The Bananaman
By
Jim Bradley
The first time Richard ever saw Ela was in the closed stacks of West
Virginia University’s Library. She was sleeping, sitting on the floor, leaning
against the back issues of The Sewanee Review. All this happened on the
eighth floor of the library where they kept all of what Richard’s dear friend
Tom Rutledge called “the Lit-Ter-A-Chur” books when it was close to 11 p.m.,
just before closing, and Richard had abandoned his carrel and was roaming the
dimly lit stacks looking for a book.
Actually, he wasn’t looking for “a book”, he was looking for The Book, the one that would fill him
up and make him whole forever, the book he always imagined finding, the book
that held the secrets he longed to know—secrets of the heart and soul, because
Richard was, above all else, a poet at heart and poets are eternally searching.
He had almost despaired of finding that book, but that night, in late
September, he walked the aisles of the stacks, searching…. Richard’s searching
had become almost frantic since it was the autumn of his junior year of
college, the year he would turn 21 and be a man.
Unfortunately
for him, Richard had no idea whatsoever what it meant to “be a man”. And Ela,
now only a few yards away from him, leaning back against a bookshelf, dozing
off, needed, of all things, “a man.”
Soon
they would meet—for better or worse, and with equally ridiculous hopes and
expectations. Then they would talk on the plaza outside the library as most of
Morgantown tucked in to sleep away on an September night in 1968. And, quite
frankly, nothing would ever be the same for either of them again. Not ever.
But
we have jumped ahead of life. Life has its own rhythm and flow and we’ve ignored
it. Back in the moment, we have two people on the eighth floor of a University
library about to encounter each other for the first time. We should go back
there.
In
1968, the Library at West Virginia University closed at 11 p.m. as if people
stopped reading books, stopped searching for knowledge, stopped wanting to
learn an hour before mid-night. Since Richard was a library rat, he knew the
signs of closing. At 10:50 the lights went dark and then blinked on again. And
at 10:55 the lights in the stacks blinked off and on three times. Richard often
wondered if the lights were on a timer or if someone’s job was to blink them to
warn of closing. He would stare at the librarians, wondering which one had to
find the switch to flip once at 10:50 and three times at 10:55. What a job!,
Richard thought each evening since he was almost always there when the lights
flickered.
But
this night in particular—in the midst of September—Richard had been waiting for
the second warning, carrying his book bag full of reference works on Spencer
and Trollop and Beowulf like the good Honors English major he was, looking for The Book for a while, never knowing
what he would find would be Ela instead.
This
is, after all, a misbegotten meeting between two people who will find each
other and lose each other and almost find each other again, but not. They are
not meant to be together—not in this world at any rate. They are so different
from each other that we should ache for them, knowing as we do that this will
never work. It would be wondrous and romantic if their love could overcome the
vast expanses between them and their worlds. But, since this is real, their
love will not be enough—or, if it could be, they would squander it and waste it
and never say what needs to be said or do what needs to be done to bridge the
chasm between the son of a coal miner who will be an Ivy League professor
someday and the daughter of an advisor to the President who will give up her
due rewards to become a social worker in West Virginia. Richard and Ela will
pass each other going in different directions. Their lives will be full and
productive and good: especially “good” since both of them are remarkably decent
people. The time they share with each other will be tinged with magic and
hopefulness. And it will never find fruition. It will die on the vine. It will
never be what it could have been. More than once, Lord help them, they will
miss by a mite that is just as much as a mile. However, it is worth the
telling, what happens to them after this night in the stacks of a University
Library on a hill above a river in the northern part of West Virginia. Worth
the telling and worth the wondering too—the wondering of what might have been.
“Once softly, October….”
She was
lovely. Richard would remember that as he was checking out his books at the
main desk and thinking about what he needed to do before he slept. The thought
would come to him all at once, full blown, while he watched the elderly
librarian-lady imprint a return date on the cards she was inserting neatly into
the little pockets inside the books he would carry home and read, mark and
inwardly digest. “Ca-chunk” went the little tool the librarian-lady was using,
and just as Richard was asking himself what the imprint device with ink pad and
movable rubber numbers was called, the thought exploded into his mind and his
heart, perhaps even into his marrow and his soul.
She was lovely….
