Brush with Greatness

by J.D. Scrimgeour

At the end of summer in 1982, my family drove me from our home in New Milford, Connecticut, a town of 20,000 in the southern Berkshires and helped me unload my meager belongings—a few bags of clothes—in Carman Hall, the freshman dorm at Columbia University. While I had been to the city a few times, living in the frenzy of Manhattan was an adjustment. One time that first year my family joined me in the city to watch a basketball game, and when they returned to their car, they discovered that someone had broken into it. The thieves had stolen a couple ratty sleeping bags and a few of my siblings’ high school textbooks. The following year, two students in Carman Hall found a rolled-up rug in a dumpster and carried it back to their room. When they unrolled it, they discovered a corpse inside, a man who had been shot twice.

It wasn’t just the grittiness of New York in the 1980s that left me disoriented; I had to adjust to being around so many people who had lived lives so different from what I had known. As someone who had attended public schools, I was fascinated by all my classmates who had attended private boarding schools, places I’d only read about in The Catcher in the Rye. And Columbia was cosmopolitan. I remember going for ice cream during orientation week with students from Italy and France, hearing languages and accents that were foreign to my ears.

Another adjustment was that there were so few women. My class, the class of 1986, was the last all-male class at Columbia, a fact that I’d hardly registered when I decided to attend. I knew that Barnard was just across the street, and I had assumed that the students all took the same classes. They didn’t. In order to meet the women from Barnard, I would go with friends to the campus pub where we’d drink pitchers of beer. At some point, I’d muster courage to saunter up to a stranger and ask her to dance. She usually said no, and I’d slink back to my table and pour another into my plastic cup. It seemed simply impossible to meet a woman. Even if a conversation were to begin amid the too-loud music, what was I supposed to say?

I was adrift, and even the routines that I developed were those of someone who was lonely: playing hours of pick-up basketball in Levien Gymnasium and watching David Letterman’s late-night show in the TV lounge at the end of our floor. I got a kick out of Letterman’s sardonic humor, his stupid pet tricks, and his “Brush with Greatness” segments, in which members of the studio audience shared comic stories about how they crossed paths with celebrities. Having a brush with greatness may have been one of the reasons I chose to attend Columbia. Being in New York held the possibility of seeing famous people, and, in fact, I walked past Letterman himself in Midtown one afternoon as he was filming on the street.

That first semester I’d take The Odyssey or Euripides’ plays out to the campus lawn and lie reading in the sun, hardly registering the words, dozing off more often than not. My classes all went well enough, except for the class in my declared major, Math. Before the semester started, I met with an advisor to help choose my classes. “Wouldn’t you like to take a class with a world-famous mathematician?” he asked, and so I decided to take the test to place into a theoretical calculus course taught by a professor named Lipman Bers. The test was like the SAT, and I did well enough to get in.

Lipman Bers was old, from eastern Europe, with a thick moustache and a thick accent. He had us buy a book with more equations than words. Unlike my math classes in high school, we never had to turn in homework. It wasn’t always clear what our homework was.

It was a small class, a dozen students in a musty room. Although a seminar table filled the space, we didn’t sit around it exactly. A blackboard ran along one side of the room, and Bers would lecture in front of it, so we would sit in two rows on either side of the table, facing the board. I sat in the back corner, the table in front of me. In the front center sat Daniel, the thirteen-year-old with a bowl cut of black hair and just visible fine dark hair above his lip, the beginnings of a mustache. Daniel was, I’d heard, the captain of the U.S. math team, whatever that meant. I don’t think he was enrolled at Columbia; he was just taking this one class.

It seemed like Daniel was the only person, besides Bers, who spoke in class. He’d raise a scrawny arm and ask a question that I didn’t understand. Bers’ eyes would light up. “That’s a very interesting question, Daniel,” he’d say, and the two of them would engage in a long dialogue while the rest of us—or maybe it was just me—sat in befuddlement. Eventually, I began doodling in my notebook, rehashing my stats from my senior year baseball season or reviewing possible starting line-ups for the Knicks. I passed that class with a gentleman’s C, dropped down to a more standard Calculus class the next semester, and dropped that after I bombed my first test. I wasn’t going to be a math major.

