Long Bridge Runner

Chapter 76-Kimberly's Diary

Copyright 1995
By David Rojay

THE LONG BRIDGE RUNNER
Book One/THE MIDWEST

As Kimberly unwrapped her parents' Christmas gift, she realized that this would be the loneliest Christmas of all. The Christmas tree didn't alleviate the loneliness because it had been put up without Gurion's cooperation. He referred to it as "your tannenbaum"* or as "a barbaric totem of the Schwarzwald."** No matter, she thought as she opened the gift to find the predictable contents. Every year her mother made coconut macaroons. This year she added peanut butter fudge with walnuts; there was a simple blouse which, of course, she would never wear and a Christmas card which started out, "My sweet child." At the bottom it said, "Your father has made something for you that is rather large so when you get the box, don't be frightened by its size;" and in the bottom of the package, as always, were candy kisses in tin foil and a small net bag that held pecans, walnuts and a dozen or so chestnuts, all of these items grown on the farm. It was a simple assortment because Kimberly's family did not believe in extravagant Christmas gifts. It was almost a religious thing with them; what they gave was heart-felt and good and honest; and realizing this made Kimberly so very homesick. At that moment in West Virginia on Christmas Eve there would be crowds of people at her parents, tables laden with food and banjo playing and mandolin playing and guitar playing and harmonica playing and Haley, at some point, would break out his Jew's harp. Remembering this made Kimberly laugh out loud. She had her own Jew in the bedroom recovering from a bout of the flu. The first night of his illness when his fever reached 104, he inexplicitly went into the bathroom and cut off his beard. He knew immediately that it was a mistake. He had forgotten how weak his chin was. He disliked people with weak chins and that was one of the reasons he grew a beard as soon as he could. He had had it all his adult life and now it lay on the cloth he had spread across the bathroom sink. If he could have put it back on he would have but instead, he rinsed his face with a washcloth that had been soaked in alcohol and returned to bed and never thought about it again until he heard Kimberly scream. He woke up to see her backing away from the bed in horror. The instant she saw him, she thought the shaven face was the outcome of his sickness and just as she thought about all of this Gurion stumbled into the living room in his terrycloth bathrobe.

"May I sit next to your tannenbaum?" he said sarcastically.

She showed him her mother's present and he immediately availed himself of a macaroon, a piece of peanut butter fudge, two chocolate kisses and an assortment of nuts. "You got a plate or a bowl for these?" he asked.

Kimberly rose to fetch a bowl, happy to turn her back on the stranger that sat in her living room. Gurion was one of those men who looked older without a beard and she immediately did the math, if he was the age of the century-fifty years in all, then he was fifteen years older than her. She had never thought about this before and so, after a few sips of the milk she had poured herself, she directed Gurion's attention to a quite large box that had arrived with her mother's present.

"I think this is from my dad," she said, "Mom said it was something he made for us." And so they opened the box together and together they lifted out a handmade wooden cradle.

Gurion looked stunned. He sat back in his chair with nothing to say except, "I came in here to listen to Toscanini and the NBC Orchestra." He had bought a tabletop model of a deluxe Philips Radio Receiver specifically so he could listen to that program. The Receiver had dual speakers. "It's a 671A," he proudly told one and all.

With a fresh cup of tea at her side, Kimberly sat at her dresser and opened the diary she had begun in Provincetown:
"June 7," it said on the first page, "Keith opened the door and welcomed us in. There was orchestral music coming from the living room at the end of the hallway, coming from a new stereo system made by General Electric, the latest thing in sound. Although I didn't know the composer's name at the time, I thought it was Copeland; and it turned out to be Copeland's Third Symphony in C Minor with its big brawling brass sections and the omnipresent Nine Chord Harmonics."

Kimberly knew enough to recognize the pentatonic scales. She tried to remember it as she read the diary, but Richard Strauss was floating in from the living room. In any case, when the symphony ended Kevin said with a flick of his wrist, "Written by a Jewish Communist Fag." This comment stirred some laughter in the room full of men; the lone woman, a thin brunette wearing a turban said, ‘Kevin, you're such a little queen.'

‘And you, my dear, are a fag hag, let's face it.'

Keith, not sure of the effect of such repartee said, ‘Let's not startle the doctor and his wife. They've probably never heard that kind of talk.'

Gurion smiled a broad smile and I tried to be cool. The dinner was delicious and then Isaac and Kevin got down to the business of organizing the clinic they had discussed in the winter. We had spent the week prior in Evansville where Gurion laid in every conceivable piece of equipment that we could haul to Massachusetts. In addition, he shipped several boxes of things as simple as gauze and tape to Provincetown. He didn't know any of the supply sources there and he felt this was the best thing to do.