***
When he turned the corner of the
stacks, he almost tripped over her legs. She was leaning up against the
bookshelf asleep, her legs crossed and across the aisle. She was tiny,
fairy-small and wrapped around a book as she slept. In his mind Richard
thought, “what a fickle fiend Fate is: to send me The Book wrapped up in a sleeping girl.” And deeper than that, in
some damp place where things really matter, Richard saw the face of that
sleeping girl and knew she would haunt his dreams forever. He noticed her
extremely short hair—blond, he thought in the dim light of the library, though
later he would think it almost white and only whispered with blond—and her
small, fine-featured face. “Like a Loris or a Lemur,” he thought to himself,
“like some small night-creature that begins with an L.” She was wearing a
shapeless sweat shirt, gray with small, dark, gothic letters spelling out
“RADCLIFF” and faded, too-big jeans. A hint of shin showed pale between her
jeans and white socks covering feet inside well-worn penny loafers. “Cordovan”,
Richard thought, involuntarily, about her shoes, fascinated as he was by the word
and by a color that, so far as he knew, did not exist in nature.
But all that thinking was in a little
used part of his brain that simply observed and recorded. The electrical
impulses in his frontal cortex weren’t registering any of that—and he wasn’t,
in the moment, taken by her loveliness. What caught his conscious attention was
that the sleeping girl was cradling a book against her breasts as she dozed
away at closing time. “The Book,” Richard thought in the most reptilian part of
his brain—the part that dwells on survival and food and reproduction and
safety. “This might be The Book,” he thought, “and it is ‘a sign unto you’ from
the gods who conspire to make me whole.” (Richard actually thought those
thoughts, though he imagined, later, that he was reading back into the
experience. But what besides those primitive thoughts could have caused him to
reach out and take the book between his thumb and forefinger, blowing on her
face until she moved her hand and he took the book from Ela’s grasp, brushing her
breast with the back of his hand, waking her from her slumber, causing her to
open her slate-gray eyes and stare at him?)
“Excuse me,” Ela said, staring up at
the man who was holding her book and looking not a little confused—so confused
he didn’t seem to hear her. He was too busy noticing what a whore Fate had been
to him. The Book was written in French! “Excuse me,” she said again, louder
this time, “what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Richard shook his head. His face, Ela
thought, was as fresh and clean as a mountain stream. He was far from handsome,
but there was something “wholesome” about him, something she found attractive
even in the dimness, something worth wondering about.
No stranger to the accents of West
Virginia, Richard knew from the girl’s one sentence that she was a “foreigner”.
He was quite adroit at accents and before her question registered clearly, he
was pondering where she could be from: “Philadelphia? No. Maryland somewhere?
Not quite. New England, maybe there….”
“Pardon me,” Richard finally said.
“You’ve got my book,” Ela responded,
chill and threatening.
Somewhere
near Boston, Richard thought to himself, ignoring the aggressiveness in the
girl’s voice. But something else….
“You grew up in Boston,” Richard
blurted out, “but you went to school somewhere else, somewhere further south.
Where?”
Ela squinted up at him. “I want my
book,” is all she said.
“You were asleep, I didn’t think you’d
mind,” he said.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” Ela told him,
fiercely.
Richard handed the slim volume back to
her and shrugged. “It’s in French,” he said.
Effortlessly, like some slim animal,
Ela stood up, holding the book next to her.
“Of course it is. Becket.”
“Pardon?” Richard said.
“Samuel Becket,” Ela told him, coldly,
flat and hard. “He wrote in French.”
She turned and moved away from him.
She did not so much walk away as glide, with an instinctive, inbred
gracefulness of night animals. As he watched her go, crazed by the cosmic irony
that The Book was written in a language he could recognize well enough but not
read, Richard subliminally shivered at the faint scent of vanilla the girl left
in her wake and wondered, somewhere deep within himself if large, unseen
creatures had started to move to leave him frozen in place. He thought, without
intending to, about long walks, coffee at some shop, things he had never
imagined. And all of those thoughts were tinged with the smell of vanilla and
gray eyes the color of December clouds.
The second blinking happened and time
passed before he tore himself from his spot and took the elevator to the main
floor. He thought he saw her going through the revolving door, but it may just
have been the smell of vanilla—like an ice-cream soda, that seemed to envelope
him just at that moment. “Waiting for Godot”, he realized, was what the
French words he’d read on the cover of The Book had said. “Beckett, of course”,
he thought, because when he fanned the pages the words had formed short
sentences separated by white space and magic. Someone he’d briefly met could
read the play in French. He smiled, involuntarily, emptying his bag of the
books he needed to read in front of the librarian-lady.
“Sorry,” he said, as the books
scattered across the surface and skittered toward the elderly woman.
