Jesus.H@Christ.org
It was a thought that had come and gone as internet became more common.
“I don’t need a middle-man,” Mike had said.
The follow-up call between Banting and Mike, his school wrestling buddy and team captain, came the following spring. The motive was Susan, their school friend, who had led a secretive, mysterious and for the most part unknown life since then, that had come to light only after her death the previous autumn.
They had both known her and her family well, although on different levels of intimacy.
Another discovery, as Banting frantically searched for clues to unanswered questions among friends and acquaintances from their nearly forgotten home town, was a second death in their adolescent cohort.
It was not random association, but rather close.
Susan’s sister had dated the older brother of the most recently lost classmate. The end of that romance just after college, Banting inferred, had demonstrated to the younger sister Susan, that a longstanding early relationship could end, but that was not terminal for the marriage prospects of a young woman.
The older sister had been abandoned by the middle of three brothers after a lingering school romance through and after college, but she, Betsy, recovered and had married well within two months.
Susan had had no trouble morphing from a beloved to a haughty and superior attitude almost instantly while Banting, as a young man, was chagrined and struggled with making his way in the world, as if she were the only one.
The facts of her own surprising choices and life were not apparent to Banting at least, until fifty years later.
The awkward fact was, just past her mid-twenties she had broken someone else’s two-decade first marriage of a man eighteen years her senior, old enough to be her father. That fact had gone from a shock, to provocative, to a more nuanced understanding of a woman he had been mistaken about knowing well as a young woman.
It had surprised him that as he learned more from third parties, she had two sides, a public and a private persona that was unexpected.
Why this was such a breathless and inexplicable fact, was in part due to her penchant for secrecy. It was the sort of soap-opera, somewhat trashy thing that people among his school cohort just did not do, especially her.
But Banting knew plenty about her, behind her prim and correct facade, what she could be like in private. That unexpected and, for the most part, hidden side of her personality combined with her secrecy manifested as two diametrically opposite conclusions about her actual identity. The revelations came as a surprise even for her older sister Betsy, appointed as executrix of Susan’s estate.
Betsy didn’t know her as he knew her.
* * *
By cell phone the two former wrestlers chatted philosophically and without constraints as old members of the same, long past, but highly successful athletic school team. They had sweated out the low points and high points of several winter seasons while rising into manhood in something beyond simple acquaintanceship.
Perhaps it was acceptance devoid of personal judgment that begins in adolescence and persists: some might call it camaraderie, but the actual word wasn’t important. A winning competitor instantly recognizes and respects it in another teammate. It is lasting and foundational.
It was singular how the discipline and struggle of school athletics, and the mentorship of a stern coach, had a life-long impact on character.
“Remember Coach Putt LeMott talking about Life Sports, the things we could do even years after finishing our school athletics?” suggested Banting.
“I have a few friends our age. We still get together for Pickleball...” Mike countered.
“Oh: you’re one of those?” Banting teased.
“Yeah, there was a friend when we were still living in New Jersey. We met socially but he was a tennis player and a little superior about pickleball. He knew Danny, Chris’ brother. And the eldest brother Tom, he graduated in the same school class as my brother John.”
“GFHS ‘64?”
“Yes, that’s right. And Yale after that, but I don’t know much about Danny.”
Banting held his breath a moment and didn’t speak. John, Mike’s big brother had died in Tucson in the 1970s in a head-on car accident. Mike, as the sole survivor, had traveled to Tucson from the East Coast and in the process, had visited Susan and her husband who also lived in Tucson at the time. No, Mike would let it go unspoken...
There was the topic of health, the diseases overcome, the titanium joints replaced, those among them still battling the sudden arrival of old age. And, whether replacement joints were better in zirconium for those with allergies to nickel.
“Last week being Easter,” Banting continued, “...with all the talk of Resurrection and Rebirth, naturally I thought about Sue. When we were young, we occasionally talked about the future, and who would die first...”
It was somewhat morbid, he later realized, but also knew it was what young lovers discussed, engrossed in each other’s bodies, soul and mind, thinking they were forever, although he was vaguely aware the scene might have been pilfered from Romeo and Juliet...
They had been talking of mutual friends.
“How did you hear about Chris Rauschen’s death?” Mike asked.
“It was about Sue. The guy she married...”
“As soon as I got off the phone with you last time, in October was it?” Mike continued, “I did some research about her husband, James Wiltig. He was local to Jackson Falls. A married man: with children. He was a Junior himself, and named a son The Third.”
“Five children,” Banting commented. “One son owns a seafood restaurant in Jackson Falls... Susan’s husband was a good man, although his adult children never accepted her...”
What Banting did not verbalize was that despite Wiltig’s business interests as a car salesman, a minor semi-pro football player and a former Marine NCO, he seemed a bit beneath her socially and intellectually. In the end, however, the man who had bested Banting, had been with Sue for forty-five years as husband, and had died as her life mate. No matter his own disappointment, a second marriage does not last that long without a deep and enduring connection between them.
Somehow, on further consideration and putting aside the urge to judge a woman he was still angry with, he had to concede that the two of them had brought to their marriage what the other needed. A close but recent friend of Sue’s who had seen to her personal details after her funeral, had asked Banting if she had ever mentioned Jesper.