I’ve told the story of that math class many times. It seemed a story about discovering one’s limits, though, to be honest, it involved pumping my ego, too—I was good enough in math to place into that class, after all. And the audience always got a kick out of my embellished description of how lost most of us were while Daniel and Bers held their abstruse conversations.

But recently, while writing about this event, I began to wonder about Lipman Bers. He really was, of course, a world-famous mathematician. He was born in a Jewish family in Riga, Latvia, at the beginning of World War I, and his early life was colored by the political upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. He spent time in St. Petersburg and Berlin. While studying math at the University in Riga, he became a political activist who argued for human rights, an orator and columnist for an underground newspaper, defending democracy in the face of Latvia’s dictator. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but he escaped to Prague. He fled from Prague to Paris with his family, and then, just ahead of the Germans, he fled to the United States. Living as a refugee, he continued to work on mathematics. He eventually did math work assisting the allied war effort, and then went on to write many important papers in the field, known for their elegance and clarity.

He was admired by his students and fellow mathematicians, and a recent book, Lipman Bers: A Life in Mathematics, celebrates his achievements. Mathematician William Abikoff writes this about Bers:

Lipa possessed a joy of life and an optimism that is difficult to find at this time and that is sorely missed. Those of us who experienced it directly have felt an obligation to pass it on. That, in addition to the beauty of his own work, is Lipa’s enduring gift to us.

Bers had a way not just with numbers, but with words. I laughed aloud when I came across his line that “Mathematics is a collection of cheap tricks and dirty jokes,” though I don’t know enough about math to really understand it. Throughout his career, he also continued to advocate for human rights. Here’s Bers himself, speaking about human rights in 1984, when he was awarded an honorary degree from SUNY-Stonybrook:

By becoming a human rights activist ... you do take upon yourself certain difficult obligations. ... I believe that only a truly even-handed approach can lead to an honest, morally convincing, and effective human rights policy. A human rights activist who hates and fears communism must also care about the human rights of Latin American leftists. A human rights activist who sympathizes with the revolutionary movement in Latin America must also be concerned about human rights abuses in Cuba and Nicaragua. A devout Muslim must also care about human rights of the Bahai in Iran and of the small Jewish community in Syria, while a Jew devoted to Israel must also worry about the human rights of Palestinian Arabs. And we American citizens must be particularly sensitive to human rights violations for which our government is directly or indirectly responsible, as well as to the human rights violations that occur in our own country, as they do.

Bers retired from teaching at Columbia in 1982. The class I took with him may have been the last he ever taught.  

I wish I could claim that Bers and his vision, expressed so eloquently above, had an impact on me, but it’s only through the lens of time that I see more than myself in that room—those other students may have been getting a lot more from the class than I imagined. And, having learned a bit about him, I can better see Bers, a man brilliant and committed, see the spark between him and Daniel. What did I know?

It was my first semester, and I was a lost boy. I needed grounding myself to see others. I went on find circles of friends at Columbia, to find a girlfriend when I lived in Barnard dorms my sophomore year. Eventually, I no longer needed David Letterman’s late-night company. And my junior year, I started to put my own words down. I took classes with the poet Kenneth Koch and legendary literature professor Wallace Gray, early steps on the path to becoming a writer.

That same year, I took to the cold March nights to join students who blocked the doors to Hamilton Hall, a main classroom building, demanding that the University divest its financial holdings in South Africa and South African companies. Some of my friends scoffed at the protests, and their cynicism made me doubt my conviction, but, ultimately, I could do the math.

I was usually alone those nights, one of the crowd. Many of those around me were people who, I had been taught, did not look like me. I sat among them all and listened to the speeches, the music, the drumming.

I took in the world, and the world took me in.

Writing this essay, I became curious about Daniel. Perhaps discovering Bers’ words, his insistence on being aware of all others, made me wonder about Daniel and his life. I googled “Daniel, mathematician, born 1970,” and I discovered Daniel, a mathematician at an Ivy League university. I thought the thin face, something about the nose, looked familiar, and so I sent an email. Sure enough, it was him. He read the essay and was gracious and self-depreciating. He confirmed the bowl haircut; he didn’t recall the table. He said he had read some of Bers’ papers and built on his work. I hope that in my own way I’m building on Bers’ work as well.