She looked up and didn’t smile. Then
she started checking out the books, carefully clicking a date on each lined
card before sliding them back toward Richard. She knew him by sight and by his
University ID. Always in the library. Always with books from the stacks that tumbled
toward her in a wild profusion so she could mark them and slide them back.
“That accent,” she thought, considering only the one word sorry that Richard had
spoken. “Southwestern Virginia? Eastern Kentucky?” She would never know how
close she was and how fascinated Richard would have been, being a devotee of
accents as well, to know she could almost place him from the one word he’d
said. The librarian never asked and, therefore, never knew. Close calls often
go for naught.
While Elsie French—the librarian’s
name—was wondering about Richard’s accent, Richard was suddenly, completely,
unexpectedly consumed with one thought: She was lovely. His heart beat a different rhythm. He felt lightheaded and scooped up
his books, pouring them into his bag, slipping on the tile floor as he tried to
turn, his eyes on the revolving door, just now slowing to a stop, hoping he
could catch up to the vanilla smelling girl who could read French and apologize
for inadvertently touching her breast when he took her book.
Then, remembering his raising, he
turned back to Elsie and said, “Sorry to be in such a rush.” And she knew in
that moment—with just those extra words said in his distinctive
accent—that he grew up within 50 miles
of Beckley, West Virginia, which was off by only four miles. So she smiled.
(What Richard did not know was the
librarian-lady’s last name. French. And “The Book” was written in French. And
the girl could read French. And Richard grew up in French, West Virginia,
exactly 54 miles from Beckley. Had he had all that information he might have
torn through the revolving door with a little more vigor and urgency. Such
coincidences are nothing short of magic. But, when it is considered, the vigor
and magic and urgency in Richard was quite enough already.)
Outside the air was slightly chill and
the sky was full of stars. Richard emerged onto the plaza outside the library
and spun around looking for the girl. Weeks later he would reflect back on that
night and think: “I didn’t find The Book
but I found The Girl.” And he was right in many ways, ways he would
never know or realize.
There she was, standing by the wall in
front of the acre of Lawn that led down to University Avenue and then, sharply,
down the hill to the River. For years afterwards, Richard would remember that
there was a full moon that night and that Ela was bathed in moonlight as he
approached her. It wasn’t true, unfortunately. That night was cloudy so the
stars he saw were in his heart and the moon, a mere sliver, was in his soul. It
was actually quite dark where he found her. She was holding an unlit cigarette
in her thin fingers and looking out across the river to the factories on the
other bank. Richard stared at her for a long moment.
“Do you have a light?” she asked,
softly, distracted by whatever she was seeing in the distance.
“Pardon,” Richard said, when he found
his breath again.
She shook the cigarette and handed him
a book of matches. “Light mine,” she said, “if you will.”
As he took the cardboard match book,
his hand grazed hers. A month later he would attribute a great deal to that
first touch (as if he had forgotten the back of his hand against her breast
when he stole her book.) In the moment, he scarcely noticed.
The match exploded and she took a deep
drag to light her cigarette. Ela would teach Richard to smoke in the times to
come, among other things. In the amber flame of the match he saw her face for
the first time. Years later, being honest with Johanna, the woman he loved, his
wife, the mother of his child, he considered telling her about how lovely Ela’s
face looked in the match glow. Wisely, he choked that awful truth back and told
her a harmless truth instead. And he never forgot.
“What’s going on over there?” she
asked him, expelling smoke, looking across the river where windows in the
factories were red-hot and burning.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking where
she looked. “Something to do with glass, though that might not be true. Maybe
the room is just on fire.”
They gazed across the river and
wondered what was going on in the red hot rooms.
“I’m sorry, you know,” Ela finally
said, dragging on her cigarette. “Pardon?”
Richard said.
She smiled at him for the first time.
“Are you hard of hearing,” she asked, “or do you just like the sound of
‘pardon’?”
“I’m a mountain boy,” he said, bolder
than he’d ever felt in his life. “What we mountain boys say when we don’t
understand is ‘pardon’.”
She just stared at him, as if he were
a puzzle to solve or a problem to understand, which, actually, was true for
Ela.
“Further north,” is all she said.
“Par….what?” he asked.
“I did grow up near Boston. But I went
to school further north of there—New Hampshire actually.” She watched his eyes.
“But your accent…” he began.
“I roomed with a girl from Richmond
for three years at boarding school,” she said, “we talked a lot.”
He grinned—which was actually his best
feature, a grin to break the heart of the hardest woman. Ela was not immune.
