SOME FAMILIES JUST keep on growing in wealth and power, as if each successive generation is genetically driven to outdo the previous ones. Other families begin well, gather momentum, seem destined for greatness, only suddenly and inexplicably to lose their vitality and sink back into mediocrity.
Individuals are subject to the same unpredictable laws of rise and fall.
In the beginning, the story lines of individuals are almost always epic in nature, beginning with the drama of birth. What could be more epic than that?
The epic of growing takes it from there. The sense of progress and overcoming challenges is a daily thing when the hero is a toddler. The hero walks. The hero talks. There is much applause and cheering from his parents to convince even the most modest toddler that he’s bound for some glorious destiny.
The oral tradition of recapitulating every deed the young hero performs is not lost on him. A day spent saying a few barely coherent words and taking a dozen or so stumbling steps on his own takes on the aura of heroic accomplishment. He hears his name mentioned over and over again. His illnesses are catastrophic. His recoveries, festivals of rejoicing.
To the hero, to the toddler, to the child, he is not just a child. He is made to feel like a redeemer come to rescue the kingdom of the household from certain destruction. Just by being born, he has accomplished much and is made to feel like the child of whom it was said, “And unto us a child is born.”
The epic continues. The epic of the young body growing. The mind expanding. The metamorphosis of both.
Somewhere along the way, he develops his own internal narrator, the I of the hero, the storyteller who speaks in his name. The narration of this personal story line almost always favors the epic genre as the only one suitable for the job.
The I of the hero proclaims, “I am,” “I like,” “I don’t like.”
Certain epic phrases are used to connect disparate episodes into a coherent story line. Phrases such as “And then I …” or “And after that I …”
The epic of puberty. The epic of first love. Of sexual initiation.
Somewhere along the way, the cheering that attended his every act tapers off.
But that’s all right.
The epic of leaving home picks up the story line just in time and takes it to a new and higher level. Oh, the epic of leaving home. What could be more epic than going off to college in a car of one’s own with the hero at the wheel, captain, navigator, and crew all in one. The car radio is playing, but the real music the hero hears is the music of the first-person narrator, the I inside his mind, the voice that says, “And then I …” or “After that I …”
There is a sense of progress again as the hero works his way up through the ranks from freshman to sophomore and so on. He is asked to join a Greek fraternity. Not the undisputed number one fraternity he wanted to join, but it’s one that’s right up there with the rest. He is disappointed, to be sure, but he thinks of his disappointment as a learning experience and his accommodation to reality as something that sharpens his skills of survival. In no time at all, his disappointment is transformed into the “best thing that could have happened to me.”
“It taught me that I …”
“After that I never again …”
The epic of going home for the holidays.
How small the kingdom of the household now seems to him. Claustrophobic, almost. How much taller he is than his father. He takes to draping his arm around his father’s narrow shoulders and assuming classical poses in doing so.
The growing distance between the hero and his parents only confirms to him that he is growing himself, branching out, heading forth, and that they’re not.
But they are still, after all, his parents. He still loves them and is moved profoundly by his capacity to love them.
And then he’s off again, back to the campus.
Car radio playing.
But the song that’s being sung is a song of himself.
“And then I …”
He has no idea where his story line is going, but what epic hero ever did? Destiny awaits.
The girl he falls in love with on the campus, madly in love, from the number one Greek sorority, is unfortunately in love with someone else and nothing the hero does seems to convince her that she’s in love with an out-and-out barbarian. An animal. A dumb jock. A human genital. The hero suffers much over this unrequited love, but not for long, because he has developed a mechanism for dealing with such episodes. In no time it becomes “the best thing that could have happened to me.”
There are not only many fish in the sea but there are many seas as well, and so he’s off again on yet another voyage.
Away from that provincial Midwest campus to the city of the rising sun. New York City. Grad school. The first apartment of his very own. What could be more epic than that?
New York City, he discovers, is full of epic heroes like himself. Their numbers suggest a swollen army of heroes gathering there for some epic campaign against the established order.
There is a sense of progress again, but not as exhilarating as before. From master’s degree to PhD dissertation in three years. He becomes a doctor without a practice. In the meantime he has fallen in love with a girl who has also fallen in love with him. He is thrilled by both aspects of this love affair, but more so by the latter than the former.
For reasons that he can’t quite explain, his story line starts to lose its epic quality. There is a sense that he has arrived somewhere without having reached any destination in particular. The comfort of arrival, however, feels pleasant. He thinks of it as temporary. Just a little pause before he sails away again in pursuit of his destiny.
