Douglas Kennedy - The Pursuit of Happiness

'Hiram Walker was your father's favorite bourbon', she said. 'Personally I could never stand the stuff. Scotch was my drink - until I turned seventy, and my body decided otherwise. Now I have to make do with something dull-and-feminine like sherry. Cheers'.

She raised her sherry glass. I didn't respond to her toast. I simply threw back my whiskey in one gulp. It burned my throat, but eased some of the serious distress I was feeling. Another small smile crossed Sara Smythe's lips.

'Your dad used to drink that way - when he was feeling tense'.

'Like father, like daughter', I said, pointing to the bottle.

'Please help yourself', she said. I poured myself another slug of bourbon, but this time restricted myself to a small sip. Sara Smythe settled herself into the sofa, then touched the top of my hand.

'I do want to apologize for the extreme methods I used to get you over here. I know I must have seemed like an old nuisance, but...'

I quickly withdrew my hand.

'I just want to know one thing, Ms Smythe...'

'Sara, please'.

'No. No first names. We are not friends. We are not even acquaintances...'

'Kate, I've known you all your life'.

'How? How have you known me? And why the hell did you start bothering me after my mom died?'

I tossed the photo album on to the coffee table, and opened it to the back page.

'I'd also like to know how you got this?' I said, pointing to the clipping of Ethan in the Allan-Stevenson school newspaper.

'I have a subscription to the school's newspaper'.

'You what?'

'Just like I had a subscription to the Smith College paper when you were there'.

'You're insane...'

'Can I explain...'

'Why should we be of interest to you? I mean, if your photo album is anything to go by, this hasn't been a recent fixation. You've been tracking us for years. And what's with all the old pictures of my dad?'

She looked at me straight on. And said, 'Your father was the love of my life'.

Part Two

Sara

One

WHAT'S MY FIRST memory of him? A glance. A sudden over-the-shoulder glance across a packed, smoky room. He was leaning against a wall, a glass of something in one hand, a cigarette between his teeth. He later told me that he felt out of place in that room, and was looking across it in search of the fellow who had dragged him there. As his eyes scanned the guests, they suddenly happened upon me. I met his gaze. Only for a second. Or maybe two. He looked at me. I looked at him. He smiled. I smiled back. He turned away, still seeking out his friend. And that was it. Just a simple glance.

Fifty-five years on, I can still replay that moment - nanosecond by nanosecond. I can see his eyes - light blue, clear, a little weary. His sandy hair, buzz-cut down to short-back-and-sides. His narrow face with sharply etched cheekbones. The dark khaki Army uniform which seemed to hang so perfectly off his lanky frame. The way he looked so young (well, he was only in his early twenties at the time). So innocent. So quietly preoccupied. So handsome. So damn Irish.

A glance is such a momentary, fleeting thing, isn't it? As human gestures go, it means nothing. It's perishable. That's what still amazes me - the way your life can be fundamentally altered by something so ephemeral, so transitory. Every day, we lock eyes with people - on the subway or the bus, in the supermarket, crossing the street. It's such a simple impulse, looking at others. You notice someone walking towards you, your eyes meet for an instant, you pass each other by. End of story. So why... why?.. should that one glance have mattered? No reason. None at all. Except that it did. And it changed everything. Irrevocably. Though, of course, neither of us knew that at the time.

Because, after all, it was just a glance.

We were at a party. It was the night before Thanksgiving. The year was 1945. Roosevelt had died in April. The German High Command had surrendered in May. Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima in August. Eight days later, the Japanese capitulated. Quite a year. If you were young and American - and hadn't lost anybody you loved in the war - you couldn't help but feel the heady pleasures of victory.

So here we all were - twenty of us, in a cramped third-floor walk-up apartment on Sullivan Street - celebrating the first Thanksgiving of peace by drinking too much and dancing too raucously. The average age in the room was around twenty-eight... which made me the kid of the group at twenty-three (though the fellow in the Army uniform looked even younger). And the big talk in the room was of that romantic notion called the Limitless Future. Because winning the war also meant that we'd finally defeated that economic enemy called The Depression. The Peace Dividend was coming. Good times were ahead. We thought we had a divine right to good times. We were Americans, after all. This was our century.

Even my brother Eric believed in the realm of American possibility... and he was what our father called 'a Red'. I always told Father that he was judging his son far too harshly - because Eric was really more of an old fashioned Progressive. Being Eric, he was also a complete romantic - someone who idolized Eugene Debs, subscribed to The Nation when he was sixteen, and dreamed about being the next Clifford Odets. That's right - Eric was a playwright. After he graduated from Columbia in '37, he found work as an assistant stage manager with Orson Welles' Mercury Theater, and had a couple of plays produced by assorted Federal Theater Workshops around New York. This was the time when Roosevelt's New Deal actually subsidized non-profit drama in America - so there was plenty of employment opportunities for 'theater workers' (as Eric liked to call himself), not to mention lots of small theater companies willing to take a chance on young dramatists like my brother. None of the plays he had performed ever hit the big time. But he wasn't ever aiming for Broadway. He always said that his work was 'geared for the needs and the aspirations of the working man' (like I said, he really was a romantic). And I'll be honest with you - as much as I loved, adored, my older brother, his three-hour epic drama about a 1902 union dispute on the Erie-Lakawana Railroad wasn't exactly a toe-tapper.

Still, as a playwright, he did think big. Sadly, his kind of drama (that whole Waiting for Lefty sort of thing) was dead by the start of the forties. Orson Welles went to Hollywood. So too did Clifford Odets. The Federal Theater Project was accused of being Communist by a handful of dreadful small-minded congressmen, and was finally closed down in '39. Which meant that, in 1945, Eric was paying the rent as a radio writer. At first he scripted a couple of episodes of Boston Blackie. But the producer fired him off the show after he wrote an installment where the hero investigated the death of a labor organizer. He'd been murdered on the orders of some big-deal industrialist - who, as it turned out, bore more than a passing resemblance to the owner of the radio network on which Boston Blackie was broadcast. I tell you, Eric couldn't resist mischief... even if it did hurt his career. And he did have a terrific sense of humor. Which is how he was able to pick up his newest job: as one of the gag writers on Stop or Go: The Quiz Bang Show, hosted every Sunday night at eight thirty by Joe E. Brown. I'd wager anything that nobody under the age of seventy-five now remembers Joe E. Brown. And with good reason. He made Jerry Lewis appear subtle.

Anyway, the party was in Eric's place on Sullivan Street: a narrow one-bedroom railroad apartment which, like Eric himself, always struck me as the height of bohemian chic. The bathtub was in the kitchen. There were lamps made from Chianti bottles. Ratty old floor cushions were scattered around the living room. Hundreds of books were stacked everywhere. Remember: this was the forties... still way before the beatnik era in the Village. So Eric was something of a man ahead of his time - especially when it came to wearing black turtlenecks, and hanging out with Delmore Schwartz and the Partisan Review crowd, and smoking Gitanes, and dragging his kid sister to hear this new-fangled thing called Bebop at some club on 52nd Street. In fact, just a couple of weeks before his Thanksgiving party, we were actually present in some Broadway dive when a sax player named Charles Parker took the stage with four other musicians.