“You do accents?” she said, near
laughter at his grin.
“Well….Among other things….” Another
grin, more potent than ever this time.
“I have to go,” she said, quickly,
knowing how important it was not to bask too long in Richard’s smile. She
turned to glide away.
“I was
asleep,” she said, pausing, not looking back.
“So you lie,” Richard was trying to
hold her, keep her from gliding away.
She turned toward him. “You still have
my matches.”
He fumbled through his pocket and
found them. “Close cover before striking”, was all he could think for a moment.
She took the matches and turned way.
“I steal,” he told her, longing in his
voice.
She shook her head several times. Her
back was toward him. “I lie and you steal, quite a pair. No way to start a
relationship,” she said. “Can you ever trust me?”
“Should I?” Richard asked softly.
“Should you what?” Ela said, never looking back at him.
“Trust you.” He answered.
“That’s for me to know,” she
said. And then she was gone.
Richard stood in the gathering chill
for a long time, staring at the stars and moon he could not have seen because
of the heavy cloud cover. But forever after, he remembered moon and stars and
Ela.
***
The thing hard to imagine in such a
love story as this is that Richard, for the next few days, almost forgot about
the girl with the book who smelled of vanilla and smoked Marlboro cigarettes
(though he did remember her brand somehow). It is possible to forgive him
because he was, after all, reading Spencer in large doses and early British
novels and dealing with what was necessary to put out the students’ literary
journal because he was the editor—the first Junior ever to editor the “Spirit”.
Plus, he lived in a dorm on the Main Campus with Freshmen because he was one of
the “dorm counselors”—something few Juniors had ever been either. The Freshmen
on his floor were, so far as Richard could tell, Neanderthals from the
far-reaches of West Virginia and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Kentucky. Madmen
all, he thought. And they consumed his time and attention—like his classes,
like the magazine. He had things to do, duties to attend to, papers to write,
books to read.
Fox and Trotter—two of the
freshmen—had destroyed a bathroom on his floor on Friday night after a round of
Fraternity Rush drink-a-thons. Richard liked them, animals that they were, and
had spent much of Saturday dealing with the Dean of Student Affairs and the
maintenance men in Arthur E. Boreman Hall trying to keep Fox and Trotter in
school while they slept off their remarkable, almost mythic hang-overs.
He called home and talked to Vernon
and Susan, his parents, back in French, almost telling them about the girl he’d
met in the stacks on Wednesday night and how the starlight fell on her
shoulders as they stood outside and briefly talked. But he didn’t. Instead he
told them about his classes and about the food in the cafeteria and about the
football game he’d missed because of the disaster in the bathroom. And he
listened as they repeated the litany of illnesses and deaths and hard times
back in French, where—it seemed to Richard—nothing ever turned out as well as
it could have. And then he read some and wrote some and slept.
On Sunday morning, Richard repeated
his normal rounds. He stopped in at the little Greek restaurant across the
street from his dorm for some scrambled eggs and a grilled roll. He paid Plato,
the youngest son, who was the hero of any student who actually studied and
understood Western Civilization, for his breakfast. Then he went to church at
Trinity, the Episcopal Church a block away. Richard had left his Methodist
upbringing as a Freshman when he discovered the Episcopal faith by accident,
drug to Trinity by a girl from Parkersburg he knew from a Freshman Honors
class. Tina disappeared in the midst of the Eucharist. Richard was consumed by
the liturgy and ritual and richness of the language of Anglican worship. He and
Tina never dated, but Richard became an Episcopalian, confirmed by the Bishop
in his Sophomore year of college. He was, if nothing else, a faithful man and
attended church every Sunday.
After the last prayers and postlude he
wandered around campus because it was an unusually warm Autumn. And in his
wanderings, he happened on the great lawn in front of the library. And there he
saw her, smoking a cigarette, making sketches on a pad, squinting against the
morning sun.
He had not “thought” of her for four
days. He had dreamed of her, in dreams he never remembered, each night. So much
of what happened between Richard and Ela was subconscious that it is difficult
to tell their story. But it must be told.
So you must know that, filled with the
Anglican version of the Body and Blood of Christ, empowered by the sacrament,
stepping out of his shy, mountain-boy path, Richard crossed the Lawn and
plopped himself on the fall grass beside of Ela. He waited.
As Richard waited he suddenly and
unexpectedly remembered a poem he had written when he was 15 years old. He
thought he had long ago forgotten it, but it came back, all new.