J.D. Scrimgeour is the author of three books of poetry and two of nonfiction, including Themes for English B: A Professor's Education In & Out of Class, which won the AWP Award for Nonfiction. Recent essays have appeared in blackbird, Solstice, Sport Literate, and The Woven Tale Press.

Turkey on the Strip

by Susan Eve Haar

There are many appeals to Las Vegas aside from my brother—my youngest, at a California college, will not come east; we all have a taste for sleaze; a few of us like to gamble; and we have a super discount suite in the best new hotel in town, courtesy of my kids’ pal Dan, a dropout from the Cornell School of Hotel Management. The suite is a triumph, glittery and luxurious, and the price is certainly right.

Everything is spanking new. The side-tables are classics designed by Eames. They look like giant chess pieces, flat-topped pawns or de-crenellated castles. The muted greens of rug and fabric suggest an oasis suspended over the strip that unspools outside the gigantic living room window. There’s a bar lined with modern Danish glassware and sparkling light fixtures, suspended circles hung with cut-crystal balls that refract and reflect the light. Bits of rainbow ready for the Cinderella’s ball. I desire them. I feel the itch to pilfer. I stand on a chair and reach up, de-looping one of the crystal drops that cluster on the fixture, attached only by a delicate wire. It’s easy, really. Like so many illicit acts, I slide right into it. Holding the crystal in my palm, I feel the weight of it. I admire its many facets and its secretive translucence that pretends to show all but refracts into abstraction. Listen, it is a beautiful object. I hop down and carry it into the next room to show my kids, who are lolling on majestic beds.

“Look,” I say, holding it out for inspection. It is intrinsically beautiful in its solitary state, smooth and rounded, and they admire it, passing it between them. I wonder aloud if it would be possible to pluck just one from every fixture in the suite and make a chandelier for our new house. My sons are delighted.

I try to limit the number of criminal acts I enact before my children. And really, with the exception of the one or two enacted with a vengeful mind, I believe I had God on my side in the commission of each and every one. Perhaps this is not altogether accurate, but it is the story I tell myself, and here is the story I will tell you:

It was a Thursday afternoon in early autumn and branches started crashing outside. There was a crane operator, swinging loads of drywall into the adjacent building, lopping off tree branches. The trees that hung like naiads over Charles Street, that we treasured—our green neighbors. Calls to the company number on the side of the crane reached a machine, as did a call to NYU construction (the crane was working on their job). I even ran to the precinct two blocks away to ask for help. All to no avail and, desperate, I turned to self-help.

My throwing arm is lacking, so I enlisted my agile boys, five and seven. They stood at the top of our stoop, pumped with delight, and pitched old tomatoes and fruit at the windshield of the crane. A soft pear spattered on the windshield, juice dripping down, and they whooped and hooted victory. I was standing at the top of my stoop. The driver was sitting in the cab of the crane; I could see him pretty clearly. We’d already had some pretty harsh words, my manner eroded by his complete disinterest in the damage he was doing. Now he looked interested. A half-rotten banana hit the windshield. He put the crane in park. I kind of thought I had the measure of the guy, an angry man with a big machine. Yet I have to say I was surprised when he opened the door of the crane, hopped down, and started walking fast toward our house.

“Go!” I pushed the boys behind me. They streaked upstairs, yelling, “World war three!” as the driver charged toward me. I stood my ground, albeit briefly.

“You’re trespassing,” I shouted. And as he paused, weighing his options, I slammed the door shut.

There have been other incidents, I won’t deny it. One doesn’t want to model behavior that is too compliant with society’s requirements. It behooves you to leave a little dirt in the vegetables so your kids develop immunities. But this is not the time for a confession of my crimes; it is only to say that my children have borne witness to my bad acts—indeed, they have even been my accomplices.

Now they are twenty and twenty-two. My younger son stands on the bed; stretching up on toes, he balances and deftly removes a crystal from the light fixture. He sits down on the bed cross-legged, weighing it in his hand, absorbed. I know how good it feels, dense and glittering as a promise.

