20

An Essay on Cowardice

IN FOXE’S BOOK OF MARTYRS, I found a Keillor who was burned at the stake by Catholics for reading his Bible, and I made a note to avoid martyrdom and so far have succeeded. If ordered at swordpoint not to read the Bible, I would be okay, I have enough of it memorized to last me for a while.

The one time martyrdom was offered was in the summer of 1968 when I was ordered by Local Selective Service Board No. 51, Hennepin County, to report for induction into the Army on a specified Tuesday at 7:30 a.m. I wrote back to say I would not report because the war in Vietnam was immoral—mindless carnage, the weekly body count, B-52s bombing rice paddies, Marines in choppers barreling down into villages, all in defense of a corrupt regime, a war irreconcilable with our values, etc., etc.—it was a long letter, about four pages in ballpoint on lined yellow paper, and I did not show up to board the bus for boot camp on that Tuesday. I expected an FBI guy in a shiny gray suit and aviator shades to knock at my door with a warrant for my arrest.

The day I was ordered to report, I went to visit my Uncle Don and Aunt Elsie, who still were fond of me though I’d left the Brethren. My sweet-tempered aunt, who kept her girlish enthusiasm all of her life, and my plain-spoken uncle, who was bigger than anyone else and also more boyish and loved games and sports. We sat on their porch and talked about old times. I recalled the tremendous line drive he hit in a softball game at the 1956 Grace & Truth Bible Conference at Lake Minnetonka, Married Men vs. Single. It was in the middle innings, the score close, the game in the balance, I was playing third base for the Single Men, and he came up to bat and took a big cut at an inside pitch and hit a scorcher down the third-base line that had double written all over it. It bounced just inside the line and took off from the topspin, and I stabbed the glove to my right, backhanded the ball, planted my right foot, saw Uncle Don steaming toward first, and threw him out by a stride. I told him that this play was a highlight of my entire life. He said: “The reason you remember that play so well is that it was the only time you ever threw anyone out from third base.”

I kept expecting the knock right up to when I started A Prairie Home Companion in 1974 and so I never used my name on the air lest I wind up at Sandstone prison, and the knock on the door never came. Probably it was a bureaucratic glitch, papers misplaced, the discrepancy of the two names, Gary had been ordered to report, Garrison wrote the letter saying no, though I liked to imagine a savior at the draft board, a clerk who was moved by my letter and at great risk to herself stuck my file in the Inactive drawer. Being a draft dodger makes Memorial Day more meaningful to me. The Light Brigade rode into the valley of death on the orders of an arrogant fool, and men have been riding off to death in behalf of arrogant fools ever since. Vietnam was a lost cause, and anyway it didn’t matter to the security of the United States. Saigon fell and now cruise ships stop at Ho Chi Minh City and life goes on except for the dead. They died for their own sense of honor and nothing more. You walk along the Vietnam Memorial wall and you know that many of those honored dead were dissenters but went anyway. I hope the man who was called in my place got assigned to the Army Post Office in New York City, like my dad, and spent two years in the city and developed a taste for Japanese cuisine and Broadway musicals and returned, safe and sound, to Minneapolis. I wish I could meet him so I could honor him for his service.

I escaped the draft, and my ancestor Elder John Crandall escaped the Puritans of Massachusetts, who drowned young girls accused of witchcraft. He was once arrested in Boston for preaching Christian charity toward the Algonquin people, and some men who were arrested with him that day were publicly whipped, one of them whipped to death, but Elder John got to Rhode Island to join Roger Williams and the Baptists and founded the town of Westerly. I don’t know if he’d want me as a descendant but I’m proud to have him, and the fact that our connection also connects me to Katharine Hepburn and Lucille Ball is no problem whatsoever. But in his place, I wouldn’t have preached to men who were holding whips, I would’ve bit my tongue and headed west and found a nice Quaker settlement somewhere.

In 1776, a number of Crandalls loyal to the Crown fled to Canada to escape the Revolution. They didn’t find ease and comfort up there, and the nineteenth century was as grim for them as for everyone else. Aunt Ruth had a little piece of hand stitching:

Susanne Crandall is my name & Canada is my nation.

Amherst is my home & Christ is my salvation.

I am a girl of ten years old. When I am lying dead and cold

& all my bones are rotten,

If this you see, remember me. When I am quite forgotten. 1841

A girl of ten meditating on death and ignominy, sewing a little monument for herself—and I know nothing about her except that she had the same morbid streak I had at that age.

I know more about my distant ancestor Prudence Crandall, who opened a school for young women in Canterbury, Connecticut, in 1831. When several young women of color applied for admission, Prudence accepted them, whereupon the town turned against her. She was jailed, a mob attacked the school and broke the windows, and Prudence closed up shop and lit out for Illinois and then Kansas Territory and took up the cause of women’s suffrage. She did not live to see it come to pass, but she knew what was right. Had it been my school, I would’ve asked the young women of color to wait while I formed a committee of educators to study the matter, solicit community input, and find a solution that everyone could live with. I also would’ve upped my property insurance.

My grandfather James, whose middle name was Crandall, left New Brunswick to rescue his sister Mary on the verge of widowhood and her three little children. Our relatives who took our family in during the war were cut from the same cloth. My brother Philip was a good father and grandfather, worthy of esteem. I am a hanger-on in this line of worthies, but I do hang on.

