Mr. Hawxhurst (Part 3)

Like those pages that fall from a calendar in a pre-war film: "leaves" fluttering downward and away, marking the changing seasons, the passage of time, and the flowering or wilting of dreams and hopes…. the days came and went, some thirteen hundred or so of them since that mid-summer day at Rockaway Beach. Our fatherly leader, in war and in peace, General Eisenhower had been retired to his farm near Gettysburg for over three years. A nuclear crisis (among others) and a young American president had both come and gone: the one filled with the darkest of threats and then defused, the other with the brightest of promises and then murdered. Pubescence was upon me and the angst of this stage of my journey was intense though most of my peers seemed oblivious to youthful alienation or mass annihilation while reveling in rock and roll's euphoria, especially as now interpreted by young musicians from England helping us to forget our national trauma. In April a new World's Fair was opening here again in New York's Flushing Meadows after not quite a quarter century. The last one ended with the world at war, an emphatic rebuke to the ideals and yearnings of the international festival's promoters and patrons. Mr. Hawxhurst was then a twenty two year old keen on adventure, sharply inclined, as mentioned, to join friends who had volunteered to fly for the Royal Canadian Air Force against Hitler's Luftwaffe. George's parents still needed him as the vestiges of the Great Depression lingered and both realities short circuited his wanderlust and longings for derring-do. As the new Fair beckoned to a new generation, he fully intended to "see" the world with his children, Mickey and Jamie along with Mrs. Hawxhurst, but now safely from his own backyard.

My Mom had been hired the previous fall as a legal secretary for the Fair's corporate headquarters situated adjacent to the fairgrounds itself. Ours became, consequently, a fairly (no pun intended) intimate relationship with all the events and exhibits. Passes occasionally issued, discounted tickets and parking privileges all made visits to the Fair a family affair, typically and not infrequently. Going there with Mr. Hawxhurst and his family never occurred to me and besides, I hadn't seen him for some time, at least since the end of the winter. I knew he had been a hospital patient on several occasions, but my focus on school had become quite concentrated, except for the visits to Flushing Meadows, and I only vaguely knew that he had been having "stomach trouble." His several returns home seemed to indicate that things were normal and unremarkable. I was unbelieving when one morning Mrs. Hawxhurst told my mother who told me that Mr. Hawxhurst had been advised that he had six months to live.

All of my grandparents were still living and my experiences with death were limited to a pet cat I doted on back in '57: the fact of her sudden demise (caused by a large truck), hidden from me by well meaning but foolish friends and neighbors, including Mrs. Hawxhurst and Mickey. Mr. Hawxhust had simply said nothing about it, while the others told varying fibs about the feline including that she had simply "run away." Only Jamie, the mischievous one, had an affinity for the truth: "Tim, your kitty cat got squashed by one of the Sanitation department's tar trucks." Besides my tabby, several other adult humans, unrelated or distantly so, had left this vale of tears in recent years also, but this was the first time, in the case of Mr. Hawxhurst, that anyone so geographically close to me had had their mortality precisely defined and circumscribed. I "did the math" with the rapidity of my fevered adolescent brain and wondered aloud if Mickey's dad would be dead before Halloween, and then with logically extended reasoning, the minutiae that followed included wondering if Jamie would, at that point, go Trick Or Treating.

The year wore on. I was becoming quite the little scholar, hiding behind my books as these early teen years were particularly unkind to my changing physique. My "Roman" nose's prominence had become especially pronounced as baby fat continued to evaporate and acne's dreaded visitations became a reality. Baseball was a blissful escape. Imaginary teams and leagues enjoyed with a kindred spirit and "old" friend supplemented the fair weather months of ball playing as well as rabid rooting for my beloved if hapless Mets. Every once in awhile Mrs. Hawxhurst would report to my mom about Mr. Hawxhurst's condition. Mickey was not feeling well now either. Two summers before the trips in the Pontiac, he had been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. Now there were indications that his eyes were being affected. I did not understand why these unpleasant things were happening to the Hawxhursts and I did not want to dwell on them. Still, I knew that I could not pretend that I was unaware of my neighbors' sufferings.

It was the summer of the civil rights movement's apogee of accomplishment as well as of heartbreak. The war in Vietnam began its first of many intensifications with the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The Fair continued as the last vestiges of the 1950s were held to our collective bosoms as represented by the festival's motto and zeitgeist of "peace through understanding." They were dying children: the world of international and even national unity and "normalcy" after World War II. The Fair's poohbahs, Robert Moses, et. al. were in their declining years, despite their enormous power; their world was fading away too, even if they did not know it. Mine was receding as well, though my life in its early spring, chronologically supposed, was brimming with possibilities and dreams, if they could only be vividly imagined. I racked up "A"s and averages that sent me into the exclusive ranks of junior high school "eggheads." But somehow, I could not envision the future's incandescence and I thought about Mr. Hawxhurst more and more often as the new school year began.

