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Thursday, October 5, 2006
From Fly Creek: Half in love with death ...
The death happened over a half century ago, but it haunts me still: A friend who never lived beyond his boyhood, who died by his own hand.
Thoughts of him have been especially strong since that 50th high school reunion I told you about. Back in my hometown of Annapolis for the event, I'd been asked to speak a few words of tribute for each of our deceased classmates. It was a jolt when I tallied them up. We were only 48 in the class, and the tally showed that 20 percent of us were already gone. I hope I won't be assigned this duty again for the 60th reunion. But, then, maybe it won't be my worry.
Some died very young. Christine and Freida weren't that long out of school, and neither was my good buddy Roger; he was in his early twenties, a husband and new father, when leukemia took him. Others lasted much longer than those three. Cynthia, who'd been an organizer of all our earlier reunions, died of cancer in her 50's. Dave, our quiet class president, was not much older. Rich and a generous philanthropist, Dave died while working on his boat's hull. The boat slipped off blocks and crushed him. God rest that good man, and all the others.
Only one in our class was dead before our high school graduation. It was a full year before, on a hot tidewater night just before our junior prom. Drunken boys were playing Russian roulette. Our classmate Jimmy Windsor was among them, age 18.
Jim, who'd been thrown out of a range of local schools, was at St. Mary's as a last resort; perhaps the nuns could do something for him. And they tried very hard_not to make him a Catholic, but to tame him. For Jimmy_bright, warm-hearted, and funny_was a teen-aged wild child. It seemed that, for him, the world was a playground, free of all rules. Across the years, I can still picture him: short brush cut, warm mischievous smile, eyes that were dark and sparkling, but somehow feral, too.
If Jimmy Windsor had never been tamed, the class he joined certainly had. We'd mostly been together since the first grade, and a succession of single-minded women in billowing black serge and starched linen had schooled us to unquestioning belief in an ordered universe and in an all-seeing God who took a stern interest in our actions, especially regarding sex.
By and large, we had bought the whole company line. We were mostly polite and orderly, the girls in dark blue uniforms and white blouses, the boys in shirt and tie, khakis with sharp creases, and white buck shoes. True, by mid-high school some were starting to slip out of the traces. A girl a year behind us went away on a year-long "visit to her aunt," and one of our guys bragged that he'd occasioned the trip. Most didn't believe it, but even the possibility made some giddy.
But it was basically a tamed, God-fearing group that gathered for our junior year with homeroom teacher Sister Brendan, a hefty, red-faced woman with firm ideas about everything. But then Jim Windsor blazed into our midst, an alien being from a parallel universe that had room for rollicking disorder, fistfights, amoral fun. Sister Brendan, unlike the other nuns, was put off by him; but Jimmy was unabashed. To him, she was a funny old spinster who needed to be jollied along.
I used to think that Jim saw himself as fate's darling, invulnerable and immortal. He seemed sure that he'd always come out on top, no matter what risks he took. I remember him at the literal top of telephone poles on the school property. I remember him riding off the campus on the roof of Joe Boyle's car, sitting cross-legged like a grinning Buddha, waving and throwing kisses.
His final testing of fate came in late May, after he'd been expelled from his last school, ours. I don't recall what he'd done, but it was too much even for the nuns who'd tried to help him. And so he'd been cast out and had returned to other friends. Somebody's parents were away, and a bunch of those boys were partying in a brick mansion alongside South River. In drunken bravado, they were passing around a revolver, adding a cartridge each round, spinning the cylinder, clicking the trigger.
When Jimmy took the revolver in hand the last time, there were three shells in the cylinder's five chambers. He grinned, raised the barrel to his head. The entry hole was small, but the bullet exploded out his opposite temple. Jim dropped on his back, sat up looking puzzled, then fell back dead. And boys who'd not so much as lost a grandparent stared horrorstruck as blood gushed to blacken the oriental carpet under his head.
When word reached us, his former classmates, great changes took place in us. Jimmy had done the unthinkable, taken his own life. In catechism terms, he'd committed a mortal sin of presumption, put his life in grievous danger, and destroyed it. That made it a de facto suicide. But privately, I don't think any of us followed the company line. We didn't consign him to hell.
Looking back across a half century, I don't think Jim Windsor really thought himself invulnerable. I now think his rash acts deliberately courted death. There must have been pain in him, unbearable pain that we never realized. I now think that he was "half in love with easeful death," with the release and relief it might bring.
My class changed with Jimmy's life among us, and surely with his death. The latter has half-haunted me for 50 years, and I'll bet my classmates would say the same. I carried Jim with me into the monastery. I brought him out with me. And he's with me now, as I come into the gravitational pull of 70. Jim, our sign of contradiction, won't go away.
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