When we crossed the Bourne Bridge onto the Cape, it was a cold rainy Tuesday; nothing like the sunny Saturday morning in Evansville where we were held up for an hour because of a parade of bands on the street in front of the McCurdy Hotel. What a contrast-a warm spring day filled with leggy majorettes and the forbidding chill of Cape Cod; but within a week spring arrived in Provincetown. ‘Spring is always late here,' an old fisherman told us ‘because we're surrounded by water and it takes a while for it to warm up. Of course, in the fall, just the opposite happens. It takes a while for the water to cool down so the leaves stay on the trees into November.'"

As she read, Kimberly remembered the rose-covered cottages of Commercial Street. She had taken multifitous pictures with her Leica and she had a box of slides to prove it, but no prints and no slide projector. I should have thought about a slide projector as a Christmas present, she thought. She knew Gurion would like to relive the beauty of early summer on Cape Cod. There was, of course, the excursion from Falmouth to Martha's Vineyard; coming back from the island at sunset, riding on a glistening sea with the sound of gulls in the air, they both fell in love with the place.

But Cape Cod and Provincetown had another side to it.
"It's as if someone turned off a faucet," Gurion said the day after Labor Day. The season was over as he had been told, but he had not expected it to end so abruptly. The town emptied out and as if on queue the weather changed back to the cloudy and chilly drizzle that he had encountered on first arriving. Shops began to close and Gurion wondered aloud, "How do people make a living here in the winter?"

"It's not winter," said Kimberly, "it's fall, it's September."

Gurion knew what a long non-summertime felt like. He had spent time on the Baltic in the fall and the knowledge of this depressed him as the endless weeks laid themselves out one by one. There were virtually no patients in the clinic and he soon realized that Kevin's dream of year-round medical access would require some kind of subsidy. It was only after all this that he accepted the offer made by Evansville Hospital. He had spent considerable time in Evansville; it was a small city with much going on but not too much. It was not too crowded, not too hectic and he could imagine spending star-lit nights there with Kimberly dancing on the red paddlewheel steamer. His decision had come suddenly and with complete finality. It was irrevocable. Kevin was disappointed, of course, but Keith understood and said as much when he patted Gurion on the shoulder, "So you don't want to hunker down here in the wintertime with a bunch of fags." There was affection in Keith's voice but a little hurt also and Gurion thought, how strange it was that Keith seemed closer to manliness than Kevin. He was devoid of the hostility that Gurion saw in many gays.

He felt comfortable when he was with Keith or Kimberly but when he was alone on the crowded streets he felt somewhat intimidated. He was not gay, of course, but he was occasionally approached by someone who could not see this. He didn't like defending himself against the majority. Maybe it was just paranoia, maybe it was just the mindset of a Jew from Germany. He wasn't sure what it was but with time he tried to avoid being alone on the streets.

Evansville had been the middle ground, a city that was thriving in the post-war economy, it sat across the Ohio from Henderson, Kentucky and Gurion was amused at how the Civil War hung over the place. A billboard facing the Henderson Bridge on the Indiana side said, "Up early in the morning, slop the pigs, swim the river and work at Briggs." Briggs was a large factory that manufactured refrigerators with a work force mainly of low wage earning Kentuckians. Evansville residents made fun of their southern kin, especially when they used the term, "y'al."

But now they were settled in a large house on River Side Drive overlooking the Ohio. Gurion was apprenticing with a surgical team at Evansville Hospital. He had not done any serious surgery since 1939. This would give him a chance to get up to speed.
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Kimberly could tell that Gurion's program had ended. She put the diary in a drawer and changed into baby blue lingerie. Gurion was reading a copy of the New York Times when she reentered the living room. He insisted upon subscribing to the newspaper, which was sent by mail, in spite of Kimberly's asking him, "What good are three-day-old newspapers?"

"I don't read it for the news," he replied, "I read it for the writing."

He didn't seem to notice her entrance and she sat and stared at him, this man who was so strange without his beard. While he read, holding the paper with his left hand, he nonchalantly fondled his penis with his right. It was not a sexual thing he was doing and he had only been doing it since he had crossed some border of familiarity. She had been intending to ask other wives if their husbands did this also-sat around and fondled themselves absentmindedly.

*Ger. Pagan precursor of Christmas trees
**Black Forest in Bravaria

Due to the holidays, the next chapter will appear next Friday evening.
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Chapters change on Tuesdays and Friday Evenings:
Be sure to watch David Rojay on The Dan and Dad Show each Saturday night at 9:30 on Channel 17. Read A RED STATE HERO by David Rojay on capecodtoday.com. Read Sea Street-David Rojay's blog on capecodtoday.com and finally check out David Rojay on YOUTUBE. For more information, Google "David Rojay".
Check out my Sea Street Blog: "Obama's Katrina".