Years later, I was hung out to dry for a mutual email flirtation and my career came to a screeching halt, which I felt was unjust, and then I came to believe it was justice for my cowardice of 1976 when I ended the marriage to Mary. Justice deferred, and all the more painful for it.

We had a quiet marriage that became silent and unbearable. I’m a person who maneuvers out of difficult situations by subterfuge—I evaded the Darwins, I skipped out on swim class and then persuaded my mother I could swim, I slipped away from the Brethren without confrontation or explanation. And I broke up with Mary without ever facing her and saying why. I needed to depart swiftly in silence by the cowardly device of a love affair with someone else. I have revisited those scenes many times over the years. How a gentle, evasive man, aware he is doing a dishonest thing, will hurry up and try to dismiss it from his mind. I know that man and I could find excuses for his behavior—I could argue that self-righteousness does not teach ethics, that the invisible middle child learns how to get away with deceit—but it doesn’t alleviate the damage I caused. I could argue that I was single-minded in my vocation and cut corners on honesty. I could argue that humor is itself an act of evasion. Give me five minutes, I can come up with other explanations. But really, it’s cowardice.

My wife, Mary, had stood by me through hard times when I worked eighteen-hour days and we were isolated in a farmhouse far from her people, and in 1976 I left her behind, simply walked away. Her mother, Marjorie, and I reconciled ten years later, but I failed to make amends with Mary and that lies heavy on my conscience. The inability to forgive and to reconcile and resume decent friendly relations with people you care about whom you broke away from. This is a heavy weight forty years later.

Soon after I left her, she found her vocation as a social worker, advocating for the elderly and impoverished in their complicated dealings with weary bureaucrats. Where the clients were sheepish and confused, she was forceful and direct on their behalf and, if necessary, spoke with faintly concealed cold fury. She’d had a habit of timidity with me, but for clients in desperate circumstances, she looked authority in the eye and demanded attention and mercy. We saw little of each other except at funerals, and at our son Jason’s graduation we sat together. The sight of her made me forlorn. A man would like his former wife to remarry and be happy with someone else, but that didn’t happen.

Over the years, I heard stories of her good work defending hopeless cases, and every year around her birthday, March 8, I thought of calling her and wishing her well but didn’t, not sure she wanted to hear from me. She died the Friday before Palm Sunday, 1998, in Fairview Hospital in Minneapolis, of a massive infection after a hip replacement. Jason had spent days at the hospital, talking to her though she was in a coma, and spent the last night at the hospital, holding her hand, talking. She was 53. I had sent her gifts of money over the years but I should’ve asked for her forgiveness.

Her death hit me like a hammer. It was the Friday before our annual Talent Show at Town Hall in New York. People said it was a good show, but people always say that. I flew back to Minnesota and helped Jason clean out his mother’s apartment. A grim afternoon. So many mementos of our married life. A photograph of the white frame cabin where we’d met when she was nineteen. At her funeral, I sat in the back row next to Judy Larson and I wept a bucket of useless tears, thinking of that girl’s wistfulness, longing for a life, lying on a dock at the lake in northern Minnesota or sitting at a piano in a practice room in Scott Hall, playing the Bach French Suite No. 6. We longed together, the fragile man and the fearful woman, he waiting for her to affirm her love, she mistaking his silence for anger, when all either had to do was to reach over and embrace the other. The music at her funeral was a Gillian Welch song:

There’s a mile of blacktop

Where the road begins,

It takes a time or two to recognize.

Growing at the roadside,

Scattered by the wind,

Are everybody’s unsaid sad goodbyes.

But there’s only one and only

Who could go and leave me lonely.

Tears poured out of me, at those words “only one who could go and leave me lonely.” I never cry at funerals, but I’d never attended the funeral of one whom I had so badly disappointed. The funeral ended, I edged through the crowd, people reached over to pat my shoulder, but there was no comfort, no words, and there still are not.

I disappointed several women badly. I was too restless to be a good father or a true friend. I found it terribly hard to set aside hard feelings and make peace. I’m not a good person, but I did a radio show for forty years that attracted a great many good people—teachers, social workers, nurses, musicians, skilled workers—and I did my best to amuse them for a couple hours. My own life was tangled and ragged, but when I walk down the street, sometimes a person sees me and smiles, remembering a show I did, and that counts for something.

By all reasonable standards, I was rather unemployable in this world, which turned out to be an advantage. The smart guys went off to become serfs in tall buildings, and I, at the lower end of mediocre, was well-positioned to be wildly lucky. As my friend Sydney Goldstein said, “That you could make work for yourself that suits you and has ended up giving you and other people a lot of pleasure—what more could you ask for?” She lived in San Francisco, ran City Arts & Lectures, which she’d invented, was smart and elegant and loyal, and every year she invited me to come out and do a show in her theater on Nob Hill and enjoy the trolleys rumbling along Market Street, the Mediterranean buildings, the river of fog in the Golden Gate, and the beautiful faces of young people, with their Asian eyes, Hispanic cheekbones, Creole skin. One friend as good as Sydney is enough, and I had her plus Bill Kling, and my artist friend Joe O’Connell, and my old J-school professor Bob Lindsay with the dent in his head. Bob was a Marine, sparing with praise, but when he said, “Last week’s show was pretty damn good,” to me, it was the Peabody Award. He sent the note on Sunday and I read it on Monday, and it was all the encouragement I needed.