk himself into it. That night it took him a while, but by the time the food came, he finally got there. His father, he said, was expecting us, and his mother would get into one of her moods if Jim didn’t show up. Elmer would be up most of the night trying to calm her. And Jim and I would have to sit there and listen to the whole ugly story on our next visit.
“I guess there’s no way I can get out of it now,” he concluded, shaking his head glumly. “I should never have told my Daddy I’d be there.”
He asked if I minded, and of course I said no. I didn’t want to let on how apprehensive I was. I had no idea what this woman was like or what she might do. Whatever she did do would likely trigger something ugly in Jim. Making peace with his father had been an emotional roller coaster. This encounter with Mother was bound to be worse. If I’d believed in God in those days, I would have prayed for Him to protect both of us that night. As far as I knew, though, there was no one to watch over Jim or me either. I did not enjoy dinner that night.
The Hurt Building was a narrow triangular building on the southernmost edge of downtown Atlanta. The area was deserted, so we parked on the street. Jim led the way to a darkened side entrance and knocked. Through glass doors we could see a glimmer of light at the far end of a long corridor. A dark ill-defined shape moved slowly toward us, resolving itself into human form, and then the wan light of the street fell on Elmer’s lined face and high forehead.
“I was beginning to think you weren’t coming, Jimmy,” said Elmer, holding the door open for us. “Mother’d be awful disappointed if you didn’t come. She’s been talking all week about seeing you.”
“Daddy, I come when I can and I leave when I got to. I ain’t punching no clock here.”
Elmer looked at me and shook his head, his private signal that Jim was being unreasonable. After the past few months, I was used to my middle man role. I’d had a lot of practice keeping my face expressionless and my thoughts to myself. Whatever happened tonight, I’d be OK as long as I didn’t overtly take one side or the other.
Elmer led the way down the dark corridor toward a reception desk bathed in pale light. As we drew nearer a crown of gray hair came into view over the top of the desk, and then slowly the head attached to the hair appeared: first a wide forehead beaded with perspiration, then a pair of close-set watery eyes glistening in the overhead light, then heavy sallow cheeks that crowded a thin colorless mouth and small chin.
“Elmer, what time is it, I don’t want to sit here all night waiting for you to carry me home.”
The voice was thin, affectless, as if we were hearing it at a distance through some kind of tunnel. Jim glanced at me and I could see the foreboding in his eyes. Elmer led us around the reception desk. Behind it three folding chairs had been set up facing a short heavy woman in a faded print dress.
“Jimmy,” she exclaimed, turning her head toward her son. “Look at all that weight you put on.”
Jim’s head jerked back, and I could see the shock on his face. It wasn’t so much the insult, I think, as the way she delivered it, casually, as if he’d been away just a couple of days instead of 17 years.
Jim opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. Then he turned to me and muttered something I didn’t hear. After what felt like minutes of silence but was probably in reality only a second or two, Jim said something to his father. I must have heard it but it didn’t compute. If anything, I was more dazed than he was.
Elmer sat down. Jim and I did followed suit. I noticed the dog was curled up in the small enclosed space under Elmer’s chair. I remember thinking that dog told us everything we needed to know about the life of that little family.
“Sophia, this here is Jim’s friend Charlie that I told you about.”
Sophia’s eyes strayed briefly toward mine before shifting away again. She said hello tonelessly but did not say my name. I felt a pang of sadness. Sophia was a beautiful name, a name I associated with poise, grace, and beauty. Somebody long ago had been thrilled on the day she was born. What heartache she must have left in her wake all the years since.
After another awkward silence, Elmer told Sophia it was still raining. He asked Jim where he’d parked and Jim told him. Sophia said she didn’t get out much at night. The three of them went on like that, talking intermittently but not really answering one another, like strangers in an airport making small talk and waiting for their flight to be called. How could people live like that? The feeling of remoteness was interrupted by just one more personal comment when Mother noticed the scar on Jim’s forehead and remembered that it hadn’t been there when he went to the foster home. She didn’t ask how he got the scar. It didn’t surprise me that he didn’t tell her.
Soon afterward, Jim said to his father that we had to be going. Elmer told him he didn’t need to rush off, but Jim said he had some things to take care of and he didn’t have time to sit around in an empty building all night just talking and not getting anything done. I remember thinking he’d done well not saying more than that. If I’d been a believer I would have thanked God for His handiwork. I know now, all these years later, that this night, as well as encounters that led up to it and many that followed, actually were His handiwork. More times than I can remember, I have thanked him for watching over Jim and me and keeping us from harm.
Elmer walked with us to the entrance. Once out of Sophia’s earshot, Jim said he’d try and visit next week.
“When you come back we’ll get something to eat, Jimmy,” Elmer replied anxiously. “You ain’t seen the snack room here. They got a good one.”
Outside it had stopped raining. The streets were deserted and the wet pavement shone under the streetlights. As we trudged the half block to where Jim had parked, every part of my body felt heavy. A deep fatigue had settled on me, not explained by anything I had actually done during the day. I wondered if Jim felt it too.