But is it right to really take it? All right, steal it. Them. By now there are three of them glittering quietly. There is, we reflect, the possibility that the hotel expects to replace them; it’s just built into the room price. There might be a vault clogged with crystals waiting their turn to hang in splendor. We consider the possibility that the suite was designed with the expectation of heavy drinking and orgies, so some damage is to be expected. We sit together and ponder. What would Aquinas say? But, in the end, it looks a lot like thieving, and with regret we pull over chairs and hang them back. I do know the difference between right and wrong sometimes, though it is obscured by experience. And there is something about Las Vegas that invites the illegal. And it’s not just the hookers who solicit both my sons, though one of them looks like he’s barely out of high school.

          Criminality must run in the family, I reflect later. Or at least a deep conviction that the rules don’t apply. We are in my brother’s club having Thanksgiving dinner. He lives in a gated community in Henderson. They take their security and their landscaping seriously. And there is a clubhouse, more for convenience than conviviality. Membership is obligatory, as is a monthly minimum charged. So, begrudgingly, my brother eats there. In fact, he reports to us he has recently escaped the children’s section, to which he was relegated after putting a plastic worm into a salad and then pointing it out to the horrified server. 

Today they have given us a large, round table. Around us the room is thronged with families of some stripe or another. The ladies have all had their hair colored, blown out, and shellacked with hairspray; the men wear blue blazers with gold buttons. We are all on seconds. My brother’s shaggy toupee is a little askew; it looks like a convivial, napping animal. My cousin has slowed down a little, but he’s talking to my older son about puts and calls or some such. He is a money guy, a millionaire and a miser. Two adolescent girls, leggy and sweet-faced, scoot around our table on the way to the buffet. They are wearing skirts so short you fear for them when they bend over, heaping sweet potatoes onto their plates. The view is one of the other glories of Thanksgiving, I suppose, along with roast beef dripping with blood and fat, trays of iced shrimp and oysters, and the inevitable turkey.

“Shrimp!” my brother declares. They are definitely the most expensive of the foods offered on a per-ounce basis, and that is a calculation he has done.

“You guys are wimps,” he suggests to my boys; they have faltered after second servings. He’s already on his feet, empty plate in hand. He hands it to a passing server and heads for the buffet unhindered. He’s a big guy, my brother; bulky, not fat. Thick. He kind of lumbers but that’s more an attitude than a physical necessity. I sit and ruminate, watching my kids joking, and contemplate another run at the salad. Maybe a few more hearts of palm. My brother returns, the new plate piled with oysters and shrimp.

“Do you like oysters?” I ask, surprised.

“Not particularly. Did you bring plastic bags?”

“No.”

“Could have fit a lot.” He gestures at the purse slung over my chair.

“What d’you do with them? Feed them to the cats?”

“Eat them eventually.”

“I can take cookies,” I counter. “I can wrap them in napkins.” And then I get a sudden memory of my mother slipping dinner rolls into her purse wrapped in a cloth napkin. Now that was theft. No one ever ate them that I remember, but they were always there, just in case.

What is it to steal, what is it to earn? Have we earned, in any way, the bounty that we possess in this moment of our fleeting lives? Of my fleeting life, this momentary bounty. This is how the meal began:

Jed, my youngest, took his brother’s hand and my brother’s hand—I could see his hesitation, but he let Jed take his paw in his smaller hand. And then he said, “Let’s all say what we are thankful for.” It’s his tradition, not mine, but I wait my turn, listening. There is such a truthfulness and sweetness to what they say, these children of mine. I listen and then I say it—well, most of it, what I am grateful for: my children, my freedom, my health, and great good luck. My brother listens; he doesn’t speak but he holds Jed’s hand and mine. It’s then I realize that I am not a thief after all. I may feel unworthy or undeserving, but there is no way to steal the happiness I feel. It is simply a gift.

Susan Eve Haar is a lawyer and playwright living in New York City. A member of The Actor’s Studio, Ensemble Studio Theater and H.B. Playwright’s Unit, she explores, among other topics, the intersection of our neural and lived experience. Her work has been produced at a variety of venues including Primary Stages, The Women’s Project, 13th Street Rep, HERE, Chester Theater, Manhattan Rep and The Looking Glass Theater and published by Broadway Publishing and Smith and Krauss.

