Freedman Last Brazil of Benjamin East

A Novel
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-939555-11-3
Verlag: Bright Lights Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 274 Seiten

A big-hearted, compelling, zany, funny, fast-paced novel. It takes courage to believe in your dreams, and after heartbreaking failures, it takes courage to go on dreaming. Returning to America in the twilight of his life with an old valise, an irascible parrot, and an expired U.S. passport, Benjamin East still dares to dream big. When Benjamin meets Amy McCafferty, they recognize in each other an unbreakable belief in infinite possibilities. Although the plans they each had when they first met may never be realized, something bigger, better, and more eternal awaits them at the end of the road. The Last Brazil of Benjamin East is an American road story steeped in hope and longing, regret, love, and the courage of those who dare to dream. Lives intersect and are changed forever as one old man and his youthful companion cross the country in sear of something they may never find. Along the way, they find love, friendship, and adventure, and the grain of truth that lies hidden in all of us, waiting to break into bloom. This novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jonathan Freedman was thirty years in the making.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Freedman, Jonathan

Leseproben

CHAPTER 3

The Washington Monument, an obelisk of Vermont marble, is visible from virtually any point in the capital, not for any mystical reason but because federal law prohibits buildings in the District of Columbia from exceeding its 555 foot height. It gives Washington, along with its circles, its broad avenues, its esplanades, a pivotal feeling; as if the world turned around its center. It draws people to the values of freedom, individuality, and democracy embodied by the monument to the Father of Our Country, and communicates by its simplicity, its upward striving.

“What a prick!” Amy cursed the white phallus framed in the rear window.

“Pardon?” Benjamin leaned over the front seat.

“Nothing!”

Benjamin’s cologne clashed with the chemical odor emanating from the cab’s air freshener. Amy cranked down the window and breathed in the wind. If it were only so easy to let go of the past and not look back. Being who she was, she looked back anyway. Concrete buildings. Trees losing their leaves. Ray was gone. Like her past -- erased; it had never happened. She swiped her hair behind her ears and peered ahead with an alertness that made her look younger than twenty-five, though her skin was drawn and the circles around her eyes made her look washed out -- thirty.

‘Where am I going?’ Her eyes watered; not tears. It was the wind, the future. She sucked oxygen into her lungs and felt it cleansing her veins, soothing the bruises on her ribs and thighs. New York Avenue was written on the green and white signs they passed on every corner. She looked down the corridor of trees and saw a point where the screwed-up lines of her life would meet at the end of the road and she would come out the other side, a new woman.

An awkward silence enveloped the cab as it whistled past once-elegant townhouses, now burned out tenements. They reached the outskirts of Washington, white suburbs ringing the capital, in reverse of Rio, where the rich lived in the city and the poor were relegated to live without electricity or water in the favelas. Benjamin straightened his tie and looked out the window at the dense green woods pressing up against the highway. He thought of the road up to Petropolis, where Gisela’s father had a villa not far from the summer palace of the last emperor of Brazil, and they promenaded through the town in the cool nights and kissed to the batucada of drums. That was not so many years ago. It seemed so close, tangible, not like this road drawn like a ruler through the trees, unreal.

What was he doing in a taxi with a runaway housewife? She huddled in silence in the backseat, tears streaming down her cheeks. Benjamin remembered an Indian maiden he’d once seen crying aboard a tramp steamer on the Rio Negro, sold to prostitution in Belem. He no more knew how to comfort Amy than talk to the natives of the Amazon.

“Mind if I turn on the radio?” the driver asked near Baltimore.

“No, go ahead,” Benjamin said, glad to break the silence.

The driver wheeled through the airwaves. He settled on a hard rock station with a disk jockey on amphetamine spinning the discs. The DJ cut away to a traffic copter hovering over a five-mile backup then segued back to the studio for a live interview with a dietitian.

Benjamin cringed. America was suffering from disjunctivitis! Nothing connected. Everything was jammed together. No wonder men were beating up women, wives running away. He wanted to turn to the fugitive in the backseat and say something helpful, but he didn’t know the first thing about this new America.

Where had she come from? He shifted in his seat. Ever since he’d stepped off the plane from Brazil, he couldn’t get it out of his mind: they’ve put a man on the moon, they’ve got enough bombs to kill everyone in the world three times, and here they are, night and day, crowding the highways. What do you do in this country if you’ve lost your home, your job, your family?

“If you don’t mind me asking,” he said, leaning over the seatback. “Where do you come from?”

“Virginia.”