As I couldn't seem to picture joyous developments for a career path or a social life that might include members of the opposite sex, neither could I or would I turn my attention directly to the world of the Hawxhursts. Still, they were now on my mind daily. One afternoon, shortly after the first of the Jewish holidays in September, my mom stated that Mrs. Hawxhurst had left little to the imagination in her latest report. Mr. Hawxhurst's health had taken a sharp turn for the worse. When I asked her for details, she hesitated. I persisted. Dad advised her that I was growing up quickly and that shielding me from certain realities of life could not go on forever. She agreed and then informed both of us of the extraordinary pain and agony of Mr. Hawxhurst's life as it was being lived now in a hospital. Lung cancer had long since metastisized to most of his stomach and intestines. The removal of part of his colon had been necessary. The nightmarish account included Mickey's dad experiencing unrelenting nausea that resulted in him expelling fecal matter from his mouth. I defaulted to the age old safety valve as depicted in the film "Home of the Brave." There was the moment when the protagonist, a soldier being treated for "battle fatigue" by an army psychiatrist has an epiphany that relieves his burdensome guilt over the death of his comrade: "I'm glad it didn't happen to me!" Still, my incredulity was strong. This had been reinforced by meetings on the sidewalk during the summer, less frequent as in years past, but so normal and pleasant during Mr. Hawxhurst's returns back home. He seemed fine, perhaps walking a bit more deliberately than usual but he greeted me in the way he had always done: simple, direct and with a friendliness devoid of any of the condescension some adults convey to youngsters. He was ever courteous, regardless of whether my parents were present or not. My grandmother had often remarked through the years in her heavily accented English: "he is a gentleman."

It was with great surprise that only several days after mom's revelations to us, that I saw him again. He and Mrs. Hawxhurst were visible through one of their screened-in porch windows on a mild afternoon when I had returned from school. I mustered the courage to enquire after his health. "Just been to the dentist. Got a good checkup" he offered. "Oh, good" I responded, pretty much stuck for anything else to say. "Oh, had a tooth pulled too. Didn't hurt a bit." Then Mr. Hawxhurst seemed to defer to his wife, their marital bond's "true love ways" beyond my immature grasp. "Okay to show Tim?" It seemed a tad silly, but thinking about it today, the privacy that we, as good neighbors mutually respected, and that was so frayed by recent events, was restored in some very tiny way by making the display of the result of an extracted tooth not a casual thing. Thusly, she looked at me and smiled as she gave her permission conditionally to her husband: "Just a quick look!" He stepped outside into the sunshine, a gaunt and stooped figure whom I pretended not be startled by. He opened his mouth for less than two seconds revealing a gap between two of his lower teeth that was neither shocking nor uninteresting. "Oh, boy" I remarked and then waved goodbye as I thought of the horrors of his diseased alimentary canal and wondered if brushing his remaining teeth was really not futile at this point. I never saw Mr. Hawxhurst again, alive that is.

My dad and his friend had arranged for tickets for us to attend the World Series, a Sunday game in the Bronx. My passion for baseball was usually boundless. But my lowly Mets had failed to win the pennant of course, and their chief tormentors, the Cardinals were playing the hated Bombers. "A pox on both your houses" I thought, amazed at my first Shakespearean allusion, thanks to our enlightened ninth grade English teacher's curiculum that included a trip to Stratford (Connecticut) to attend one of the Bard's plays on the four hundredth anniversary of his birth. But my anemic rooting interests were further enervated by the passing of Mr. Hawxhurst the day before. Tomorrow would be his wake, only my second, the first being that of our parish pastor two years earlier. Ken Boyer's game winning grand slam homer had caused quite a ruckus, even in the enemy territory of Yankee Stadium and I forgot, for a little while, about tomorrow.

Tomorrow came and many others too. For the Hawxhursts, sorrow dogged them pitilessly. A priest's homily after Mickey's death twenty years later at the age of thirty four might have impressed some congregants when he explained George pre-deceasing his sons (Jamie was the first to follow his dad, five years before his brother in a hunting accident) as a kindness from God. But how to explain Marlene's forty more years, the only understandable, natural event: her mother's passing ten years before hers? Both Marlene and Mickey had died on Father's Day. These seemed appropriate coincidences (or were they synchronicities?) just as Jamie's demise had come curiously, on the September day that Pope John Paul II celebrated mass at that same, though refurbished House That Ruth Built, not far from those palisades and man-made canyons of George's youth. END.