Soon will come the chill,
the cold.
It is upon us, at the
very door.
Winter conquers all—and
all is lost.
The warmth is lost
forever.
Life and love are but
memories.
And yet today there is a
warmth
A warmth we do not
deserve.
But we must embrace it
and love it.
We must reach out to it
and rejoice.
Before November and the
freeze,
Once softly, October.
It
was a terrible poem, full of the kind of longings Richard imagined were not
part of his life any more. But there it was. And there she was—this Girl beyond
imagining, right before him, sketching one of the oaks on the Lawn, paying him
no attention.
Her
delicate hand, holding the cigarette now, flicked across the page with a
pencil. She was left-handed, Richard noticed, wondering how that might be, if
she’d been disciplined in grade school, criticized by how her arm embraced the
desk as she tried to print. And now she drew. It wasn’t the oak at all, but it
was an oak—some tree in her memory or vision, more wondrous, stark and
unforgiving than the actual tree.
She
laid the pad aside, finally and handed him a book of matches so he could light
another cigarette for her.
She
inhaled deeply, astonishingly deep, holding the smoke within her until she
began to let it out as she spoke.
“You’re
all dressed up,” she said, trailing smoke above her head.
Richard
noticed he had on a jacket and a tie. He always did for church—something he
hadn’t noticed before since it was simply part of him.
“Church,”
he said. “I’ve been to church.”
She
seemed vaguely interested, he thought. She leaned her fragile head to one side,
stretching out her long, lovely neck. “What cult are you?”
Confused,
Richard answered, “pardon?”
She
laughed, freely and electric, like the air that October Sunday. But Richard
noticed that though her body laughed, there was next to no sound. Her laughter
was silent, haunting, just out of reach.
“I’m
sorry,” he said, “about the ‘pardon’. I know you don’t like it. And I don’t
know your name. I’m Richard and I’m an Episcopalian.”
Ela
rolled around in a joyous circle, sitting on the grass. This boy, she thought, is
nothing that I need; but I want to know him….”
She tossed away her
cigarette and fell backwards in the grass. Her legs were still crossed in front
of her and she spread her arms out wide to either side.
“He’s
not there, you know,” she said.
“Who?”
that strange boy asked.
Ela
laughed inside and her body shook. “God, Allah, Jehovah, the Bananaman, none of
them, nobody….” She said, still laughing.
(This is the first moment when all that
happened, all that was to be and can’t most likely be changed, could have
shifted away and been different. In a moment all this happened inside Richard:
he was shocked and dismayed by Ela’s words, he was convinced—on some level—that
nothing would ever come of this moment, and…and, he was hooked on her, her
audacity and verve and shear energy. And, let it be known, he was shocked into
being by the way the color of her eyes matched the stones, gray and ancient, of
the library, by the way she looked like some creature you couldn’t tame or
hold, by the way the laughed without sound, by the very being of this girl
whose name he still did not know. So he didn’t leave. He stayed. And the truth
be known, he already loved her.)
“Who’s the Bananaman?” is
all he said.
“That’s
for later,” she smiled and said, “and maybe never. We’ll see.”
If
we had been watching what we would have seen for a long time was Ela in the
grass, smiling and Richard sitting beside her and her sketch pad off to the
side, between them. For a long time, that would have been all we could see.
Finally,
Richard said, “I love your drawing of that oak.”
She
stirred in the grass and sat up. “It’s a maple.”
He
grinned and she was swallowed into his grin. “No,” he said, “it’s an oak tree.
I know from the shape and the few leaves still left. My father could tell you
from the bark, but not me.”
“You’re
a ‘shape’ and ‘leaf’ man, I take it,” said Ela, sitting up, looking from her
sketch to the tree to Richard.
“Mostly,”
he said. And if Elsie French had been out on the Lawn instead of hid away in
the library, when Richard said “mostly”, she would have known he grew up
further south of Beckley than she imagined before.
And
if Richard had been listening to Ela’s accent rather than falling in love with
her—hopelessly and hopelessly in love with her—he would have known, from the
few sentences she said that her roommate at St. Paul’s hadn’t been from
Richmond at all, but from Tidewater Virginia somewhere, a place so unknown and
forgettable that she had said she was
from Richmond. Such intimacies as that are oft forgotten on Spring days that
fall, inexplicably, in October when the sun is bright and warm and you are
younger than you’ll ever be again, younger than anyone ever could deserve.
You’re that young and already that in love.
After
what seemed to both of them to be a long time, Ela finally said, “My name is
Ela, Ela Dunning.”