She’d been born in Harrisonburg, in the Shenandoah Valley, but she’d lived most of her married life in a tract development near Manassas that her husband helped build after coming back from Vietnam. The monumental emptiness defied even the developer’s rendition of the Southern plantation manse Ray had picked out of a model home book and built her: a ranch-style Tara with faux pillars. She had lived there for three years, yet she could not remember if the shag carpet had started out blue or beige. It had turned grey, like everything else in her life.

“Do you like Virginia ham?” he asked, knowing little else about the state.

“No, I hate it!”

She saw, reflected in the window, mascara streaked down her cheeks, and a shiver of embarrassment ran through her. She wrestled her leatherette billfold out of her purse and unsnapped the clasp and the greasy scent of pastel crayons rose up in the cab. She pulled out a soiled tissue and blew her nose.

Benjamin wondered if she knew any goose calls.

“Looks like you’ll be staying away for a while.” He cast a sidelong glance at her stuffed suitcase.

“Forever.”

The younger you are, the longer you think you’re going to do something. At his age, he didn’t want to do anything forever, just today.

“What are you going to do in New York?” he said, offhand.

“I’ll show you.” She rifled her purse. Her fingers ran over credit cards punched with the raised letters, “Mrs. Ray McCaffrey,” claim checks from the dry cleaners for Ray’s purple tux jacket and her formal for the Veterans Day Ball at the VFW, a fragile slip of paper with a blue mimeographed message she’d pulled out of a Chinese fortune cookie, “Your wish is within reach.” She felt the plastic picture folder, split at the seams and Scotch-taped together, containing her high school graduation portrait, posed in a mortar board supplied by the photographer, her face set in a look of utter vacuity that was supposed to represent a Southern belle, her eyebrows plucked, her tawny red curls ironed flat and pasted across her forehead, from which the acne had been airbrushed, leaving only the green irises deepened by flicks of black eyeliner. She skipped over her parents’ 25th anniversary photo and paused momentarily at her wedding portrait: an Instamatic snapshot of Ray in a red bandana, black leather jacket, faded jeans tucked into motorcycle boots, hooking his arm around a pale flower child in front of the E-Z Motel in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, where they’d eloped. She dug deeper in the detritus of her purse, stabbing her fingertips on hairpins and colored pencils, until she found what she was looking for.

“Here--”

She pulled out a folded-up newspaper clipping from the Harrisonburg Daily News Record, “Local girl wins New York art scholarship.” It showed an awkward eighteen-year-old hiding her eyes from the camera. She stood next to a painting of a school bus surrounded by protestors. Desegregation battles persisted into the mid-seventies in rural Virginia. The newspaper ink was so smudged you could hardly make out the image. But Amy knew by heart the faces of her classmates staring through the windows of the bus she’d ridden from her father’s farm to school in town. Angry protestors marched with placards, “Down with Busing.” In the rear window, a white girl and a black boy stared out, their faces fragmented into cubistic shapes. The caption quoted the scholastic prize committee:

“This sensitive painting shows the young artist from the rural South grappling with racism in a naïve style combining pictorial elements of Grandma Moses and Peter Max.” And other bullshit, but she wasn’t complaining. The scholarship was to Cooper Union Institute in New York.

“That’s where I’m going.” She handed the yellowed newspaper clip to Benjamin.

“But this was dated several years ago.”

“You don’t think they’ll honor it? I’ve got the letter in here.” She pulled her suitcase onto her knees and started to open it.

“I believe you,” he said. “But why did you wait so long?”

She remembered the afternoon she got the letter. Ray had picked her up on his motorcycle and they roared up the side of Massanutan Mountain into the pines. He didn’t say a word. She had never seen him act this way before, but it was clear as the newly cut hairs on the back of his head he knew and was afraid of her going away to New York City. Then he parked the bike against a barbed wire fence and lifted her off the seat, and when she started to tell him, he stopped her lips with kisses, his mustache pressing into her nostrils, his hands gripping her wrists. They went down in the dogwood leaves, which crunched like cereal and sent motes of dust into the shafts of sunlight streaming through the branches. He proposed to her afterwards. She lay on her back in the prickly leaves with her bare thighs cooling in the pine breeze, and he promised her he’d take her to Alaska. He’d work on the pipeline and she’d draw Eskimos and icebergs, not sterile nudes in a dusty studio.

When she told him she didn’t know, he got mad and cut himself pulling the bike off the fence, and as they took the curves down the mountain, swinging toward the smoke rising from the Shenandoah, they seemed to fall together into the turns, like a pendulum or like fate, and she knew she would keep the letter hidden in the bottom of her drawer.

“I married Ray instead,” she said. “We were getting ready to go to Alaska when he got Greetings from Uncle Sam. When he came back from Nam, he had tracks in his arms. You know how that...