A Movie. A Book. A Memory.
Longing. Forgetting.
The other
night I was watching the movie THREE COMRADES directed by Frank Borzage, based
on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque and written for the screen by F. Scott
Fitzgerald. Toward the end of the movie
Robbie has been visiting the love of his life Pat in a sanatorium where she is
dying of TB. They embrace and she
objects to the ticking watch. He hurls
the watch to the floor…
It all came
back to me from Patchogue in the summer of 1965 on Robinson Boulevard.
But first let me quote from the actual
novel:
After
a while she grew restless.
“What is it, Pat?” I asked.
“It ticks so loud,” she whispered.
“What? The watch?”
She nodded, “It’s so threatening---“
I took the watch off my wrist.
She looked anxiously at the second
hand, “Throw it away.”
I took the watch and flung it
against the wall. “There, it’s not ticking
any more now. Now time is standing
still. We’ve torn it in two. Now only we two are here; we two, you and me
and no one else.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were very
big.
“Darling---“ she whispered.
I could not bear her glance. It came from far away and passed through me
to some other place beyond.
“Old Lad,” I murmured, “dear, brave,
old lad.”
She died in the last hour of the
night, before morning came. She died
hard and no one could help her…
From the scrawled inscription of my
name I can say I bought the 50 cent Popular Library paperback in my eighteenth
year when I was a Freshman at Beloit College.
I would eventually acquire and read all of Remarque’s novels. As to their quality, I never gave that a
thought.
When my son Lorcan was in seventh
grade at Grace Church School he was required to read ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN
FRONT. Of course I was pleased but he
was very disappointed, “The book was interesting but really sentimental, Dad. I know it ‘s supposed to be about how awful war
is but being so sentimental you don’t believe it.”
Of course he was right. And I admitted the justice of his comment and
gave him Ernst Junger’s STORM OF STEEL.
This book renewed my credibility and Lorcan told me Junger was really a
good writer and he had written a much better book as it didn’t tell you what to
feel in the way Remarque insisted.
But the ticking watch… at the end of
June or early July, 1965 I was walking
back from the Patchogue Theatre with Melinda Brady. We had seen the movie THE TRAIN starring Burt
Lancaster and directed by Fred Zinnemann.
It was a long walk from Main Street to Hewlett Avenue where Melinda
lived. We walked by way of the shadows
of Robinson Boulevard. We kissed for the first time and I could hear the watch
on my wrist ticking.
I had longed for this moment since
sometime in the fall of 1961 when I had first seen her in the second floor
hallway of Patchogue High School. I was
a senior and Melinda was a sophomore.
The ticking watch has an inscription
on its face
LONG ISLAND PRESS 1 YEAR
SERVICE AWARD.
I had a newspaper route before working
at Francis Bannerman’s in Blue Point and
before going to college out in Wisconsin, before going to Dublin where
everything changed or didn’t change.
I wrote two short stories about a
Melinda and a guy named Joey who would
die on November 6, 1918 in World War One.
Alfred Willis published them in the high school newspaper THE RED AND
THE BLACK in the spring of 1962. Willis
did two tours as a Marine in Vietnam…
In this the one hundredth anniversary
of that World War One…
In the fictional moment labeled the present both Melinda and I have been married three times. She lives far away in a tiny village in Maine and I live on East First Street in Manhattan. The watch is broken and on a shelf in front of Julian Green, Ernst Junger, James Thomson, Hannah Green, Pati Hill, Louis Ferdinand Celine and Evelyn Scott books… in another part of that present Melinda asked me how I had known her birthday as Joey had died on… but I had not known and…