“Like
Ella Fitzgerald?” Richard asked.
“With
just one l. I don’t know why, but Ela with one l.” She smiled at Richard and
into the midday sun. And she was lovely.
“I’m
pleased to meet you Miss Dunning,” he said in his deepest Appalachian accent,
“I’m Richard Lucas.”
“Mr.
Lucas,” she said, savoring the words in her mouth, finding them sweet to the
taste. “The sentiment is mutual.”
And
they both smiled, neither knowing, not for a moment, the sweetness and joy and
pain and disappointment and memories this moment in the pale October sun would
bring. Not for a moment could they have known that. But they were young—younger
than anyone ever deserves to be. And though they would almost find a love for
the ages, a love beyond imagining, a love that would endure forever…although
they had several moments to find that kind of love and never did…it was enough
in that moment.
And
they couldn’t have known or imagined what they were in for…it would be sweet
and joyful and painful and remembered always in their hearts. Just that moment
on that Lawn before that Library, near that river, waiting for something to
happen next, Ela and Richard couldn’t have been happier. And that, after all,
is something to be devoutly wished.
“Want
to go for a walk?” Richard asked, already scooping up Ela’s sketch pad, already
imagining the joy and hopefulness.
Ela
touched her face. Years later, Richard would remember that simple gesture and
smile.
“A
walk might be good, Mr. Lucas,” she said.
So
they walked until the October sun waned and dimmed and set. They walked until
they were fully in love.
Nothing
happened to Richard, ever....
Richard David Lucas, only child of
Vernon Lucas and Susan Brown Lucas, was someone nothing ever happened to.
Something happening to him that was extraordinary or transforming would, most
likely, have seemed like a mistake to him. He was loved by and devoted to his
parents. He was the type of fellow almost everyone likes and some admired. He
never felt confounded or betrayed of put upon in any significant way. Nothing
much ever confused or annoyed him. Years after his time loving Ela, he would
reflect on his blood from time to time. There was no part of his DNA that did
not originate in the British Isles. His poetic sense came from the Irish parts
of him. His calm from his Scottish roots. His sweet reasonableness from the
peasant stock of Kent.
Richard would have been hard put to
tell you—when he was a boy becoming a man—about what made him happy. “Happy”
wasn't a term he connected with readily. It would have been equally difficult
to discuss his sadness. Richard rode gracefully on the rail between powerful
emotions. He hated no one he could think of and loved but a few. He mostly
simply 'liked' people and his life and how things were turning out. He felt a
profound and universe sized emptiness only because he thought there must be
somethng--'the Book' or the aphorism or the key, clue, cloud parting Truth that
would make him completely Whole and Right. Mostly, though, he felt he was as
close to Whole and Right as people get to come. He imagined that if he found
the Deep-Down-Meaning of it all, he might turn to white light and cease to
exist as he did.
And Richard David Lucas preferred his
existence greatly to not existing at all.
Back in 1968—eons ago as things go—he was 'seeking' but not 'longing',
not in any existentially painful way. He didn't mind being who he was and when
and where he was. He had no concept of 'boredom' in the way his friends all
discussed it endlessly. He wasn't sure the world was dying to get better—in
fact, the world as he knew it was, for the most part, comfortable and copacetic
(though, even as an English major, he may not have known the meaning of that
word in 1968.) If you looked up “well adjusted” in some cosmic dictionary in
the autumn of 1968, there just might have been a picture of Richard along with
the definition. “Easy going” didn't begin to fill in his blanks. Though he
didn't think in terms of being 'confident' or having a healthy ego, by virtue
of the way people evaluated such things in those days, Richard was the poster
boy.
He had a girl friend of sorts—and
since the two of them were an enigma to everyone in French, West Virginia—the
'of sorts' part was what most people focused on. They weren't passionately in
love. In fact, they seemed to be best friends who dated. Rosemary Ball was the
only child of the man who was Richard's father's boss. Alex Ball was the
General Superintendent of French Coal Mine. Vernon Lucas was the Mine Foreman.
Everyone—over 200 men--'men' literally in those days—who worked in the coal
mines of French, worked for Vernon Lucas. Vernon Lucas worked for Alex Ball and
whatever concept of the Almighty Vernon had. The two progeny of those two good,
fair men were born within seven days of each other, grew up next door—though
Rosemary's house was the 'big house' of brick at the end of the street and
Richard's house was the wooden frame house, with more rooms than any other of
the wooden houses on the street.