Down the Aisle with Henry James

by Renée Tursi

In his 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James put his heroine Isabel Archer’s marriage at the story’s midpoint. Before then, nuptials had always dwelt at a tale's end. Following Isabel’s ill-considered decision to wed the pernicious Gilbert Osmond, James kept the cameras rolling, giving his readers unnerving access to a very unhappy ever-after.

Having recently entered the marriage plot for the first time in my early fifties, I am thrown off by the return of the fairytale arc in my life. My ever-after, a copiously joyful one so far, has fallen a considerable distance from Isabel’s youthful start of the tale, and presumably well past the middle. Crunching the numbers, I see I could conceivably escape any marital strife just by where my husband and I fall in the actuarial tables. “Before the charm wears off, we’ll be dead” was how the last boyfriend had spun our dating circumstance. He missed the mark for that romance. But he may be spot on about my marriage.

            Yet, while it turned out not to be too late for me to be married, I wonder if it might be too late for me to feel married.

            Mrs. Osmond strikes me as someone who, to James’s astute and life-long unmarried observer’s mind, would have a particular quality that differed from a woman who wed for the first time later in life. It goes deeper than her regret at having married the wrong man—and beyond the fact that, as James notes, “It may seem to the reader that Mrs. Osmond had grown of a sudden strangely cynical.”

            I cannot name the quality, nor would I presume to try. And that’s my dilemma.

Of course I know that marriage in this country today, at least on paper, allows for both partners to remain fully realized individuals. When I talk about feeling married, what I’m referring to is what otherwise strongly autonomous women, ones who had wed at an “expected” age, will often say to me. That long after becoming single again, they still carry a married orientation. They confess to entering rooms as an “I” with ever-so-slight a hesitation, an inner pause registering only on their own finely tuned gauge.

Being unmarried turned out to be nowhere near the “dreadful existence” my 16-year-old self, despite its nonconformist spirit, had imagined such a life. Freedom has been mine in every sense: I made my way through graduate school to an academic career. I went from my own apartment to buying my own house. I had long-term relationships, albeit always fraught ones. I never cooked. And the only diapers I changed were those of my sisters’ children. When one of my nieces was asked once what her aunt does for a living, she replied: “She gives me books.”

But I wasn’t content. I wanted a forever partnership.

That said, the dating advice to “get out there” doing the things you love so as to meet like-minded people landed on my doorstep with a thud. When what one loves most is to curl up at home with Henry James, potential mates tend to remain fictional. 

Plot lines, however, do not. Those tragic miscommunications, tortured ruminations, excruciating choices, and unrelenting disappointments James visits upon his characters were the very storylines I seemed fated to pursue. His heroines and I took on narcissists like lint. 

            After too many decades and very little effort from me, my future husband, in a stroke of impossible irony, just showed up at my door and rang the bell. 

            The day before, I had put down my book and gone for coffee at my neighbor’s, whom he was visiting. He was magnificent. His three children, too. Within a year, he and I wed, surrounded by the people we love and a Vermont downpour.

            When friends ask me “did the marriage take?”, the answer is easy. Happy sped by in a blur. Now I’m in some sort of incandescent bliss. My husband is loving, kind, brilliant, funny, patient, generous, charming, tall, and handsome. Really. When someone talks to him in front of me, I’m so relieved; it’s proof I’ve not made him up.

Astonished to have found each other “at this point in our lives,” we feel so temperamentally enmeshed that he and I are as much a “we” as I imagine two beings can be. As my stepson watches his father and me eat breakfast with our oatmeal bowls touching, he just shakes his head.

But the first time I was asked whether I was planning to change my name to my husband’s, I admitted the thought hadn’t occurred to me. Honestly, at my age, the question felt even a bit embarrassing. Like my trying to pull off a navel piercing. And now when I’m asked what being married feels like, the truth is, beyond my absolute happiness, I don’t know. I think I may have a permanently unmarried state of mind.

            So here’s what I tell people: I feel like a single person who’s married.