“Charlie, anyone that looks like her don’t need to be telling no one else how much weight they put on,” said Jim in the car. I waited for more, but he drove in silence until we were about halfway to my apartment. Then, in a more neutral, even affectless tone he said that he never did have too much to do with his mother and he didn’t guess he was going to any time soon. He said it quietly, but I knew there was a lot of anger behind it.
The next time I saw him there was no mention of what had happened at the Hurt Building that night. As far as I know he never saw his mother again. She died in the early 1980’s. There was no funeral. Elmer lived another ten years. Jim never lost touch with him. After I left Atlanta to move back north nearer my parents, I sent Elmer a card once and he wrote back—a friendly note in a neat, old-fashioned hand. Jim told me later that Elmer was thrilled that I wrote to him.
Soon after the encounter with his mother, I began to see less of Jim. He got a new job as a machine operator in a plant that made stainless steel machines for bagging food. It was a skilled job, a union job. He had to serve an apprenticeship, and after that he got paid a lot more. A fellow worker at the new plant introduced him to his wife’s sister Janet. Jim dated Janet for several months, and then they were married. I never did get to know Janet well. She always seemed distant and awkward when I was around her.
After the wedding Jim and I still met for coffee, though at much longer intervals. Jim didn’t volunteer much about married life, but one afternoon he asked me to have lunch with him and Janet. We met at a restaurant near where they lived. Janet seemed tense when we sat down at our table. Just before the waitress came to take our order, she leaned over and murmured something to Jim, and he said they would have to be leaving.
“She’s kind of nervous in crowds,” he said to me in an undertone as Janet preceded us out to Jim’s station wagon. “You know how it is, Charlie. She’ll be all right when we get home. I’m really sorry, man, I’ll make it up to you soon.”
I didn’t understand what he meant, but over time he told me more and I was able to figure it out. Janet feared open spaces and crowds. She was agoraphobic. As her needs escalated and Jim had to work harder to shield her from the world outside of their home, I was struck by the similarity between their marriage and that of Jim’s mother and father. Though Jim sometimes chafed under the burden of taking care of Janet, more often I heard a quiet resignation in his voice that echoed that of his father. “She don’t like to go out all that much, Charlie,” he would remind me. “I do what I got to do.” Unlike his father, though, he didn’t surrender his whole life to his wife’s mental illness. He divorced Janet in the mid-1980’s.
Jim and I have been friends for more than five decades now. We still talk on the phone every month and see each other every few years. I would have thought as we grew older and our shared past slipped further behind us, those phone calls and visits might end. Whenever I think about that possibility, however, the feeling of loss is intolerable. Despite having only the briefest fragments of shared experience, we are bound together so tightly that neither of us could ever bear to let go. I came to Atlanta as a radical activist, determined to make the world better through violent upheaval, but the one person I worked hardest to recruit to the movement turned the tables and ended up recruiting me as a brother.
Brothers though we consider ourselves, I remain an outsider in Jim’s world and he in mine. “Charlie’s from Boston,” Jim would tell a friend when he introduced me. Sometimes I thought he might as well have said Vientiane or Addis Ababa. Then, as if being from Boston didn’t make me exotic enough, he would add, “He’s got a college degree.” A decade later, “He’s got a master’s degree . . . .” Finally, “He got his doctor degree . . . . He’s a professor.” I don’t recommend introducing a friend in this way. It can be very uncomfortable. But I’m sure it was no easier for Jim to be introduced to my circle of friends: “This is my friend Jim from Atlanta.” They know at once that the main difference between Jim and me is not geographical.
Over the years I came to understand how important it was for me to accompany Jim to visit his father. He needed someone to witness his efforts to come to terms with his past. What I did not understand was how that someone came to be me. How did a young college graduate and rabblerouser from the North end up being the one to sit through those visits and talk to him afterward about what had happened? Couldn’t he just as well have picked one of his less controversial friends?
How obtuse I was! I was looking for the answer in the wrong place. Putting Jim’s life under the microscope wasn’t going to answer my question. For that I had no need of a microscope. What I lacked was a mirror.
It wasn’t until I sat down to write about the tumultuous years of my early 20’s that I was able to put the pieces together. When I did that, the answer seemed obvious. I couldn’t have sat there all those hours, watching Jim struggle to forgive his father for having abandoned him without thinking about the great distance between me and my own family—their anger and disappointment over the path I’d taken, my harsh retorts when they urged me to reconsider, all that had happened to me that I was too proud to reveal to them. Like Jim, though for different reasons, I was a prodigal son. Through Jim’s reconciliation with his father, the Lord pointed the way forward in my own life. As I watched father and son picking their way through the minefields of the past, searching for some way to express their love and need for each other, I got a glimmer of how my own life might be different.
Somewhere inside me, I must have harbored that intimation, because two years later, it was still there when a chance came to act on it.