The new woman friend was Danish and they shared a family name discovered through mutual obsession with genealogy: turned out they were distant cousins.
Or, the Dane asked him, had Sue mentioned an unnamed Indian jewelry maker in Tucson who had given her quite a bit of turquoise.
Banting slowly came to realize what and who that jeweler and Jesper must have been. Ailing and unaware old man, still lusty younger wife...
His focus returned to the cell phone conversation as he paced back and forth in front of a ruined section of vineyard fence he ought to have repaired that morning.
“I didn’t know that,” replied Mike.
“I keep journals: always have. After Sue died, I returned to old writing about our own difficult time just after college. She was ready to marry, but I didn’t ask. When I was ready, she had moved on. Did she ever date Philing?”
For an instant, he wanted to summarize the various points of contact between Philing and his Susan. She had been seeing Philing at the same time she was professing her interest in him, although she never admitted it.
“I don’t think so: they never dated seriously...he never talks about her.”
“Yeah, well, Philing talked anonymously in his book about Sue, and Patti, and Meryl and Sue and that he could have married either one. You know as well as I do who these girls were...don’t remember the title of Philing’s book but I’ll send you the quote...”
“I don’t remember that: I read the book. That time at Eddie’s funeral, Philing came down from up north. He’s been having a rough time. Stomach surgically removed. I don’t think he had been out of the house until then...” continued Mike.
Banting hated Philing for being a phony.
Had Philing started Sue down the road to yoga and meditation, a belief that would eventually lead to her death?
She had apparently believed that meditation and yoga were adequate to treat her cardiac a-fib.
But there was another more personal issue with her, that he came to believe turned her toward marriage counseling as a profession, as well as mysticism to correct a personal physical inability in fulfillment.
* * *
“Mike, I returned to my journals and old letters from that period of life.
“You asked how I came across Chris’ death.
“Sue’s sister Betsy had just broken up with Danny, Chris’ older brother. Danny was the middle one, Tom the eldest. The summer after graduation. Within two months, she’d found another prospect and was married by December.
“Chris had a difficult time with two older, higher achieving brothers,” Mike commented. Banting had not known that.
“I was getting the cold shoulder from Sue at that time: my theory was, Betsy’s success at finding another boyfriend after Danny dropped her, and getting married, offered an example to Sue that she didn’t need me either, that there would always be another one coming along...
“Anyway, last December I tried to track down Chris to ask him about Danny and Betsy just for the record. I had seen Tom’s name online and Tom provided me with an email address for Chris, but cautioned that Chris had just left for a Viking Cruise vacation.
“So, it did not occur to me anything was amiss, that Chris would get back to me by email in due course.
“Well, Tom emailed me last week with the news that he and Danny had been appointed by the probate court as Chris’ executors. Chris had a stroke on Christmas Eve ‘22 and was hospitalized in Germany. Tom said he died on January 16th earlier this year, but it was just now that Tom had been authorized to follow up on Chris’ unanswered emails...
* * *
“I grew up Catholic but we don’t go to Church now...” Mike offered.
“I was away from it for forty years myself, but about ten years ago, while taking down a vineyard trellis on the Church property, I met a few of the congregation and liked them...,” replied Banting.
Mike’s tone suggested he still believed in God, but like Banting, the established church bureaucracy always got in the way. Banting said further, that with the changes in social discourse lately, a more traditional framework should be supported. For him, Church was a traditional American institution, and one on which American society and national character was founded.
“The children these days are brought up with no sense of morals,” Banting stated with no trace of apology for his return to religion. “If there is one duty the Church performed as we were growing up, it was providing the young with a moral framework by which to judge right from wrong...”
“I don’t need a middle man,” Mike repeated.
“By God, that’s it,” thought Banting. He didn’t need an established liturgy and a choirmaster to depose him of his own personal articles of faith.
Faith was above and beyond codified worship, although Banting had highest respect for the resounding sentiments and declarations of the Book of Common Prayer (1928). It was one of three foundational masterpieces of English as a language along with the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible.
“So, yeah, with Sue we had talked about dying when we were sixteen and seventeen: the agreement was, whoever died first would find a way to get a message back across the great divide.”
Mike found this amusing: someone checking emails and finding one unexpected return address.
Jesus.H@Christ.org, popped into Banting’s mind, but he kept it to himself. Was it sacrilege to entertain the notion of some heavenly server through which one could connect with dead lovers to see how it was going on the other side? Not, what would Jesus say, but what would he write...? It bordered on insanity, but after all, didn’t the internet go everywhere?
“No, I don’t think her life after her death is very likely,” said Banting with a trace of sadness over the pretty lie. “However, I have been looking for it...”
“There was one instance that made me wonder, however...,” Banting concluded.
* * *
Banting’s theology was evolving.
If literal immortality only existed in the hearts and minds of those who loved a person and those future descendants who occasionally gave it a thought, then could it be that if given free reign, or perhaps hypnosis, the beloved departed might speak from and through one’s own subconscious?
There were dreams when he was visited by his mother and he had wrapped his arms around her tiny frame, telling her and himself that she was long gone and this couldn’t be happening, that it was delusion or projection or some memory trace for some reason bypassing the threshold between consciousness and memory...but he loved her anyway no matter what it was.
He would wake up crying.
* * *