            Everything and nothing prepared me for this impasse. During the feminist-turbulent years of my childhood, the fact that my mother had forfeited a dance career because my father deemed it unfitting for a university faculty wife to be seen in a leotard made no small impression on me.

            “Never count solely on a man” she told my sisters and me within earshot of the spouse upon whom she could count for everything, except recognition as a sound decision-maker.

            She loved my father and she loved us. But it was clear that her life had left her in service. I came away with few convincing arguments for becoming a wife and having children myself. Virginia Woolf said what we all know: “we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

            My mother spent the last dozen years of her life a widow. As much as she changed remarkably during that period—traveling, building a house, and tramping the Vermont woods with chainsaw in hand—she would never have been mistaken for a life-long unmarried woman. Mistaken for me. Something about the tilt of her head, as though still listening to my father’s voice.

            She would also never come to like James. A perceptive reader, she found the way he loitered about in a discontented mind unsettling.

            In high school, no one had asked me to the prom; the day after, however, a boy came up to me to say that he had thought about asking me. This utterance, astounding for its Jamesian conflux of misdirection, bewildered me as nothing had before.

I could understand his deciding not to ask me. It was his telling me that was impenetrable.

            I turned to novels. There I was sure that such unfathomable discourse would be explained. I started to really read and I started to date. But the two experiences seemed to conspire to make the possibility of fruitful pairing mere fantasy.

            Had I been able to identify more with another author’s heroines, Jane Austen’s, say, maybe my decisions would have sent me down the marriage path, for better or worse, at a younger age. What I ended up taking to, instead, was James’s sensibility. There is such a profound inwardness to it all. An aching aloneness and yearning that surges through his careful studies of human behavior. I ate it up.

            If only he had chosen, just for me, to keep going his short story “The Jolly Corner.” It ends with the promise of a mature kindling of an earlier friendship. Having waited, on reserve as it were, for Spencer Brydon’s return to New York after thirty-three years abroad, Alice Staverton had been getting on with her life. She “sallied forth and did battle.” In appraising her after all these years, Brydon thinks her appearance “defied you to say if she were a fair young woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one who looked young through successful indifference.”

            I would like to read about the married Staverton a decade down the road. Just to know whether or not James would leave her unmarried habits of mind intact.

            Perhaps only someone as never-married as James, someone to whom women often confided quite deeply, could suggest so enigmatically the transformation that the young Isabel Archer undergoes in becoming Mrs. Osmond. When a few years into the marriage James has her become absorbed into thought about her husband’s irregular conduct, he seems to imply that she is feeling emotionally alone. But not exactly solitary.

            Since I’ve been married, my interiority has withstood any breach upon my feeling solitary. This despite the absence of lonesomeness. Despite a husband who, with such sweetness, has somehow come to read my mind and to protect my every vulnerability. Nevertheless, on forms, I still search for a hybrid term somewhere between “single” and “married.”

            My life has been a rich yield from feminists before me. They gave me choice, income, and innumerable rooms of my own. Unlike Mrs. Osmond, who “sometimes felt a sort of passion of tenderness for memories which had no other merit than that they belonged to her unmarried life,” I suffer no need for nostalgia. As my husband works at his desk near mine, his presence offers neither rescue nor suffocation. He is there simply as a pure good, added to my singleness.

            James’s world denied the author the comfortable possibility of a satisfying union for himself. Maybe he is suspect, then, for presuming to write the inner life of women. But his prescribed singleness may explain why his outlook has given me insightful companionship equal to that of any female author.

            At key moments in her life, Isabel Archer has just been reading. She lays down the book and stares ahead while her intricate Jamesian contemplations take shape. It’s terrible how, after all that, she so misreads Gilbert Osmond before marrying him. 

I had the benefit of reading much longer than she did before marriage. As it turns out, a deferred ever-after has its advantages. Even if it means my state-of-mind never catches up. 

Renée Tursi is an associate professor of English at Quinnipiac University, where she teaches (mostly) American literature. Her academic work has appeared in the aesthetics journal Style, the Henry James Review, and Studies in the Novel. Her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, and the Times Literary Supplement. With her submission to bioStories, she takes her first steps with a new genre.