The epic story line of his life remains in his mind. It’s vivid for a while. Then it starts to fade. First from reality and then from memory.
The first-person narrator within him, the I within him, begins to sound like the I of other people he knows, as if his I were interchangeable with theirs.
He comes to terms with this. He discovers that he has a genuine talent for coming to terms with things. He takes to drink, and in an unconscious homage to his lost story line he becomes an epic drunk. His talent for coming to terms with things allows him to come to terms with being a drunk. Once again, he has a sense of progress as he succeeds in coming to terms with an ever vaster array of things in his life. Without much fanfare, his story line goes from the epic genre to the tragic and from the tragic to the tragicomic, until it finally settles down to farce.
Whatever journey he had been on is over. There is no sense of direction or motion in his life anymore. Only the years roll on, like waves washing away the I’m-still-young phase, the I’m-not-yet-old phase, bringing on middle age.
He comes to terms with it all.
And just when he has accepted and accommodated himself to both the brevity and the banality of his life, just then (let’s suppose) something happens.
A story suddenly presents itself to him.
The story is perfection itself. It has a beginning and a middle and a glorious happy ending, which promises (as he sees it) to be an even more glorious beginning of the rest of his life.
When this happens to a man in midlife, it’s like falling madly in love for the first time. The passions aroused, actually, are even more profound. No young Romeo ever loved a Juliet with more abandon than a middle-aged man loves the story line of his one last grasp at salvation.
But when, for whatever reason, such a story line suffers a sudden and catastrophic conclusion, more than a story line is lost. All is lost.
There is no falling back upon the comfortable despair where one has lived before. Not now. There is no fall-back position this late in life.
This, more or less, was the situation in which Saul found himself after Pittsburgh.
Saul has survived. Billy and Leila, on the other hand, are dead. But their story, unbeknownst to Saul, unbeknownst to anyone at the moment, is just beginning.
These things happen.
They have happened in centuries and countries other than ours: the premature and catastrophic end of a life coincides with the birth of the story line of the deceased. In the old times (real old times), deaths gave rise to legends. In our times, the legends are called newspaper stories.
For the moment, whatever moment this may be, the story of Billy and Leila is confined to a modest newspaper article in the Pittsburgh Sun. It is the story of an ill-fated traffic accident, the death of an actress by the name of Leila Millar, and the preview of her movie, Prairie Schooner, that very night in a theater in Pittsburgh. The producer of the movie, Jay Cromwell, is quoted as calling the accident a real tragedy. In his opinion, Ms. Millar was poised to become a star, perhaps even a superstar, as all those who see her performance in this movie will agree. He hates comparisons, since all human beings are unique, but in his opinion Leila Millar had the talent and that ineffable something to become another Judy Holliday.
Billy’s name appears in the same article as someone who was also killed in the car.
It gives his full name and age and the fact that he was a sophomore at Harvard.
Saul is mentioned as the sole survivor who is currently in a coma and whose condition is described as serious. He is further mentioned as being Billy’s father and a well-known script doctor in Hollywood.
Not much is said about the couple in the other car, other than their names, ages, and the fact that the driver of the car was legally drunk at the time of the accident and failed to heed a stop sign.
And that, essentially, is that.
A modest story.
But such a modest beginning is in no way indicative of the eventual sweep that an initially tiny story can attain. Once a story becomes public, anything can happen to it.
It’s not just people living in Pittsburgh who read Pittsburgh newspapers. Some traveler from somewhere, pausing at the Pittsburgh International Airport to wait for a connecting flight, can easily pick up the local paper to while away the time. Who knows who he or she might be, or for whom he or she works or used to work? There, in the local paper, is the story of Leila and Billy and Saul. Maybe the name of one of them rings a bell. Or maybe all three names ring a bell. Maybe the reader doesn’t know any of them personally but knows someone who does.
There are public telephones everywhere at the airport. With one phone call, the story of Leila and Billy and Saul can go directly from the Pittsburgh International Airport to the desk of some adoption lawyer in New York or some other individual who has information not included in the story as written.
Public stories are different from private stories. Public stories, by their very nature, are not really stories but stories of stories, once or twice removed from the individuals in the story. And just as second or third generations of computers are deemed superior to the original prototypes, second-or third-generation stories are likewise deemed superior in every way to the original story of some private person who has become public.
And so, although both Billy and Leila are dead, the story of their story has just begun.